How Long to Reach 10th Level

[Primitive Screwhead]

The way I look at this is that if the rules support being able to play something in a 2 hour session other than most of a single combat encounter...that is a good thing.

I really love the War of the Burning Sky campaign world and would very much love being able to dig into the nooks and cranny's, loose the players for a session or three in any of the major cities or get them lost in one of the many interesting environments available. But because I can barely squeeze 2 combat encounters, the ones that are plot critical, into a session the end result is a bare bones, 2 dimensional story line. It is almost episodic and my players have to be reminded why it is that they are fighting the new big bad guy. In many cases I end the session as combat ends and start with 'you last defeated so and so, after learning some stuff you ended up facing the NBBG...roll initiative'


Part of that is my group, they do not do well with in between session banter and focus. Part is the delay between monthly sessions... but I think if I could do those same two plot critical combats in 30 minutes each, that would leave almost an hour to flesh out the story.

{yes, I know two 30 minute combats plus 1 hour story is 2 hours short of my 4 hour session... but that's the way this group rolls!}

 

[Hussar]

I have to admit, even though I've been a pretty strident defender of 4e's combat system, I would like to see 30 minutes be the baseline, instead of 1 hour. 4e baselines a combat as 1 hour in the DMG 1 and, while I love all the fiddly stuff, it does tend to eat up too much time.

I think I could really get behind the idea of a 30 minute presumption for a combat since there's always the option to go longer if you want. I'm just not sure how to achieve that without losing some of the tactical richness you get in 4e.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I have to admit, even though I've been a pretty strident defender of 4e's combat system, I would like to see 30 minutes be the baseline, instead of 1 hour. 4e baselines a combat as 1 hour in the DMG 1 and, while I love all the fiddly stuff, it does tend to eat up too much time.

I think I could really get behind the idea of a 30 minute presumption for a combat since there's always the option to go longer if you want. I'm just not sure how to achieve that without losing some of the tactical richness you get in 4e.

Yes. Almost all of my house rules are about shortening combat time. We've got it down to about 40 minutes for a good fight when everyone is paying attention, but I'd like to have half that under those circumstances, and then expand out to 30 or 40 minutes when people are not paying attention.

 

[Hussar]

Yes. Almost all of my house rules are about shortening combat time. We've got it down to about 40 minutes for a good fight when everyone is paying attention, but I'd like to have half that under those circumstances, and then expand out to 30 or 40 minutes when people are not paying attention.

Yeah, we're about the same. When everyone is on the ball, combats take about 40 minutes. We play 3 hour sessions and we can usually get through two, maybe two and a half combats in a real combat heavy adventure (I was doing the Chaos Scar adventures of a while).

But, if we do that many combats, it really doesn't leave a lot of time for other stuff. I'd be pretty happy if we could have 3 combats in a session and still have about an hour and a half for the other stuff. That would peg advancement at about every 3 weeks, which is a nice rate for me while still scratching a lot more of the rp itch.