How long do your combats last

[Dreadite]

I put in an hour to an hour and fifteen (roughly). My group, including myself, have never played D&D before this, although I've had some experience running Vampire and other Storyteller games.

And even though we barely know how the system works (our first combats, we didn't realize weapon proficiency meant you got an attack bonus...) they finished our first couple encounters with relative speed and ease.

Three PC party, Paladin/Rogue/Warlock (fey). I've been throwing roughly 350/400 exp fights at them, about half minions to make up for the fact that they really have no dedicated healer (solo fights nearly wipe them out every time).

All in all, I think it's pretty quick if absolute newbies can pick it up and get through basic combat in an hour or so, although some of the players found that to be a bit tedious and I'm all ears for ways to improve the speed of the game.

 

[Lauberfen]

Good stuff. My primary analysis (i.e. I had a glance at results so far) suggests a fairly wide distribution with two peaks at just over half and hour, and just over an hour. We'll see how this develops, but possibly the results indicate two groups of gamers, perhaps with different levels of experience and/or styles of play.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Well of course. You save 20-30 minutes just not having to look up the 3.x Grapple rules.

Heh. We're wrapping up a 3.5 campaign before we move on to a new one for 4e, and just last session, we had to look up the grapple rules, yet again. And, though it's been 8 years, I still have to remind DMs of the -20 for Improved Grab.

 

[Xorn]

I put 31-40, but that's when we're not goofing off. 30-60 minutes would be my preference to pick. In a pretty linear dungeoncrawl (like Scalegloom/Kobold Hall) I got through 5 encounters plus the exploration and roleplay in 6 hours.

 

[Scribe Ineti]

First encounter was about an hour, and we were learning the rules. Second encounter took a little less. I suspect the better we learn the rules and each character's capabilities, the faster combats will go. I'm targeting 30 minutes for a balanced encounter, a little more if we goof around a bit.

 

[Minigiant]

31-40 minutes. Since we miss a lot.

"Fighter moves here and do this XYZ. I miss. Go"
"Wizard teleport and do this XYZ. Hit. ABC damage. Go"
"Cleric rolled a 2. Go."

 

[Nikosandros]

I've just DMed my fourth session. We never went under two hours per encounter. We are playing H1 with 6 players and encounters scaled accordingly, so that makes thing slower than standard, I believe.

 

[BlueBlackRed]

If everyone is 100% ready, is paying attention, and knows their PC's enough then our non-major combats last 30-40 minute.

Irontooth lasted almost 1.5 hours, but the fight right before only took about 15 minutes.