D&D 5E How much fighting do a typical D&D session have?

[Erechel]

Before posting, get me straigth: I know that combat is an important subject in a typical D&D adventure. It is a big part of the game, as many of the main features of classes are linked to it, adventures tend to have a lot of action. I'm not questioning that. I also enjoy a good, difficult, tactical combat.

Considering all this, I don't really know how much time a typical session assigns to actual combat. Even less an adventure or campaign. I would want to know how many fights do you do in a typical D&D session, how much they last, and how impactful on the aadventure they are. Many of the posts in this and other forums, YouTube analysis such as those made by Nerdarchy, etc are very combat-centric: "how do you do a spear fighter" "Which class gives more DPR" "This class can nova..." etc. Although I find these topics interesting and useful for combat, I don't really know how much they influence actual gameplay.

In my campaigns, a heavy combat session usually spawns a maximum of 3 fights. Most of the time, the actual fights in a sesion is 2. But in a campaign I'm playing as character, I found myself in less than 2 fights per session, and they took very little time each (no more than half an hour in an 8 hour session). Most of the time we are deciding how to (EG) infiltrate in an enemy temple, or laughing at our heresy when we engage in grave robbery, or discussing how to break a town's curse, fighting a storm in the middle of the ocean, etc. It's actually very little the times in which we are fighting. And when we do fight, optimization isn't even an issue, as most characters can fight pretty good without it. Neither of our characters ever suffered from "being useless" in combat in this edition, and we don't rush to combat as we only see it as a possible solution to a problem.

tl;dr: How much time do you spend fighting in a session? How many fights do you do? And how relevant the fights are in advancing the story?

 

[iserith]

Probably at least half or more of our session time is in the combat pillar. My last session was combat from start to finish, five fairly complex combats total. The one prior to that was a long social interaction challenge followed by two big set piece battles. The size and scope of the battle determine how many we do in a give session. In this campaign, I feature a lot of set pieces rather than skirmishes in contrast to my last campaign which was a dungeon delving affair. There it was higher on exploration and multiple smaller combat challenges. This usually means less fights in my current campaign, but each fight takes up a big chunk of time.

The fights are always relevant to the story, where "story" is defined as what the characters got up to. Even random encounters, at the very least, say something about the flavor of the adventure location.

 

[Xeviat]

My games have been mostly combat lately, but that's because 2 of the last 3 games I ran have only been the introductory adventure, and the 3rd was a war game. In non-combat parts of the game, it's common for one person to take the lead and then it doesn't seem like everyone is playing.

 

[discosoc]

5e expects about 6 or 7 fights per long rest, and it seems like the expected pace is a long rest per session. I personally feel like that's way too much outside of a dungeon crawl, so my games tend to aim for 3 fights and *maybe* an easy random encounter thrown in somewhere else. As for real-world time spent in combat, 5 minutes per round is pretty normal, with most fights ending by round 5 or 6 at the latest. So maybe 30 minutes per fight, or an hour and a half of fighting per session. Our sessions generally run about 4 hours, meaning we spend a bit over a third of the session fighting.

 

[Sacrosanct]

7-8 hour sessions, probably 1/3rd of that is combat. Roughly 5-7 combat encounters.

 

[Tony Vargas]

tl;dr: How much time do you spend fighting in a session? How many fights do you do? And how relevant the fights are in advancing the story?

It's varied with edition and zeitgeist over the years. But then, sessions have also varied a lot, for me, over the decades. From 6, 8 or even 12+ hours back in the day (AD&D), to 6hrs in 3e & 4e, to 1-2hr Encounters sessions (4e/E) to 3-4hrs for AL (5e).
Old dungeon crawls were lots of mapping and poking & prodding and puzzling thing out, and fairly short, one-sided (hopefully your side) fights. In theory you could have stuffed a lot of fights into one session, in reality, half of it might be taken up with one door.
My 3e/4e group was very consistent: 3 fights, every week, though we went from 6-8 hr sessions under 3e to hard stop at 6hrs for 4e.
Encounters was a mere 2hr slot, so typically one fight, taking 3/4th the session - except when it was no fights, of course, and a Skill Challenge or something, instead.
AL, for whatever reason, we now get 3-4hr slots, some fights are quickie speedbumps, over before the last PC in initiative order can act, and you could do a whole 'day's worth in one session, others can be grueling.
Maybe 2-5 combats/session?
:shrug:

 

[jgsugden]

It depends heavily upon the adventure structure. I've had 8 hour sessions with no combats, and I've had 8 hour sessions which were essentially all combat. I've had combats (in 5E) last two minutes or last as long as four hours.

A 'typical' 8 hour session will have 5 to 7 combats and those will add up to about 4 hours of time, but that is stretching the word typical quite thin as there is a lot of variance around those numbers.

 

[BookBarbarian]

1/3 to 1/2 of each session typically.

 

[Jester David]

1/4 to 1/2 usually.
Even in big dungeon has a lot of exploration and infra-party interaction.

 

[Zardnaar]

Depends, combat heavy 4-6, the other day I think we manged around 3 or 4 as the cleared Scarlet Moon Hall in PotA and avoided most of the camp fires.