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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5164214" data-attributes="member: 4937">Could be your group.  Could also be the particular mix of challenges you are using.In my experience, combat is grindy primarily against creatures that have straight foward attacks, high hit points, and comparitively low chances to hit.  Creatures with really high AC can also be a problem, especially if the party doesn't have access to alot of magic.An example might be a stock tyrannasaurus zombie.  If you apply the zombie template to a tyrannasuarus, you end up with a monster with relatively low CR but nearly 300 hit points.  In a straight up fight, it might be a long time before the creature is whittled down.  By comparison, spell-casting creatures with the same CR might only have 30 or 40 hit points and would probably go down in a hurry in a straight up fight.The solution here is IMO to try hard not to design the encounter in a way that plays against the strength of the monster.  For the tyrannid zombie, try to design a way for the players to short cut the encounter by luring the zombie into a tarpit, on a bridge that collapses, or what not.  In this way, the fight isn't about the grind, but using tactics to take advantage of the monsters stupidity.  For the spellcaster, again, try to design the encounter such that a straight up fight is difficult to achieve do to the tactical complexity of the terrain.  A spellcaster with low hit points begs for an encounter with some combination of cover, concealment, moving terrain (conveyer belts, turning gears, rapids, tides, waves, falling trees, forest fire, traps, sliding doors, etc.), and difficulty moving (difficult terrain, gaps requiring balance, climb, jump checks to cross).  The other problem is you might be dealing with a group without enough power gamers.  If your group is role play heavy and doesn't feature characters with alot of combat optimization, then 3.5 in particular is problimatic at high levels because the 3.0 monsters were upgraded on the assumption of some degree of combat optimization.  If your party of 7th level characters aren't doing 40-50 damage per round against low AC targets, you might want to consider that for whatever reason you are lagging behind the power level expected for your PC's character level.  In that case, its up to you as a DM to compensate by reducing the CR of challenges that your party faces down to a level appropriate for what your PC's can actually handle in the time frame you want.  There is nothing inappropriate about having a campaign where the assumed  power level is different than the default.As for jumping to another system, that might in fact shorten combats depending on the system, though the hit points themselves aren't really in my opinion a strong factor in whether combat plays quickly or slowly.  However, if the problem is encounter design or lack of system mastery by your players (deliberate or otherwise), it is certainly no gaurantee that jumping to a different system will fix the problem.</blockquote>

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