D&D 5E Has D&D Combat Always Been Slow?

[Argyle King]

Do you use a grid and minis? I think that plays a significant part in making combats take longer.

Not really.

Previously, we did. Sometimes, with other games we do.

Though, in the past few years, our game playstyle has changed to something which is a middle-ground between "theater of the mind" and using minis. It's mostly theater of the mind, but we may use a few tokens or minis on the table to illustrate a general idea of where things are during a scene.

 

[tetrasodium]

Do you use a grid and minis? I think that plays a significant part in making combats take longer.

Not really, That's like saying that a chess board makes for a slower game than tictactoe. The only reason using a grid & minis would significantly slow things is if players & monsters were spread out over gigantic areas that makes spells & melee have a hard time reaching opponents. It doesn't take long for someone to move 30ft & end their turn because no opponent is in reach but 5e did a bunch of stuff to make positioning no longer especially meaningful & no longer take any effort/risk to get the best result.

 

[billd91]

In my experience, 5e is faster than either 3e or 4e because it's got a lot less detail to micromanage, and probably even 2e because handling initiative often took so long in that edition. 1e was faster, in my experience, because we weren't dealing with battle maps, initiative was side initiative rather than individual, and there were a lot fewer options to think through.
That said, I'm not finding the speed of combat in 5e onerous by any means. It's a very nice change from anything 3e/4e/PF even if it's not as fast as 1e.

 

[Umbran]

I think it was always slow. Back when I played 1e, though, I was a kid and had oodles of spare time, so I really didn't care.

 

[cmad1977]

I dunno. We kinda fly through combats.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Not really.

Previously, we did. Sometimes, with other games we do.

Though, in the past few years, our game playstyle has changed to something which is a middle-ground between "theater of the mind" and using minis. It's mostly theater of the mind, but we may use a few tokens or minis on the table to illustrate a general idea of where things are during a scene.

We use a 50" TV attached to our laptop to display the powerpoint we use for battlemaps and tokens for battles. We found it is faster than minis and drawing out or prepping the encounter areas, or trying to use online VTT systems. It is also easy to drag a battlemap into the powerpoint and resize it for our tokens.

Here is a screen shot of a powerpoint I used yesterday:

EDIT: While it takes more time to prep as the DM, you can even introduce fog of war to the map. Here is an example of some exposed FOW from the giants adventures:

 

[Minigiant]

D&D combat was always slow.
Speeding it up however required taking out rules and making all the PCs and monsters ultra-simple and autopilot.

It's slow because the option paralyze people but its the options that make it fun.
The key is players and DMs knowing what their characters can do.

 

[DND_Reborn]

The key is players and DMs knowing what their characters can do.

This, and paying attention, are probably the two biggest things players and DMs can do to keep combat running smoothly and quickly.

But it was still fast in 1E with less HP bloat.

 

[Argyle King]

We use a 50" TV attached to our laptop to display the powerpoint we use for battlemaps and tokens for battles. We found it is faster than minis and drawing out or prepping the encounter areas, or trying to use online VTT systems. It is also easy to drag a battlemap into the powerpoint and resize it for our tokens.

Here is a screen shot of a powerpoint I used yesterday:
View attachment 130065

That's cool. Right now, we're using a kitchen table and a handful of random board game tokens, standies, and etc. We don't set up an exact location for things, it's more like "most of the party is engaged with a group of goblins (green pawns) here; across the hallway, the paladin is fighting with the ogre." If distances are important, we'll write that down on a scrap piece of paper or a dry erase board.

We've gone for a minimalist approach because we can fit most of the things we use in a small tackle box. That makes it easy to meet at a location and set up without much hassle.

For us, the amount of time it takes for a player to make a decision isn't an issue. What seems to take a while is the actual mechanical resolution of an encounter.

 

[Zardnaar]

More options and hit point bloat.

I have played a couple of clones post 5E and yeah they're easier/faster to run.