Is This How it is Supposed to Be?

[S'mon]

My 7-player Forgotten Realms paragon-tier group (currently 12th level) is pretty slow; a ca 6 round combat can take 3 hours, or 30 minutes per round. Roughly 4 minutes per player, inc GM.
What's 'supposed' to happen in 4e is that the standard 5 player group has 5-round 1-hour combats, or 12 minutes per round. Roughly 2 minutes per player, inc GM. I find that the Heroic Tier tends to be close to that - eg my Punjar group of 6 players just hit 4th level; they can do 2-3 fights in 3 hours. But combat tends to slow down at higher level, and players who (a) start at high level (b) don't know their characters (c) don't know the rules, all slow things down.

 

[Weather Report]

Just to chime in with halving monster HPs really helps.

I have also house-ruled Encounter powers to be Recharge, and Daily powers to be Encounter.

And removed the 1/2 level bonus and assumed +X magic item (inherent bonus) math.

 

[delericho]

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).

The last time I ran 4e, we started "Tomb of Horrors" with what should have been a quick scene-setting fight - something to show the PCs that "something's not right here". Unfortunately, that fight then took 2.5 hours out of our 3 hour session*. However, the reason that fight took so long was not that each round took a long time, but rather that the combat required a huge number of rounds to get through.

(Indeed, I disagree with Morrus that 4e rounds are the longest they've ever been. IME, high-level 3e takes considerably longer to get through a single round, especially when the dispels start flying. But a 3e combat typically takes a 3-4 such rounds, where 4e tends to take many times that.)

*FWIW, that's what finally convinced me 4e was just not for me - if a single combat takes that long, and with one 3-hour session ever 2 weeks, I simply couldn't use the system to tell the stories I would have wanted to tell. One combat per two weeks would simply kill any hope of pacing the story well. Obviously, for a great many people, Their Mileage Varied.

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

Probably not. My guess would instead be that you're doing a lot of little things rather inefficiently. 4e has a lot of small and short-term modifiers flying around. If you can get these organised, the game will flow massively better. Without that, you're likely to spend a lot of time just counting things up, going back because you've just remembered a recharge, or ongoing damage, or a save...

Or, of course, you could consider switching to a 5e playtest instead. According to the reports, that system plays much faster.

 

[S'mon]

Halving monster hp reduces the number of combat rounds and makes monsters drop quicker. This can increase the sense of progress. However it does not make combat rounds take less time.
I halve monster hp in my Loudwater campaign. My experience is that this actually increases the duration of each combat round because in order to maintain threat level I need to use more monsters and more elites. Elites especially tend to be more complicated and suck up time. So the amount of time spent on the GM's turns increases, especially early on.
I would say combat rounds go fastest when the GM uses a mix of full hp standard monsters and minions. Getting rid of 'no damage on a miss' helps a lot with minions too - a player rolling 20 attacks vs 20 minions can take a very long time; effects that kill minions even on a miss are great for speeding things up by avoiding all that rolling. I give my minions a Level+2 damage threshold, half that to bloody, can be killed on a miss - this both increases versimilitude, and often lets me use minions in place of standard monsters, so tends to speed things up IME.

 

[S'mon]

*FWIW, that's what finally convinced me 4e was just not for me - if a single combat takes that long, and with one 3-hour session ever 2 weeks, I simply couldn't use the system to tell the stories I would have wanted to tell. One combat per two weeks would simply kill any hope of pacing the story well. Obviously, for a great many people, Their Mileage Varied.

My Loudwater paragon tier campaign has three-hour sessions every two weeks, and it's been a long time* since we did more than one fight in a session (and I halve monster hp). Obviously this makes old-school dungeon-crawling impossible. Instead, each fight is normally a big set-piece battle. Say the PCs are delving into an evil temple, as happened twice recently - that's probably two fights over two weeks, one at the entrance and one inside.

*I looked it up - Session 32, December 2012, there were two fights with demons and undead. Before that session 30 had two fights, with an ettin then with a squad of dragonborn. We just had Session 41 last Monday, and every session 33-41 has had exactly one fight.

 

[Quickleaf]

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.

How many players are in your group? Did you start playing this 4e campaign at level 1 or at level 15?

My group also suffers from excessively long player turns in 4e; as I understand it most 4e groups have 2-3 minute long players turns, but my group was suffering from turns approaching 8 minutes long. In fact, I recently posted about this over here: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?336080-8-minutes-turn-is-that-very-slow-slow-average. Some things that folks suggested I look out for...

Players trying to squeeze maximum advantage out of every turn
Players forgetting conditional modifiers (usually to damage)
Players indecisive because they're unfamiliar with rules
Character builds with excessive "out of turn" abilities
Poor methods for tracking conditions, zones, etc.
Encounters with higher-leveled monsters, too many soldiers, or not enough threat

 

[Dashiellx]

Thanks for all the responses. Most encounters seem to take 2 - 3 hours. I wasn't exaggerating when i said we've had rounds that lasted an hour. That is the extreme most rounds seem to take 20 minutes for four players and a GM. I really think it is due to players looking for max advantage.

I like the idea of a timer for turns and will perhaps suggest it.

I was considering looking at Pathfinder, but will check out the 5e playtest too.

Thanks again.

 

[Weather Report]

Thanks for all the responses. Most encounters seem to take 2 - 3 hours. I wasn't exaggerating when i said we've had rounds that lasted an hour. That is the extreme most rounds seem to take 20 minutes for four players and a GM. I really think it is due to players looking for max advantage.

I like the idea of a timer for turns and will perhaps suggest it.

I was considering looking at Pathfinder, but will check out the 5e playtest too.

Thanks again.

And Basic, 1st and 2nd Ed are also options, of course.

 

[MrBauxite]

We staggered through 30 levels of 4e (basically the entire 9 books across 3 tiers Wizards produced). It took us... 3 years of weekly games to get that far? I found combat to be a real struggle in 4e - don't get me wrong I love having options as a played (and a DM) but the number crunching involved felt like hard work and needing to use tactical maps EVERY combat (else people would find it difficult to use their powers) was too time consuming. DnD next playtest looks to have paired this down a great deal though so fingers crossed!

 

[TerraDave]

15th level will be tricky in any of the games mentioned.

Levels 3-8 should be fine.

From my own exp 4E plays best at level 15, but no, not that speedy. Player familiarity with their powers is key, and 4E is easier to GM.