How much of your typical play time is combat?

[Thornir Alekeg]

Since I never really paid that much attention to how much time is consumed by chat and pizza runs, it is hard to say for certain. It could easily be more than 50%, but is not likely less than 40%.

My old group had a couple of players who were in it solely for the combat, so it was more of a focus that I personally would have preferred.

 

[DaveyJones]

Less than 10%.

this is my guess too.

but it varies a lot.

most sessions are spent in character trying to figure out what to do next. interacting with NPCs or PCs. and then plotting and coming up with tactics. and also exploring.

combat is more of an aftermath of the decisions made.

 

[pbd]

I chose 50 - 60% (but upon thinking it could be 40 - 50%) even though we are in a fairly role-playing heavy campaign. I chose the larger percentage because combat takes is time consuming. We may only run into a single combat encounter during a session, but if it isn't a trivial situation it can easily take over half the session.

 

[Creamsteak]

One thing that really helps, from my perspective, is that I put a great deal of what prep time I have into the simple things that make combat go faster. I've played at tables before where a single encounter can take hours (and I've had a single encounter that took hours, but it was stretched out over multiple battles and involved over 100 rounds). I don't particularly like slow play, so I do everything I can to lay out the options.

 

[Simm]

60-70% right now but that's just because I'm running my party through a 3.5 convertion of KotB (probably finnishing it next session). After that it'll probably drop to 10-20% for quite a while as I run through some non combat adventures I've been working on (Challenge of champion, a D&D conversion of the WFRP adventure A Rough Night at the Three Feathers, and a political/investigative piece I'm working on.

 

[TerraDave]

About 65%....I would like to get it down to about 50%. But not really lower. We can role-play while hacking, slashing, and occasionally ka-booming.

 

[Maldin]

I chose 10-20%, because thats likely true when there is any combat, but I've had many sessions were there was no combat at all. I suspect the edition you play has alot to do with this question. The mini-dominated, battlemap-married 3E is, I suspect, more likely to produce combat-dominated campaigns (although I'm sure there are also alot of role-play-centric 3E players out there as well). Us old-timers still clinging to 1E and 2E may be more prone to role-play-dominated campaigns (although I'm equally certain that there are combat-addicted DMs in these game systems as well).

Denis, aka "Maldin"
Maldin's Greyhawk http://melkot.com
Loads of edition-independent Greyhawk goodness... maps, magic, mysteries, mechanics, and more!

 

[MINI]

I game online so about 40%. Commbat takes abit longer online as well so if it was pover a tabel it might be as low as 30% but I have gotten fairly fast at doing combats online.

 

[Ltheb Silverfrond]

My group games every other Saturday, starting around ~11 AM to about 8 or 9 at night. I'd say about 1-3 hours of which were OOC time.
I voted 10-20%; Theres only about 1 combat per session, but it's usually pretty major. (unless its the final session in an adventure which is about 3-5 combats or about 75% of game time spent in combat)

 

[Greg K]

I voted 10-20%. Some sessions have no combat at all. Others might have one or two small combats that makes up a small portion (20-30%) of the session.