Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 8591221" data-attributes="member: 50987">I think it's a matter of less-is-more.  I'll try to explain.In BECM, you didn't have multiple types of actions to resolve on your turn, so there was less pressure to "find something to do" with your Action, and Movement, and Bonus Action, etc., on every turn.  The way that 5E is written, players often feel like they are wasting their action economy if they don't do something with each of their different action types on each of their turns of every battle.  So the game lags while the Fighter tries to find something to do "as a Bonus action."And there wasn't hundreds of spells, feats, class options, etc., to pore over, to find the perfect thing for this exact occasion.  There were only a handful of classes and race options (and often, they were the same thing!), and class/race features were succinct and few in number.  There were only a few dozen spells in the whole game, and the descriptions for them were brief and concise.  And so on.  This meant there was much less 'decision paralysis' from round to round, where players had to weigh dozens of options carefully on their turn and try to pick the best one, only to get frustrated and cast Eldritch Blast again, for the eighth time.There was no battle mat.  You could use one for visual reference, sure, but none of the rules cared about whom was flanking whom, or how many "squares" an orc could move, or who had reach, or whether or not a crossbow had enough range.  Using a battle mat has easily doubled, maybe even tripled, the amount of time it takes to resolve combat, as everyone finagles their tokens around trying to get the "perfect angle" on every action.Same on the DM side...the DM didn't need to track nearly as many different numbers, token positions, lighting conditions, and types of actions for every creature in the scene.  I remember just needing to track AC, HP, and initiative...everything else was in a table, on my DM screen.I could go on, but I think I've answered your question.  The reason that BECM ran so much faster for me than all other rules sets that I've tried, is because there wasn't as much stuff for me to run.  I'm not saying the tradeoff isn't worth it--I love having lots of spells and class features--but it all came with a price.  And for me, that price was really long, really boring combat scenes.  Pathfinder was the worst offender in this department, it wasn't uncommon to have a single combat scene eat up an entire 4-hour gaming session.  5E is faster, about 30 minutes or so, but that's still about twice as long as I would like.  But I can cope.</blockquote>

Verification