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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Proctor" data-source="post: 4678519" data-attributes="member: 78547">Our group takes a long time to encounters as well...I'd say about and hour and a half to two hours usually.  There's a lot of reasons for this, and I doubt it will change anytime soon...1) About half the party is fairly...weak.  I'm not trying to be mean or anything, but when someone has a 14 in their attack stat, they miss a lot.  When that person is then a Ranger, it hurts the party because we have a Striker that doesn't add anything to the combat.  We have another character that's a Tiefling STR Cleric, and she uses a sling.  So this means that she's going completely against all racial bonuses, which is fine, but is then further compounding this by using a DEX weapon when she's a STR Cleric.2) Our group gets very distracted.  One of our players actually plays DS while at the table, which means she's often not paying attention to the game or planning what she should be doing next.3) The players don't know their characters.  Several of them never use encounter powers unless prompted to do so, and they don't use power cards and so we constantly have to wait for them to look things up in the PHB and do the math to figure out their attack stat and damage every time they use something.So basically, between all of the distractions and looking things up, combat rounds take a long time to reolve.  Combats as a whole are extended because half the party can't hit very accurately.  While the other half of us have 16's and 18's in our primary stats, it's just not enough to be effective.In general though, I think one thing that can help other parties is for DM's to familiarize themselves with the way the PC math works out.  Our DM didn't really do that, and so he never said anything about some of the characters with very low attack stats because they were within the +4 to +8 range that's listed in the PHB.The really big thing though is that players need to pay attention to the game during combat and get familiar with their characters and abilities.  I think it works much better if you focus during the combats and keep all of the messing around out of it.  I'd rather have combat take an hour, and then have an hour to mess around and have fun, than have to slog through 2 hours of combat and then go straight into the next one.</blockquote>

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