Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6606522" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Conventional wisdom is that 5E combats last about three rounds, so &quot;short and bloody&quot; probably fits. My experience has been that combats are usually closer to five or six rounds before morale breaks for one side or the other, or one side withdraws out of range to reconsider its approach. My experience differs from the average partly because I run my monsters differently than the apparent norm (e.g. long-range archery duels are just fine by me, and so is cover--both things increase defensive advantages and tend to draw combat out longer) and because I eschew small-but-frequent combat in favor of large-but-rare ones that can be broken into small combats if and only if the PCs make that happen.Anyway, most monsters don't hit as hard as PCs on a man-for-man basis, and especially not as hard as optimized PCs. Past level three, PCs will rarely go down to a single hit. This isn't GURPS.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :-)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="FormerlyHemlock, post: 6606522, member: 6787650"] Conventional wisdom is that 5E combats last about three rounds, so "short and bloody" probably fits. My experience has been that combats are usually closer to five or six rounds before morale breaks for one side or the other, or one side withdraws out of range to reconsider its approach. My experience differs from the average partly because I run my monsters differently than the apparent norm (e.g. long-range archery duels are just fine by me, and so is cover--both things increase defensive advantages and tend to draw combat out longer) and because I eschew small-but-frequent combat in favor of large-but-rare ones that can be broken into small combats if and only if the PCs make that happen. Anyway, most monsters don't hit as hard as PCs on a man-for-man basis, and especially not as hard as optimized PCs. Past level three, PCs will rarely go down to a single hit. This isn't GURPS. :-) [/QUOTE]

Verification