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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Retreater" data-source="post: 9017493" data-attributes="member: 42040">Well, I do have 6 players. We have a consistent problem of having enough targets for them to be able to take actions on their turn. Individual Initiative is a big problem too, I am thinking. I have 6 players, most of whom have characters who prioritize Dexterity (rightly, because it's clearly the best Ability Score in the game). So they usually have between +3 and +5 to their roll, and usually against opponents who have a +1 or +2 to their Initiative score. So it's typically 4 characters get to act, my one Initiative for a monster group gets to go, the next two characters, and then maybe my last group. And my monsters are dead before their turn gets up. Usually it ends by Player 5 in the Initiative order. And if it doesn't, I might have 2-3 stragglers left alive who can't really threaten anybody. I certainly don't make it to the end of a second round.But yeah, 4 rounds would be great to give people a chance to move into positions, change tactics from ranged to melee, cast spells that have Concentration and duration ("protect the wizard from damage, y'all!"), allow buffs and de-buffs to actually be used. Two round combats are just like Johnny Lawrence in Cobra Kai said "the best defense is more offense" - you just charge in, hack at stuff, and it drops. I liked the D&D Encounters formula, which lasted levels 1-3 per season. When I tried the Paragon tier of play, combats were insufferably long (3+ hours). But at least I know those encounters would be balanced and could be fun if used occasionally, in between roleplaying, skill challenges, etc. 5e - for me - is a crapshoot. I have literally no idea how to make it work. In a way, 5e is worse than when I just had to eyeball the challenge of encounters in 2E, in which there were no encounter building tools at all. Why?1) There are incorrect rules presented in 5e to give us a false sense of balance.2) The adventures are poorly designed so we have no meaningful metrics of how to stage encounters.3) The game is more involved than 2e, so we can't reasonably predict synergies between feats, magic items, subclasses, expanded material from other books - there are too many moving parts to plan encounters without any meaningful tools.</blockquote>

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