Ideally, How Many Battles?

[Shemeska]

Holy crap, your game sounds awesome.

Spoiler

The cell was small and windowless, dirty from careless neglect and the slow accumulation of dust and dirt from passing boots in the adjacent hallway and the occasional drip of water from the ceiling stones. But not much more when that sole occupant had never eaten or drank a drop of water as far as anyone knew. Eventually they'd just stopped bringing her meals, though none of the Bleakers still alive remembered when they'd done so, or even when she'd been incarcerated in the Irretrievably and Criminally Insane Ward of Sigil's Gatehouse. Truth be told, they were frightened of her.

She was one of our own they were told. A former Factol of the Bleak Cabal, and like all of them she went insane, slipping into the tragic grasp of the Grim Retreat and then into the arms of her comrades who forced her into a cell with the promise of recovery or death - one or the other. Neither came.

Oh they tried to kill her. Many times. It didn't work and eventually they stopped trying. But they didn't like to approach her cell. They didn't care for the whispers that seemed to echo all around them, within the cell and inside of their own heads when they saw her, or just her luminous eyes, solid milky white and absent pupils, or the magnetic and twisting halo of psionic lines of force that came and went from her head like the pulsing fields of a dying star. She scared the hell out of them.

The eldest occupant of the Gatehouse looked up from within her cell, former Factol Tollysalmon and smiled as the Bleakers dragged one of her successors up the stairs and towards a cell of his own. The time for Factol Esmus had arrived, just as she had predicted.

"Imagine if you like," she whispered in githyanki. "Imagine being a prisoner inside of your own shell of a soul. The slate clean and bereft of your memory and power, you go about life and make your way in the world, but your lucidity and everything you were is still there, conscious and screaming to be back in control every few decades or centuries that you gain a moment of true lucidity. You realize what happened. You realize what went wrong. You realize just how much the Chromatic Queen STOLE!"

She smiled and the white lines of forced erupted from her head and danced upon the cell-door bars, eliciting audible crackles and snarles of sizzling electric sparks.

"And then imagine a few hundred thousand years of that. Imagine having the time to plan everything but no capacity to force it into play while all the while being watched from the walls by an omnipresent Bladed Gaze..."

A decade passed and another prisoner was hurled into a cell. A babbling man who claimed to be the Factol of the Fated. Of course they already had a Factol, so obviously the man was insane. But he had that same look in his eyes. That same puissant rage of having been wronged and left with the knowledge to take revenge but no means to enact it. Gifad. Rowan Darkwood. The Ancient Wizard of the Labyrinth Gem. Three shades of the same broken man.

Gith the Unshackler and ex-Factol Tollysalmon. The same.

The githyanki looked up and snarled, dragging claw-like nails across the stones she sat upon. For the first time in hundreds of millennia her eyes focused with a mental clarity she'd been denied.

"I remember."

 

[the Jester]

It depends on what the pcs are doing, but I'd say an average game in a combat-focused part of the campaign (e.g. a dungeon) I'd like 6 or 7 combats. But I'm agreeing with some other people here that not every session needs any combat at all.

 

[questing gm]

3-5 a session

I know it sounds arbitrary but it feels like a good number.

*looks at poll choices and can't make up his mind*

 

[Silvercat Moonpaw]

I chose "1 or fewer" because I don't like fights to become what the story revolves around. My preferred spacing is 1-2 fights per adventure. That's one fight sequence for just action's sake or a boss fight, and then one extra in case you need to do both or two of the same. Anything else feels like the whole thing is getting bogged-down in pointless fight sequences.

 

[Steel_Wind]

Oh, I don't think so. Obviously, combat is very important to a roleplaying game...I am merely trying to measure that importance. Do you prefer a deep-immersion, story-based game where entire gaming sessions can pass without rolling a single dice? Or do you like button-mashing video-game simulators where monsters pour out at you from spawn points all over the map?

Gee. It's good that the above quote doesn't indicate any particuar bias the questioner might already have!

Again, I think the manner in which you have asked your question is misguided. You should be asking about the time spent per sesssion inquiring as to an expected percentage basis spent of that time a person would spend on combat/encounters vs roleplaying. The suggestion in terms of how many combats per session? is irrelevant when the timing is divorced from reality - especially when it is as divorced from reality as your time estimates suggest in the original post. Because make no mistake - they bear no resemblance to reality.

I guess the real answer is that I want about 50-65% of my game sessions filled with play dealing with encounters - be those arising from battle or skill challenges.

The balance of that time is spent with exploration, skill checks and roleplaying.

If the so-called "perfect" system arose where the encounter was dealt with in as blindingly fast a fashion as you suggest, my guess is that you would suddenly have to fill that time with an increase in the underlying number of combats by a factor of 10.

3.x. Pathfinder and 4E already estimate the amount of time spent on a given tyicpal combat in a manner similar as to what I have previously answered. The expected time spent in combat is reflected in the underlying XP points awarded in 3.xx

We don't have to theorize about this, by the way. We can see PRECISELY how this works in a "blindingly fast RPG combat resolution" mechanic situation by looking at the legth of time spent in combat in a game of Neverwinter Nights 1, especially those that take place on DM moderated Permanent World servers. Because on those servers, there is also a significant amount of story based roleplaying over Skype or Teamspeak.

In those cases, to fill a typical 4 hour game session, the number of combats under 3.0 Rules based encounters had to increase by a factor of ten. That is also why the default rules reduce the number of XP points gained in NWN by a factor of 10.

 

[MichaelSomething]

It's not the quantity, it's the quality. Sometimes you only need one battle while other times it's all about making heads roll.

 

[bagger245]

Before CR system, DMs just ran an amount of combats based on his own discretion. Back then you needed 1million XP to level up at higher levels, but it didn't mean you start go on a genocide for XP.

Now with the amount of encounters needed to level up (13.3 in 3.5e and 8-10 in 4e), it is codified that you must have that much combat just to level up. This also influenced adventure design as you can see from the recent published modules. It seems like there is a need for filler combat just to level up PCs. Older editions did have them in terms of random encounters, but they were short combats and were very insignificant.

Sure in later editions I can just have 1-2 important fights and handwave level the PCs up when I want to, but the game wasn't intended to be that way.

 

[Stormonu]

I think the question is perfectly fine as asked. I'd say I like about 2-3 combats a session on average. That's true whether I'm playing 4, 6 or even 8 hours or more. Simply the longer the session, the bigger the fight, and vice-versa.

 

[Blackbrrd]

3-5 a session

I know it sounds arbitrary but it feels like a good number.

*looks at poll choices and can't make up his mind*

I am with you on that one. I would have selected 3-4, but since that wasn't a choice I went for 2-3.

3 is probably the best number, more than that and it feels more like a tactical game and less like a role-playing game.

If you had asked how many scenes/encounters I would like - well, then my answer would be 5-6, maybe even 7-8.

I have recently been DM-ing WotBS in 4e and it has a nice mix of encounters, and I am beginning to like the style. You have problems to solve that can be solved via combat, skill challenges or.. well any other method the players go for.

 

[Celebrim]

The question is not answerable as asked.

The session before last was planned to have 4-5 combats. We ended up doing 3, which was IMO not quite enough. The session I just ran had 1 combat, which was about right.

As a player, I've been 4-5 sessions in a row without getting into a combat, and that was about right. I've also been in 8-10 combats in a single session, and that was also about right. I've been in combats that resolved in under a minute and that was appropriate, and I've been in a combat that took nearly 48 hours of solid gaming to resolve and that was perfectly appropriate as well.

I reject the entire ideal that there is an ideal number of combats per session, or per adventure, or even per campaign. I further reject the notion that that there is a perfect length of time in which a combat finishes. And since I reject that such an ideal even exists, I further reject that a game system ought to be designed with the goal of attaining some idealized pace of combat. All those things are extraneous and miss the point.

You can't define proper pacing, or proper speed of play, or any of those things strictly in terms of sessions. The proper pacing of play and the proper speed of play are rightly matters that have to do with story investment, influence on the narrative, and the richness of experienced provided by the scene. The pacing in play should be part of the stagecraft of the DM, not an artifact of design save where the design facilitates good stagecraft. It's not merely that its an impossible magical feat, but its not even necessarily a desirable feat even in its magicalness.