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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 8148623" data-attributes="member: 58416">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.</blockquote>

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