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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NewJeffCT" data-source="post: 5505056" data-attributes="member: 10784">For the final combat, I recruited a friend of one of my players to help me run the bad guys, so that helped to save a ton of time and made me less of a bottleneck.  The main bad guys usually had to be evil clerics, as the entire campaign was centered around the players thwarting the evil high priest of slavery & tyranny.However, the last combat still ended up taking two entire overtime sessions - probably 11+ hours in total.  We normally gamed for about 4 hours, but ended up going 5 1/2 to 6 hours for the finale.I would work out strategies for the bad guys ahead of time, but the players in my group were often pretty creative, so most strategies got thrown out the window after the first round. I'd have to react to the changed situation on the ground.It was also very common for a player or major bad guy to die in combat, get revivified and then healed and rejoin the combat.  In the last combat, the dwarf fighter got hit with Implosion and surprisingly failed his Fortitude save.  The PC cleric, on her turn, then invoked a 5,000 XP Miracle to instantly resurrect the dwarf (normal casting time was 10 minutes.)Two combats before that, the players had a showdown with a large group of drow, including one nemesis who had survived three previous combats with the party, the first when they were level 4.  During the combat, both sides were pretty battered and down low in hit points.  However, the same cleric that did the Miracle was able to cast Mass Heal and restore 160 or 170 hit points apiece to almost the whole party.  Other than being down several spells/power points, the party was basically whole.  A few turns later that round, the drow priestess was going to do the same thing for her side (what I had decided as the DM) - however, one of the PCs managed to cut her down before she could cast, saving us from basically being almost back to square one in that combat.  (I had visions of everybody saying, "We've gamed for 5 hours and everybody is at full hit points? WTF?")</blockquote>

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