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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mlund" data-source="post: 4680185" data-attributes="member: 50304">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</blockquote>

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