Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MinistryOfGame" data-source="post: 5481252" data-attributes="member: 93346">Not quite sure if I'm getting the thrust of the post here, but are the points:1) Have you done a comparison of the same fight between different D&D editions?2) Combat takes longer in 4E, but is more fun.3) How can 4E combat be sped up, but still stay fun tactically, but be looser and more free form?To answer those points above.1) Not sure if real comparisons are possible between 4E and older editions.  I mean, insta-kill, for example, simply doesn't exist in 4E - so beholders, basilisks etc take longer to kill things.   I have played in a 4E and a a 3E game, and run a 2E/1E game, at the same time (that is, playing each  game once a week), and can pretty much guarantee that the combats in 4E take longer in my experience.  2) I'll leave that one to personal preference.3) I do attribute part of the 4E slowdown to the huge amount of hitpoints that even  low level 4E characters and monsters have (eg. 1st level wizard before then -  4 hitpoints), and I have heard that the newer 4E books have adjusted  monsters to have less hitpoints and do more damage, which sounds like it  would speed things up.  Other than that, I think players are called upon to make more decisions than they used to be (between different at-wills, encounters, dailys etc).  Fighters used to just swing their sword (before being given the option to power attack, sunder, disarm etc in 3E), and the decisions they did make were more determined by circumstance and were simply determined by the DM.Curiously, the opposite was true for spellcasting classes, who had pages and pages of spells to flick through and decide what to memorise/cast, but as a rule those classes were probably picked less often by those who weren't keen on having a bunch of choices to make.Were I to run a 4E game, I think I'd limit daily powers to certain encounters only, half monster hitpoints and double monster damage from the MM.  I think that would speed combat up a bit.  But I don't think it will ever match the speed of combats in my current 2E/1E game, where a battle with a giant slug lasted 3 rounds, and took well inside of 10 minutes.</blockquote>

Verification