How long do your battles take

[Kershek]

You're trying to tell me a ninja doesn't always look cool?

We're talking Real Ultimate Power(tm), remember.

 

[Romnipotent]

Pirates are cooler
Ninjas dont exist, and if you insist they do then you'll be marked

 

[S'mon]

I allow rules queries - I don't want PC dying from misunderstanding rule or house rule - but as far as simply deciding what to do, I give ca 6 seconds before I say "Ok, you delay." No way am I going to let each player ponder their move like a chess game!

 

[Starglim]

We'd complete, at most, two major battles in an extended full session, so it would actually average more than an hour, though we don't usually have players falling asleep in combat scenes.

 

[Hussar]

Well, had 2 combats today. A mummy vs my 5th level party and a giant ant lion vs the 4th rogue/1st fighter who fled from the first fight. My guys were awesome today. First time that I can remember that I was holding up the action. And that's because I screwed up and forgot to look up the rules for Mummy Rot. Combat slicked along fine, no hiccups a work of art. Still took the better part of an hour, but, then again, it took them 7 rounds too. Guess that averages to a tad better than 10 minutes/round. Nature of the beast.

Granted, the fight with the rogue and the ant lion lasted about 5 minutes. Rogue kept hitting and the 'lion kept missing. Makes things go pretty quick.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

The amount of time a battle takes is based upon the number of PCs, the number of opponents and the level of the party.

In my large group with 8 PCs (average level 5), I often need to throw a lot of opponents at them to challenge them. Those fights can be agonizingly slow and easily take over an hour. My other group has three PCs (level 2), most of those fights some in somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes.

 

[The_Universe]

I marked that it generally takes in the neighborhood of 45 minutes to an hour, but that number really varies. When the players are on the ball, and there's a relatively small number of enemies, combat can take less than 10 minutes. That being said, in the last campaign where I had characters of that level, they tended to engage large numbers of enemies in running battles over that range of levels, which meant battles took closer to an hour.

While level's 6-9 tend to have about the same level of complexity in terms of actions and abilities, I've found that the largest measure of how fast a combat can go is whether each player is ready to declare/roll when their turn arrives. If they're not, it's going to dramatically increase the time spent in battle.

Then again, every once in a while you get a battle where everyone rolls extremely well, and the whole thing lasts about 2 minutes.

 

[DragonLancer]

For my group at those levels combat rarely lasts more than 10-15 mins, and at higher levels ralrly more than 20 mins. And thats for a full combat.