D&D 4E How long are your 4e combats taking, real time?

[mlund]

A variety of factors can drag down a combat encounter.

Powers with a lot of secondary attacks or a lot of (save ends) and save vs. falling interactions eat more time than regular attacks. If you aren't on your players like hawks for their saves and ongoing effects things get messy. I really liked one DM's technique of handing out colored index cards with effects written on them to keep in front of players.

Player Characters with bad Attack Stats miss too much, causing combat to go on for extra rounds.

Players with bad Tactics tend to eat a lot of time on the table, either missing more than they should or having to figure out moves by committee.

Parties without enough Strikers (or with weak strikers) deal damage too slowly, which can lead to grind space.

Dungeon Masters who have to draw out / assemble every encounter on a battle mat or tact-tiles in the middle of the game also eats up a lot of time.

Monsters with too many Defensive / Stalling abilities and no real way to capitalize for massive damage can turn combat into a long grind.

Each extra player at the table has a ripple effect on time consumption. Extra party members make combats larger on both sides of the game. So +1 player = +2 combatants, typically. Going from 5 players to 6 players represents a 20% basic increase in the amount of actions and die-rolls involved in a combat. It also increases the signal-to-noise ratio at a table which slows the pace of play. If people are running Tactics By Committee, the committee is now larger and slower. The increased lag between each player's current turn and their next turn leads to higher rates of distraction, and more variable to compute against.

A 4-character table runs through a combat encounter so much faster than a 6-or-7 player table fighting encounters of the same level it is like night and day.

- Marty Lund

 

[Rel]

A 4-character table runs through a combat encounter so much faster than a 6-or-7 player table fighting encounters of the same level it is like night and day.

- Marty Lund

We had a player drop out of our group for personal reasons this campaign leaving us with 4. At first I was thinking we should recruit somebody else but now I'm seeing it as a bit of a blessing in disguise.

 

[CraigAT]

Interesting use for the Alea Tools markers. I could see where that approach might help in really complex scenarios. We typically put one color under the character-mini, then use the same color to "mark" their slected target (s) which shows the linkage. Had not thought of giving the actual player a colored marker rather than their miniature... hmmm...

 

[DrSpunj]

Since we've only used this little system with the markers once I'm still liking putting the player's colored marker under their PC in addition to the larger 2" marker as a base in front of each player. After the first combat last session a couple players commented on how much easier it was to tell which minis were party members and exactly which party member was where with just a glance.

Then the Fighter using that same Dark Blue marker to designate which of his targets are marked, or the Hunter's Quarry for the Ranger's Dark Green, and all of the other effects become very simple for pretty much everyone to see. If the BBEG has an orange marker under it, well, our Dwarf Cleric must have tagged him with some condition, oh that's right he's weakened right now from that Daily power. That same colored orange marker sitting in front of the Fighter's Player represents the bonus the Cleric gave him to hit the BBEG for this round which he better make use of before his turn ends and he had to give it back.

That kind of recognition helped players figure out their moves a bit better and helps me remember what trouble my mobs are in.

We play again tomorrow night with all 7 players (last session we only had 5 present) so hopefully it'll work as smoothly!

 

[CraigAT]

Very nice use of the markers! We always learn a lot from our cutomers!

 

[Montague68]

Our fights tend to average about an hour, so roughly 3-4 encounters a night with the usual BS and roleplay. Last game had a climactic battle against a Bloodkiss Beholder that took almost 3 hours, but no one complained. In fact, one player who had to leave at a certain time stayed an hour over simply because he wanted to finish the combat more than go to the party he was supposed to attend.

I am seeing though that combats are starting to last a little longer as we get closer to paragon tier. Some of my players are right on top of their daily and encounter powers while some barely know what they have, and they have a mess of power cards that they sort through every turn.

The final question of course is "Is your group having fun?" Could I bear down on the slowpoke players and squeeze in another encounter a night? Sure, but the group seems to be going just fine and I haven't had any complaints about the pace.

 

[Nail]

It continues to be interesting to see how long (or short!) people's combats are.

...or how long or short people *think* combats are. I wish there was some way to take observer bias out of this informal survey.

Last night our combat in Dr. Spunj's game took about 2 hours. It was a fairly complicated "street-fight" between us and several different groups of goblins who were terrorizing/looting/doing something else sneaky. Lots of fun! ...and it took 2 hours to get through.

Places were we were slow:

• Descriptions of terrain and enemy activity (hey - it was "night", so it was a "slow reveal"....which although entirely appropriate, did slow down combat.)
• Deciding PC tactics: Yep, "committee work" can slow stuff down. Though to be fair, the wizard's player was gone, so we all felt we should keep him both effective and safe.
• Deciding monster tactics: There were lots of different monsters, so our poor DM was flipping back and forth alot.
• PCs splitting up and not focusing fire: Our strikers went off to "explore" while the defenders and leaders split up and waded into 2 separate melees. Oopps.

Places where we were fast:

• Using those Alea magnetic disks as markers simplified and clarified condition tracking.
• Initiative: We track it out in the open, so everyone can see who's next.
• Rolling attack and damage dice together.
• A few of us decided our moves before our turn, so when it was our turn we just said what we did and then moved and rolled dice. I was finishing my turns in well under a minute each round, I think.
• The DM tracked groups of monsters, rather than individual monsters. It felt like that sped things up.

 

[Piratecat]

Tonight's combat lasted 41 minutes over about four rounds (it was the only fight in a 3 hour game, with the rest of the session taken up by roleplaying.) That works out to ten minutes a round, or a little more than a minute and a half per player per turn (including the DM.)

The party is five 3rd level heroes; the foes were three 5th lvl, and one 4th lvl lizardmen. Since the fight took place above, alongside and next to a waterfall, the PCs were unable to flank like they usually do, and so the battle lasted about a round longer than usual.

My group is striker heavy, and lacks a leader. This speeds combat up a ton unless there are a lot of status effects being tossed around. Wow, can two rogues dish out damage when working together... the players are using power cards. As a DM, I track initiative with index cards and let people know who's up next so they can prep. We had minimal pauses to look up rules, although there was some justified swearing that the PHB's index pretty much bites.

In general, combat is noticeably faster than it was in our high lvl 3.5 game. I'd say almost twice as fast; as one player said, she used to know that after she went she had time to go make a cup of tea. That's no longer true. I find it weird that our 4e combat is twice as fast as 3.5, and for Plane Sailing it's twice as slow.

 

[keterys]

Last session was a pseudo boss fight - a dragon in a lair filled with traps and defenses... for whatever reason 2/3 of the party basically just found a corner and turtled down, forcing the rest of the party to join them (after a few rounds of 'what the heck are you guys doing' type heckling to try to make them rejoin the battle). It was tactically sound to a certain degree, but it made the combat drag waaay down and cost them the ability to do the next fight that evening. Something like 2.5 hours for a fight they easily could have done in an hour and a half.

That was a bit disappointing, so I'm trying to figure out appropriate means of rectifying that in the future. Actually, in general I think I want to applaud courage... it's tough while still punishing stupid actions, though

In a separate group, we did four combats in four hours... online... with a bunch of roleplaying and time lost to interface issues... and the last combat was a dragon

 

[keterys]

Yet another group - 3 people on the ball, 1 person attentive but not tremendously tactical or familiar with the character, 1 person... along for the ride, serious butterflies and slow to do anything... 5 combat encounters in 4 hours. They were on the easy side, though so not wicked conclusive.