Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaculata" data-source="post: 7040301" data-attributes="member: 6801286">I've had battles that took up the entire session, or sometimes, multiple sessions. I recently had a huge naval battle in my pirate campaign, that took us three days to finish. As long as exciting things continue to happen, this is not a problem. And I think that is key. It shouldn't be a long grind where you chip away at the hitpoints of monsters.In my battle, it started out as an ambush, where sail hunters tried to disable the fleet of the players. While their captain executed various strategies with their ship, the rest of the party tried to snipe at the captains of the enemy ships, or to support the ship with magic spells. Then it moved to a big battle, where multiple ships were caught in a trap, and being shot from all directions. Here they confronted the big ship of the big bad. I gave the other players control of their allied ships, so they all got to take part in the naval battle, and not just the player playing the captain.Lastly, they boarded the ship of the big bad, and now the battle moved to a simple land battle. They had to fight their way into the holds of the ship, and then deal with the genie that the big bad had summoned from his magic lamp. And to make matters a bit more interesting, an enemy wizard used a reverse gravity spell on the entrance to the hold. This all lead up to an epic confrontation with the big bad. It was captain against captain, while the rest of the party dealt with the genie and the other enemy pirates.So, as long as you keep it exciting, a battle can be as long as you want it to be. But you have to keep moving things forward. There have to be a lot of strategic choices to make for the players. I skipped a lot of the battles that were happening in the background, and focused on the battles that the players themselves were involved in.A friend of mine once described how he had DM'd a game where his players battled a huge undead army that counted in the hundreds, and they fought every last one... that sounded like the more tedious battle ever.</blockquote>

Verification