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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Markn" data-source="post: 4665835" data-attributes="member: 21827">A few more notes to add as I think on this topic.Adding a 6th PC to the group will definately increase battle times.  It generally increases the monsters by 1 or 2 creatures to account for the extra PC.  It just makes things take longer - period.Also, I will say that my group is very tactically superior in the sense that they work well together and look for ways to deal the most amount of damage without taking too long to make their decision whether its flanking,  ganging up on one monster or any other tactic that helps.  In fact, I have found that Encounters that are on equal level as the PCs winds up being too easy of a fight for them and consequently the average fight is 1 encounter level higher with some fights being as much as 4 encounter levels higher.  Sometimes this means LOTS of lower level guys and other times it means higher level creatures.  When using higher level creatures I try to avoid high defense creatures and typically use brutes because they can still be hit but also dish out a lot of damage.The only thing I can think of that makes sense to me for the discrepency in fight lengths (with some claiming as quick as 15 minutes) is the style of encounters and the difficulty of encounters faced.  Generally, most of my fights are meant to be a challenge.  I'm not interested in running very many fights that don't have SOME level of risk associated with it because I feel like I just go through the motions then and I don't have fun as a DM.  Its the challenge that both I as the DM and my players like.  We are on 8th level, have had only 1 PC death so far and the PCs have run from some fights so I think I've been pretty fair and have accurately gauged my groups tactical abilities.To sum things up, additional PCs and typical encounter level fought in a battle I think are the biggest contributor to long fights.  I would hope that DMG2 contains some optional rules to speed up combat.  Our group has looked at a lot of options but most "damage" the balance of monster roles and the only thing we have been able to come up with that maintains that balance is adding half level damage to everyones damage rolls.Anyways, thats my latest 2cp.</blockquote>

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