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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7218573" data-attributes="member: 996">I could run from a set of books that had been put through a shredder and find it manageable, so I can't disagree.   I didn't feel like saying yes (like I said, I was in a mood last night), so I went with "No, but by 'no' I mean, 'yes but moreso.'"  Sorry about that.  Imbalance is more likely to mean shorter combats than longer ones, rather than balance implying 'longer combat' - though I guess that's just a matter of what you consider the base-line.  3e is an example - a caster with optimized DCs on SoDs would turn the game into rocket tag, so might a sufficiently optimized charge build, if it could do enough damage to just drop something outright.  Prettymuch any imbalance that gives a large enough offensive advantage to one side will shorten the combat, potentially drastically.  OTOH, an imbalance in the other direction, and unbreachable defense, for instance, could theoretically lead to a longer combat, but only if that side were 'balanced' (ha!) by having very weak offense, and if the DM punished them for it by forcing them to slowly paper-cut their foes to death in detail when there was no chance of said foes doing anything, instead of hand-waving the foregone conclusion.  Since D&D has often seemed to break in the direction of offense, and because the opposite might often get cut short and hand-waved as a boring foregone conclusion with no consequences, I think imbalanced combats would tend to be short.  Of course, that's not the same thing as 'imbalanced' (inconsistent difficulty encounter guidelines) those might also result in short combats if they tilt one way, it just won't be as obvious, when the DM creates the encounter, which way it's going to go.  So, yeah, a 'balanced' combat might be longer, because it's not shorter than intended, and because it might be interesting and/or in doubt longer, or at least have consequences (resource expenditure et al) to determine in playing it out to the end.</blockquote>

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