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

[Guest User]

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

It depends what your definition of 1e includes.

An AD&D game that used Weapon Speed Factor and Armor/Weapon charts, and the rule that 1 in 6 hits actually strike your head..etc....meant there was an entire 646 layers of rules abyss between you and that lack of HP bloat.

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.

I think this is absolutely true.

Compared to many of the games of the era: Mechwarrior, Star Fleet Tactical Battles,
Car Wars, and Traveller...AD&D was quick...(depending on how many rules your group used).

Traveller had quick combat...TL 15 Homing Plasma Blasts kill fast....it was calculating everything else that took really long amount of time.

 

[Charlaquin]

A familiar pattern. I remember a post on rpgnet a while back that did a deep dive into how the exact same thing happened with 3rd edition.

It makes sense. Early in an edition's life cycle, adventure writers are unfamiliar with the system, so they design fairly simple encounters and follow the guidelines for building them fairly closely. As they grow more familiar with it, they grow more comfortable designing more complex encounters, and more willing to bend or break the system's limitations to see those design ideas realized.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

1e AD&D: Monsters had less HP's and did less damage, overall. Also, Spells, Magic Items and other special abilities (re: A fighter getting a number of attacks per round against opponents with less than 1HD, equal to the fighters LEVEL; e.g., Level 7 fighter gets 7 attacks per round against most commoners, kobolds, goblins, etc).
..
Result: Fights not lasting very long...except when you keep adding in more and more baddies. In 1e, a fight against a dozen goblins would be over in between 1 and maybe 7 rounds. What happens in a round? Roll d6 for initiative, high roll's side goes first. Done. Each makes their attack or casts a spell/use magic item. Done. Then other side. Round is now finished. There is usually no "modifiers for Reach", or sifting through class abilities, special racial stuff, continuing "buff" spells, concentration check rolls, or variable saving throw's. E.g., goblins have a Spell save of 19. All of them. Regardless of the Spell or the level of the caster/item, etc. Fast and simple.

What about action declaration stage? Weapon and spellcasting speeds? Damage type versus armor type?

I know at least one of those (the first) was a standard (not optional) rule. Heck, I don’t know if they even had an option for skipping the declaration phase, so that would have been a house rule. As far as the other two, I don’t know if they were standard or optional, but my guess-recollection is that weapon and spell casting speeds was standard at least.

 

[Minigiant]

Exactly. 1e and 2e was fastbut it wasdull. Once you put in the rules to make combat... fun and require a brain, it slowed.

Add in people not knowing subsystems and not paying attention....

 

[Don Durito]

It makes sense. Early in an edition's life cycle, adventure writers are unfamiliar with the system, so they design fairly simple encounters and follow the guidelines for building them fairly closely. As they grow more familiar with it, they grow more comfortable designing more complex encounters, and more willing to bend or break the system's limitations to see those design ideas realized.

I think that's part of it - but I think part of it is also that they feel the need to design for the old school attrition based model of play but then people don't run it that way.

One of the interesting things however about the rpgnet post (I wish I could find it) was that it showed that over the course of 3rd edition while the average combats got harder and easy ones became increasingly rare - the really hard combats (CR+5 which were part of the original 3 guidelines vanished altogether ). Basically like 5e, 3E was designed with the idea that an environment was the primary challenge and that you populated that environment with a range of different CR encounters. Justin Alexander over on his blog writes about how fans complained when Forge of Fury included a CR 10 roper as an encounter for a group of 3rd to 5th level characters as it was supposedly unbalanced, but the 3.0 DMG actually said that roughly 5% of encounters should be CR 5+. These disappeared.

I'm not sure if the very nature of CR leads to a focus on the individual encounter, or if approaching the game that way just fits in with people's preferences for what they think D&D should be, or a little of both.

 

[Dragonsbane]

Always has been slow, I DMed 2nd, 3rd, and 5th editions now. Playing Cypher System fantasy lately, it is MUCH MUCH faster.

For faster 5e, here are some of our solutions:
1) Flanking happens, and not just on either side, but on any of the 4 sides. More people get advantage, more hits.
2) Tons of house rules nerfing optimizations, class and race bloat, and some complexities. Less numbers of monsters needed for PCs, not the vast armies needed against higher level PCs, since they are not high level demigods
3) 1 hp/lv after PCs get to 9th level, again less HP = less battle time, and more selective battles as they are risky
4) players need to know their PCs, after maybe 10 seconds of thinking I might pass them on their turn

Between the shorter battles and more narrative combat, Cypher System is doing it for my players and I (all 25+year vets)

 

[CleverNickName]

1. Yes, I think combat is slow in 5th Edition. The higher the characters' level, the slower it will be.
2. Lose the battle mat? One gaming session not too long ago, Roll20 stopped working unexpectedly and rather than cancel the game, we decided to play with just our hardcopy character sheets, dice, and webcams. We ran a "theatre of the mind" style game over Discord, and it cut our combat time in half (at least).
3. Combat in BECM wasn't nearly as slow, probably because we never used a battle mat. Nobody felt the need to agonize or argue over which square they were going to stand in, or the path that they were going to move to get to that square, or how to position a fireball so that it only touched certain squares, etc.

 

[Morrus]

I think it slowed down as the editions progressed, until it reached its slowest with 4E, and it sped up a bit again with 5E. Compared to a lot of other games, D&D is mainly a combat pillar with some exploration/social nods.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I think it slowed down as the editions progressed, until it reached its slowest with 4E, and it sped up a bit again with 5E. Compared to a lot of other games, D&D is mainly a combat pillar with some exploration/social nods.

Yep. D&D is a combat game and thus they put most of the rules and time into making combats as interesting as they can (within the D&D model). If people want less fighting and more social/exploration... there are better systems out there geared towards those standards that should be used for a more effective result.

 

[Helldritch]

I firmly believe that all the slowness only happens in mid to high levels. Or just about when characters hit 7th level. Before that, most monsters have relatively low hp and are downed I a few strokes. As the characters get higher, the AC of the monsters do not improve that much but their hp skyrocket to the stratosphere.

In previous editions, AC of monsters would improve, their save would improve too. But the HPs would not get that high as what we're seeing today. In earlier editions, the HPs' bloat would be compensated by the big artillery that wizards could do with 20d6 fire balls and 10d4+10 magic missiles. Spells rose in power with caster levels and not spell slots. It took away a bit of the spotlight for martial classes but it also made combat much faster. A 20th 1ed wizard had a lot more damage potential than the same 5ed wizard. And he would have had wands of fireball and what not at his disposal where our 5ed edition wizard might have powerful cantrips, but these cantrips only make him subpar to the martials in terms of damage. Yes the wizard can use his big guns, but he uses them less often than his 1ed counterpart. And his big guns do less damage, even when upped. The best fireball a 5ed has at 20th is using a 9th level spell slots for 14d6. The 1ed wizard uses a 3rd level spell slot for hus fireball and it does a whooping 20d6. The 3ed wizard might have seen his fireball blocked at 10d6, but it was still a 3rd level spell. Our 5ed wizard would need a 5th level slot to do the same amount of damage.
This is where you get the slow down in high level combat. Do not look any further. Spell scalling was removed for the better and the worst. All casters lost in this trade off but now, martial are not there only to get the high level casters survived to push things for them.

Sometimes I wonder if a 1 on a save should not cause you to suffer double damage. Just as a 20 doubles the damage dice...