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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7988184" data-attributes="member: 18">By design, 5E combats are intended to last 2-3 rounds, in general, according to the actual game designers.Interesting that some people are reporting figures wildly off from that. I would love to have a robot audit those sessions and see how long combat actually lasted, and if it did last a long time, what was causing that. I know one of my players was once "We're on what, round six?" and I was like "Round three..." so I know some people have warped perceptions here.Realistically anything between 1 round and about 8 does happen, but I actually keep track of this and we definitely center around 2-4 rounds. As Shiroiken says, at higher levels combats go a bit shorter more reliably. I see plenty of 3-round fights at L3, say, but also plenty of 5-round ones, because a few misses can really draw them out.I don't find that it reliably matches up that way, myself, at low or high level. Plenty of Hard encounters can be over in 1-2 rounds, for example, and mediums with a large number of enemies who are spread out can easily go on for a while, especially if its not a good idea to AOE a lot (fireball in a dry-season forest etc.). Deadly and Deadly+ encounters rarely go on for more than 5-6 rounds in my experience, at both low and high levels, because Deadly+ doesn't necessarily mean tons of HP and AC, it often means tons of enemy damage output.I do kind of agree that the number of rounds determines the resource-damage, often, though. So if you mean you can back-figure difficulty from that you sorta can, though I dunno - I just went through and checked and my party survived 27 rounds of combat in my L3 game, in one adventuring day (but that was waaaaaay more than intended and honestly one bad round at the end and it could have been a TPK - also everyone but me used all their HD already, and we still haven't got to a long rest - we've also done what are, according to the encounter calculator, two deadly+ and one deadly encounter together with several hard and medium). One short rest in there.The biggest factor in how long stuff takes is often how spread out it is and what the physical situation is, and obviously how many resources the PCs are willing to blow can factor in too. At lower levels a few bad rolls can really drag stuff out too.</blockquote>

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