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

[Oofta]

I've experienced this exact phenomenon in every edition I have played.
Even Mentzer's Companion, Master, and Immortals Rulesets took time.

What I think has changed most of all, is our sense of time. There is Pre Mobile phone sense of time, and then there is a Post Mobile phone sense of time.

The longest set piece battle I have ever ran for D&D took approximately 14 hours over 2 days. This involved, 10 players with 14th level characters, + NPC allies, + summoned creatures etc.
(It was also a NYE/ NY Day game..sober we could have shaved some time off)

In comparison, I've never played a game of Diplomacy that took less then 2 days.
In wargaming the joke that was always said was that the "recreation of the battle, took longer then the actual battle"

Slow cumbersome rules used to be a feature.

1e Shadowrun is the only game, that I found played very fast...and that ended once the Bodyguard Archetype was introduced.

Well, if you're running a small army, I can see why it takes you so long! All I can say is that most combats in 5E are over quicker than single rounds in D&D 4E at higher levels. We were lucky if I could get in 2 fights in a 6 hour game day, and those were just bog standard nothing too fancy fights (certainly not dozens of combatants per side).

 

[Argyle King]

As to what you can do to improve matters in your particular 5e group, where do you think the delays are? Are you rotating rounds fast, but finding the combats drag on spending rounds and rounds beating on things with little resolution? Or is each round itself taking a long time to resolve? When it comes to their initiative, is each player ready to declare their action, roll their dice, and give the result? Or do you have players who only start thinking about what they're going to do when it comes to their action, page through books to find the rules, spend time choosing dice and so on?

That's a big part of it. Round-to-round, little meaningful change happens. There's little functional difference between the target having 100 hp or 1 hp; more HP just means it takes more time. While that's not necessarily unique to specifically D&D, lately it feels a lot slower and a lot more static when playing D&D.

Typically, yes. We do have one newer player (the son of one of our regulars) who is a little slower than average, but that's because he's new to rpgs in general. I think one of the reasons why the contrast between FFG Star Wars and D&D has started to hit me is because building dice pools for SWs (the game handles bonuses by adding more dice to roll) takes extra time, but it still seems to move quicker for the group.

I'm not 100% sure where the delays are. Sometimes, I suspect that higher level 5E has some of the same problems as 4E, with monsters becoming bags of HP. 5E is designed to use more hitpoints as a way to scale difficulty. Some of what I'm noticing includes things I may have noticed before but didn't think much about; lately, I think it's more noticeable as the group's overall exposure to other games increases.

I think part of the problem may also be a lack of engagement in combat which feels static. Without having objectively timed our games, it may be that some encounters have felt slower than they actually are. Though, the most recent sessions do have a comparison of time (which I detailed earlier in the thread).

With optimization, combat speeds up because we do more damage. Though, rather quickly, that gets a little old as a way to play 1-20.

Unrelated (I think,) but I've noticed that (optimization) tends to lead to a weird swingy-ness in which 5E seems to bounce back and forth between the "problems" of 3E and 4E without a happy medium. Either we're steamrolling an encounter (but it's taking a while to hack through the HP) or we lose initiative and get hit with some manner of save-or-suck effect from a high level creature. (It wasn't with the same group I'm talking about here, but I noticed that with Curse of Strahd; Strahd himself was a cakewalk, but other encounters nearly killed the party right out of the gate. There was rarely an encounter which fell somewhere in the middle.)

edit: I changed the color of the last part so it wouldn't look like mod text.

 

[Lanefan]

Maybe this is a reason why I like low-level play so much - combats, one way or the other, are over quickly.

 

[pogre]

1) Do you feel D&D combat is slow (or "drags")?

2) If yes, how do you address this in 5E?

3) Has it always been that way? I'm not familiar with very much of 1E or 2E.

1) Not in person, but it does seem to drag online.

2) Not a 5e issue for us. I have put my D&D campaign on hiatus until we can meet in person again - we're playing WFRP these days.

3) 4e and 3e was slower for us. 1e and 2e could drag when we used all of the bells and whistles.

 

[Bedrockgames]

For me it didn't get particularly slow until 3E

 

[ccs]

So, my question is three parts:

1) Do you feel D&D combat is slow (or "drags")?

2) If yes, how do you address this in 5E?

3) Has it always been that way? I'm not familiar with very much of 1E or 2E.

1) Sometimes. Yes, things often do slow down in most editions as lvs (and thus options) increase. Some editions are worse/much worse for this than others.

2) I've not really had this problem with 5e. At least not because of mechanics.

3) No.

• It's been faster in B/Xcmi (not many "options" in that edition & while maybe more rounds but faster) & then when initiative becomes nuclear rocket tag in high lv 3x/PF1.
• It's been about the same speed as now in most of 1e/2e & low-mid lv 3x/PF.

*It's been slower - some mid & then high lv 3x/PF1 when Rocket Tag wasn't employed. Lots of options & fiddly timing sequences for stuff, adding modifiers, etc.
* It's been Hella slow at all lvs in 4e.
*PF2 = ? We only played a short campaign. It definitely felt longer, but that's likely because we were always learning new class features/feats/spells etc as we lvd really quick. Had we stayed one lv for any appreciable time I think overall it'd not have bogged down too bad. Until we got into higher lvs....

 

[happyhermit]

...
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.

AFAICT, the actual "mechanical resolution" should only take like 10 minutes or so, even if not rushed and not doing even the easiest things to speed up resolution, like rolling damage dice at the same time as to-hit. Things like waiting for players/gm to make decisions on their turn can fairly get rolled into "mechanical resolution", and that adds to it but is very much group/situation dependent.

We have played through many combats in 10-15 minutes in 5e, if we are playing it straight. Usually though, they take longer because we are roleplaying, strategizing, improvising (which involves back and forth with the GM), etc. I've played in some systems where combats taking longer than we wanted was a rather pervasive problem ie; D&D 4e, 3.x, Fate, various PbtA games, but I can't say that about 5e.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I forgot how slow attacks of opportunity make the system. I found in 3e, 4e, and Pathfinder 1e players will spend a lot of time making their characters move to avoid these. In 5e they still come up, but rarely (since you can move next to an NPC without provoking an OA).

I'm playing a 5e fighter with the feat that emulates 4e's Combat Challenge (get more opportunity attacks) and I've literally got to use that particular feature once. Still, I'm applying pressure to the foes so I don't see it as a wasted feat.

 

[dave2008]

For a while now, my primary group has been playing other rpgs more often.

Also, for a while now, I have had the feeling that D&D combat seems to take a long time to work through one encounter. However, it really hit me how slow it was (or at least seems to be to me) after the group recently played a mini-campaign of 5E to cover a few sessions that a regular couldn't attend.

Thinking about it more, I started to ponder if D&D combat has always been this way. I'm most familiar with 3rd, 4th, and 5th. All three are relatively quick for the first few levels. As options (and monster HP) start to pile up, encounters slow. What highlights is more is that it becomes slow for reasons which aren't (imo) compelling. If an encounter is a dramatic fight with a tough opponent, involves and epic chase, or something else, it's not quite as noticeable. But taking (sometimes) an hour to beat on some basic critters as part of an opening encounter gets old quickly. When I played primarily D&D, I didn't notice it as much. As myself (and the group) have spent more time with other games, coming back to the D&D combat system feels more and more like a slog beyond around 5th level (and sometimes before that).

In comparison, our primary campaign is currently a FFG Star Wars game. Even with high-point-value characters and some ridiculous dice pools, we were still able to play through several encounters (and still have time to wrap up some RP stuff) in one session. Also, because of how the game functions, there were rarely turns during which nothing happened.

Likewise, for those of you who may be familiar with my posts elsewhere, you may know I play GURPS. Somehow, a game which has a reputation for being "overly complex" still manages to play through combat encounters faster than D&D.


So, my question is three parts:

1) Do you feel D&D combat is slow (or "drags")?

2) If yes, how do you address this in 5E?

3) Has it always been that way? I'm not familiar with very much of 1E or 2E.

I've never had problems with slow combats ever since 4e. We developed some rules of engagement that work for any edition, IMO, that speeds things up. Simply limit a player to 30 seconds to resolve their turn. You have 30s to determine your action, roll to hit, and roll damage. If you do that you can get through most 5e encounters in 10-15 min, sometimes less.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I've never had problems with slow combats ever since 4e. We developed some rules of engagement that work for any edition, IMO, that speeds things up. Simply limit a player to 30 seconds to resolve their turn. You have 30s to determine your action, roll to hit, and roll damage.

We tried this. It only lasted one gaming session. It worked, and combats ran much faster and more smoothly. We went from 90 to 120 minute combats down to 60 to 75 minute combats. However, everyone also agreed that it made the game feel literally like a business meeting. It just stopped being fun, and turned combat into a chore of dice rolling to endure and grind through rather than an enjoyable pastime. People stopped paying attention to what others were doing, too, because they were focused on getting ready for their next turn rather than observing the game.

As a player at a table with a typically combat-heavy, kick-in-the-door style of play, it was kind of a profound experience to play D&D and hate running the combat encounters. This was one of our last sessions before abandoning 4e and going back to 3e and Savage Worlds for a few years before 5e released. I don't think that's coincidence.