Hussar
Legend
Fair enough. OTOH, if your combats are running into double digit rounds, why aren't you killing PC's?
The math says you should. A given creature of a comparable CR can easily do 10% of a PC's hp/round. In fact, most creatures can do significantly more than 10%, but, we'll leave it there for now. If you're regularly fighting 10+ round fights, someone should be dying. Regularly.
Having run the World's Largest Dungeon from 1st to 18th level, I ran a couple of hundred fights. Easily. You can see the transcripts here. Note, these are all strictly SRD monsters, as core as you can get. And, while I know I had a few 10 round grudge matches, by far most of the fights were between 2-7 rounds. So, when they say this, it fits closely with the rather large amount of combat that I've run. Which is why I suspect that the 5 round paradigm is pretty close to the norm.
From a DM's point of view, they certainly are. Unbelievable headaches. It takes forever to stat them up, rounds take an hour to play and the first Disjunction spell makes the DM tear out his hair. Never mind the fact that Mr Lich probably won't use 90% of the material you create for him. So, yeah, if you have to slow the game down to a snails pace and spend huge amounts of time developing the fight beforehand, that would pretty much be the worst choice to make.
The math says you should. A given creature of a comparable CR can easily do 10% of a PC's hp/round. In fact, most creatures can do significantly more than 10%, but, we'll leave it there for now. If you're regularly fighting 10+ round fights, someone should be dying. Regularly.
Having run the World's Largest Dungeon from 1st to 18th level, I ran a couple of hundred fights. Easily. You can see the transcripts here. Note, these are all strictly SRD monsters, as core as you can get. And, while I know I had a few 10 round grudge matches, by far most of the fights were between 2-7 rounds. So, when they say this, it fits closely with the rather large amount of combat that I've run. Which is why I suspect that the 5 round paradigm is pretty close to the norm.
From a DM's point of view, they certainly are. Unbelievable headaches. It takes forever to stat them up, rounds take an hour to play and the first Disjunction spell makes the DM tear out his hair. Never mind the fact that Mr Lich probably won't use 90% of the material you create for him. So, yeah, if you have to slow the game down to a snails pace and spend huge amounts of time developing the fight beforehand, that would pretty much be the worst choice to make.
