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Message: <blockquote data-quote="NewJeffCT" data-source="post: 5825402" data-attributes="member: 10784">My gaming group is very large - the 3.5E campaign was myself as DM and 8 players, a couple of whom were not very experienced players.I was not able to run extraneous combats in 3.5E since combats took so long, there was no point in a pointless combat.  I have been running some extraneous combats in 4E.Once games got to higher levels, a lot of the spellcasters were focused on buffing themselves and the party, or debuffing the enemy, and that led to calculations and recalculations on just about every turn in the initiative order.  It was often a lot of flinging dispel magics back & forth until everybody was completely debuffed.And, with each PC spellcaster (a sorcerer, a cleric and a psion PC, not to mention an NPC sorcerer and a cleric/paladin NPC ally), they often each had 60-80-100 options to choose from each round - while my high level bad guys often did as well, and sometimes even more options.  Plus, you had to track templates, class abilities, feat bonuses, skill synergies, magic item bonuses and a whole lot more.Sometimes, I was the logjam as DM.  The players would throw a curveball at me in game, and I had to decide which of 100 options my archmage or my lich or my rakshasa or my cleric had to pick, and since they were a lot smarter than me, I would then take a minute or two to decide.Plus, since I had such a big group, they dished out HUGE amounts of damage each round, so I could not just put one monster on the table.  I did that once when the group was level 13 and put a CR:18 blue dragon on the table and gave it MAX hit points (each hit die had 8 hit points per hit die, plus I gave it higher than standard CON as well) and it was fully buffed with surprise, and it was almost wiped out by the end of the PCs' first round.  So, I had to put a bad guy, with some sub-boss bad guys and some designated healers and dispellers, as well as a bunch of tough guys on the table for melee damage and to block the PC melee types just to give the party a good challenge.</blockquote>

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