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Message: <blockquote data-quote="redrick" data-source="post: 7040486" data-attributes="member: 6777696">We had a whole-session combat that was a blast a couple of months ago. The session before, the characters had picked a fight on the second story of a warehouse full of human-supremacists. (Our half-elf's ear covering hat had fallen off.) That prior session had ended when the warlock jumped out of the 2nd story window and cast feather fall on himself.What followed was a running combat as people fought their way out of the warehouse, tried to lead the pursuers off in different directions, and circled back to basically blow up the warehouse. I think the DM used a lot of tricks to keep things running smoothly, but the result was one of the most dynamic, nail-biting, totally theater-of-the-mind combats I've ever had. We were in the same initiative for about 4 hours. I think long combats work best when there is moving, ideally covering multiple locations. I've had this happen organically, but I think the key is to set up a location with multiple circular movement paths (allowing characters to do a loop through different rooms, instead of a straight railroad of rooms), and have the characters significantly outnumbered. Most PCs have abilities that will give them better mobility than your standard monsters and NPCs, so they'll be naturally inclined to try and move to a location with strategic advantage. Then just keep flushing them out and getting them to dig deeper and deeper into their bag of tricks.Toe to toe grind in a room? That probably gets boring to anybody after 3 or 4 rounds. The monsters run away, or they get reinforcements. (I do have the bad habit of bringing in WAY too many reinforcements. It's just, they were fighting outside the monster den and making a lot of noise, and OF COURSE the reinforcements were going to come in from multiple sides.)</blockquote>

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