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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6999496" data-attributes="member: 6787650">This doesn't seem to be true in my experience. My experience is that the time a fight takes is roughly proportional to the complexity of the fight, not the length of the fight; more decisions and harder decisions = longer fights. (Also more interesting fights IMO.)My experience is that putting an enemy at a severe disadvantage tends to actually speed up the fight by reducing the difficulty and complexity of subsequent decisions. The extra die rolling is a mere bagatelle.IMO, the tradeoff between offense and defensive in 5E is that offense allows you to project power to protect others, including unwise/un-tactical PCs and NPCs. You can save a hundred villagers by killing all the orcs quickly enough, regardless of what those villagers are doing. The downside is that overly offense-focused strategies are very brittle and tend to fall to pieces when the opposition scales up, e.g. if there are twice as many orcs in the fight as you are expecting. (This wouldn't be true of a game other than 5E--you can certainly design games where offense and defense are equally-robust strategies.)</blockquote>