Is This How it is Supposed to Be?

[Dashiellx]

I left gaming about two years after 3e was released--had some kids and needed to stay home with them. Now that they are getting older, I'm getting some of my free time back and have rejoined my old gaming group. We are all 40 - 50 and have been gaming since our teens, between us we probably have over a hundred years gaming. As you can imagine my group has always look for all the angles for advantages.

They have since moved on to 4e. I like how the heroes are heroes, but I also have found the rules to be rather complicated. We are presently playing a campaign with 15 level characters. Taking into account my groups nature, it seems to me that combat takes forever.... One round can take upto an hour (I'm not exaggerating).

Is this everyone's experience or is there something my group my be doing fundamentally wrong?

Thanks.

 

[Dashiellx]

This is my first post, but I lurked on here a long time ago. This site has really changed too!

 

[RangerWickett]

Depends on how many players you have, but yeah, an hour per round of combat is crazy. My group would typically spend 2 hours for a big set-piece combat with 5 PCs, 3 or 4 moderate baddies, and a slew of minions, and that's with complicated terrain.

I dunno, does your group drink at the table? Shoot the breeze between turns? Fiddle with electronic devices? One fair recommendation I've heard is the 15 second shot clock. Once it's your turn, you have 15 seconds to decide where you're moving and what if any attack you're making, and against whom. Then you've got a minute or two to resolve it. But if you don't pick fast enough, you have the option to make a basic attack against the nearest enemy, or else skip your turn.

That said, D&D Next is being playtested now (they're calling it Next, not 5th edition, because they want to try to appeal to all editions of gamers). It's much more rules-lite. Maybe it would appeal to your group.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Welcome to the World of Posting!

As for your group's status: 4e combats can be famously lengthy, but you are a bit of an outlier at one hour per round (hoo boy!). There's a few tricks you can do to speed up combat (I'm sure folks with more intimate knowledge of these than I will be along in a bit), but it looks like the basic reason for your long fights might be the whole "looking for an advantage" thing. It's kind of a feature of the huge amounts of options and synergy 4e presents you with, so you might not ever really get down to a combat fast enough to be considered "quick" using 4e as a chassis.

You might want to try grabbing the 5e playtest and seeing how that runs for you. It's not polished, but it's quite functional, and it is certainly a lot faster in play. I imagine you're exactly the type of player WotC would love to see adopt 5e, and you can help guide the game as you go. But those are all really neat add-ons to what is basically a much faster game engine to begin with.

Either way, enjoy, and good gaming!

 

[Sunseeker]

It really depends on the group. Most of 4e's long combats come from 2 problems.
1: Slog. Mob HP is high, especially at high levels.
2: Unafamiliarity. Players not knowing what ability they want to use, can use or should use.

My solutions to this are, respectivly.
A: cut mob hp in half or more, but increase their damage output by 5/10/15 per tier.
B: let players reuse encounters and dailies by giving them daily/encounter "slots" equal to the number of daily/encounters they have. This lets people use the powers they LIKE. People remember the powers they like better than the ones they don't.

 

[GX.Sigma]

I left gaming about two years after 3e was released--had some kids and needed to stay home with them. Now that they are getting older, I'm getting some of my free time back and have rejoined my old gaming group. We are all 40 - 50 and have been gaming since our teens, between us we probably have over a hundred years gaming. As you can imagine my group has always look for all the angles for advantages.

They have since moved on to 4e. I like how the heroes are heroes, but I also have found the rules to be rather complicated. We are presently playing a campaign with 15 level characters. Taking into account my groups nature, it seems to me that combat takes forever.... One round can take upto an hour (I'm not exaggerating).

Is this everyone's experience or is there something my group my be doing fundamentally wrong?

Thanks.

This is pretty much my experience with 4e--I don't know about one hour per round (do you mean per encounter?), but it is dang slow (encounters for my 4e group are regularly 1-3 hours). Like other posters, I recommend the D&DN playtest. Simpler, quicker, more versatile. The rules get out of the way and let you play however you want.

 

[Morrus]

4E rounds are the longest D&D rounds have ever been (due to endless interrupts and reactions to interrupts and interrupts to reactions to interrupts and then forgetting whose turn it actually was a quarter of an hour ago) but an hour is pretty excessive.

 

[SirAntoine]

Well, it comes down to familiarity with the rules and the limit to number of attacks per round. Individual rounds could last that long in earlier editions too, if you or moreover, your DM, needed to look up enough rules to learn how to do things, but that kind of reading is more common and lengthy in 4E. Every character also gets only one attack, or a maneuver, so less damage is being done, and on top of that, monsters have far more HP than they did in earlier editions (especially pre-3E). The best way to run the game is to put no time limit on anyone, though. It should get faster with learning, but you're the boss at the end of the day if you want to play something else.

 

[billd91]

They have since moved on to 4e. I like how the heroes are heroes, but I also have found the rules to be rather complicated. We are presently playing a campaign with 15 level characters. Taking into account my groups nature, it seems to me that combat takes forever.... One round can take upto an hour (I'm not exaggerating).

Is this everyone's experience or is there something my group my be doing fundamentally wrong?

At 15th level, the unfamiliarity certainly won't be doing you any favors. Your PC will probably have a pretty hefty stack of conditional and otherwise short term powers that will be difficult to manage. But I can't say what you're doing is fundamentally wrong, just maybe you're not the kind of player (or group) that will thrive with 4e. Is anyone else expressing any frustration about the log rounds or combats? If so, you may have to adjust the game for the sake of the table as a whole. There have been a number of threads over the years suggesting ways to speed things up - one of the most significant being dropping monster/NPC hit points a bit so they don't require so much grind.

 

[n00bdragon]

I must ask why you decided to start at level 15. High level D&D is always going to be very complicated. Still, your combats are definitely too long, even for mid paragon 4e. To echo Shidaku I've found that cutting monster HP by half and increasing damage by 1.5-2x can greatly speed things up. Also, don't choose excessive numbers of soldiers or controllers as they naturally make fights go slower. Lastly, players being unfamiliar with their powers can really slow things down. You might get a five minute hourglass and insist that players take their turn within that time.