JRRNeiklot
First Post
In my experience it would be more like this:
Dave: Fireball, 28 damage.
DM: *rolls saves, jots down some numbers* Okay, Leonard.
-
NOW LIVE! Into the Woods--new character species, eerie monsters, and haunting villains to populate the woodlands of your D&D games.
Playing 2e, 3e, and 4e at the same time: Observations
- Thread starter ferratus
- Start date
In my experience it would be more like this:
Dave: Fireball, 28 damage.
DM: *rolls saves, jots down some numbers* Okay, Leonard.
IME challenging, high-level 3.5e combats were usually quite long (taking over an hour to play out), and usually involved waves of opponents and/or monsters with max HPs. Fights that were one-sided (in either direction) were quick. But once the fighters think they need to full attack everything, the rogues need multiple sneak attacks, the wizards and clerics and druids think they need to summon things and/or use quicked spells, the rangers and druids decide they actually need to use their animal companion... then things start taking quite some time.
4e combat tended to drag a bit IME even at low levels, but when I was playing at a tabletop, it was pre-MM3 and with players who were new to 4e (and some of them didn't like it much, which is why we're no longer playing 4e).
2e was a lot faster if memories of college-aged gaming and recent experience with bad retro-clones can be relied on, but high levels just didn't happen in those games.
4e combat tended to drag a bit IME even at low levels, but when I was playing at a tabletop, it was pre-MM3 and with players who were new to 4e (and some of them didn't like it much, which is why we're no longer playing 4e).
2e was a lot faster if memories of college-aged gaming and recent experience with bad retro-clones can be relied on, but high levels just didn't happen in those games.
Raven Crowking
First Post
Not in my experience, which goes back over 30 years. In fact, my experience is exactly the opposite. The GM who pulls punches because he wants the mitigate the result of player choices will not remain a GM for long.
As a point of fact, I have never wanted for players. I have had to decide just how large I wanted a group to get lots of times, but I've never had to worry about how small it might become.
Raven Crowking's Nest: May 2011
[MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION] - With published adventures (where I didn't have to throw away my own prep work), with no ongoing plot, and players who don't mind throwing away months of work developing a character on the single roll of die...
Well, I guess I could run OD&D as written.
But my players generally want to achieve things, and I want to achieve things, and we're just not nihilistic enough to throw away a year long project like that. If someone does, generally their campaign is considered to have come to and end, and someone else is always ready to step into the DM's chair to run their own campaign. Billy wants to run Oriental Adventures, Chuck wants to run Star Wars, Jennifer wants to run WoD, Emmet wants to run In Nomine but no one else wants to etc. etc.
Well, that goes to show the Narrative Path school of GMing has a serious problem with allowing the consequences of player choice to occur without mitigation.
OTOH, even when playing with a group of GMs, I have found that no one wants to end the game just because one PC dies....or even in the event of a TPK. They seem to have invested in the campaign milieu, in a way that goes beyond investment in just one character. Moreover, they seem to be happy about victories that come, not as a result of punches pulled, but as a result of their choices, and their efforts.
YMMV, of course.
RC
Celebrim
Legend
Five of my six current players were complete novices a year ago and are still pretty green. I typically find they are much less of a problem than so called 'experienced' players because they a) don't have any bad habits to begin with, b) are much less likely to be jerks about this sort of thing.
I believe that exchange takes less than a minute, or should. It's also a lot of wasted breathe with people speaking out loud what they were doing like this is something difficult. I know my player's save DC's. They haven't changed since 10 minutes ago. Halfing a number less than 100 takes less than a second of head time. I shouldn't be reporting which minotaurs saved or didn't anyway, much less need to waste time reporting it. The only slow parts of the above exchange is adding up the d6's, which after 20+ years of DMing I can do in just a few seconds if the player can't, and a few seconds to jot down the numbers on my legal pad once I know the results.
It would be more like this:
DM: Ok, 14 go.
PC: I cast fireball on the three minotaurs at the back of the room *starts rolling dice*
DM: Alright *starts rolling saving throws*
PC: 28 damage.
DM: errmmm..... Ok, your fireball catches all three minotaurs in a exploding blossum of orange flames, but though the beasts bellow in pain, they continue their charge - roaring out of the dissipating flames with the heads down and smoking charred skins.
DM: Ok, 10 go.
Granted, it's not always that efficient, but it often is. When it goes well, a straight foward fight like this against three minotaurs is going to be 10-15 minutes of real time. We could get in 6-8 of them in a night depending on what we are doing. More usually, we do 3-4 fights in a night, plus roleplaying and investigation.
Now, I do have long fights in 3e, but they usually involve very complex three dimensional terrain and multiple monsters utilizing that terrain, and running fights and cat and mouse between the two sides. Twelve hellhounds chasing the party across the rooftop of a city, or a fight between a whole shipload of pirates and an army of sahaugin, or a fight between the PC's and warband of goblins in a multilevel cavern complex, or a cat and mouse chase with a high level spellcaster/sniper through a foundry complex can and did take a long time each. But, well, sometimes its worth pulling out that sort of complexity to get an epic feel.
I agree that buffs are the real problem, especially at higher levels. Fortunately, my players are really good about keeping notes about their character's abilities during common buffs that they use. If it gets to be a bigger problem at higher levels, I'll probably insist on buff cards to keep track of things.
Players aren't allowed to debate with each other about positioning or tactics, or to ask advice of the other players. They are allowed to say one IC sentence or so in a round, but any OOC chatter about the situation is frowned upon and anyone attempting lengthy IC directions will be cut off.
This is only a problem if you are gaming with minatures, which is only worth it if these questions are likely to have highly relevant answers - which they usually don't. Whether or not 7 or 8 orcs are caught in the fireball isn't something you should spend more than a second or two of worry on. When in doubt, fudge in the PC's favor and move on to something important. If it's really a repeated problem, cut out a template on paper or bend a wire into shape. If I thought this was slowing down play a lot, I'd make players buy and bring templates before I'd let this sort of thing ruin everyone's game.
Okay, okay, I give. You guys are obviously much more efficient than I am. I cannot imagine a game running with such quick precision that everyone speaks in short hand, and everyone instantly jumps to attention at the sound of their initiative being called. In my experience generally there are serious players and less serious players, and since I'm also balking at having to re-memorize all the spells from 2e after the lighter duties of DMing that 4e allows, I'm probably not serious enough for this efficiency.
However, if you guys are this efficient, then you should be able to get through combats quickly in 4e then. Every spell has a particular effect, and is as simple as attacking a defense, so shouting out "Fireball, 28" should be even easier, because you have a particular square burst, and there is no half-damage.
So my original point should stand that all things being equal, 4e and 3e take the same amount of time.
However, if you guys are this efficient, then you should be able to get through combats quickly in 4e then. Every spell has a particular effect, and is as simple as attacking a defense, so shouting out "Fireball, 28" should be even easier, because you have a particular square burst, and there is no half-damage.
So my original point should stand that all things being equal, 4e and 3e take the same amount of time.
Raven Crowking
First Post
I disagree about dropping the hammer on PCs who use up their resources.
I agree whole-heartedly that 3e and 4e combat take too long.
RC
[MENTION=428]RaveN[/MENTION] -
No, the Narrative Path school of GMing has a serious problem with allowing the consequences of player bad luck. There is nothing about player choice when you are hit with a save or die and the enemy spellcaster won initiative, or a huge spider hit you with a type F poison.
When a 4e wizard tries to use Thunderwave against a phalanx of hobgoblin soldiers... then yeah I kill him. When a player fails a saving throw and dies, there is no player choice there, only bad luck.
But I'll take your larger point that Narrative Path school of DMing does want to see a satisfying conclusion to the story. But it isn't like we're a minority of DM's or anything. Most people do a campaign as a story, rather than simply a sandbox dungeon crawl. Even if the DM is a sandboxer, he probably has a player or two who wants his character to tell a story and have an arc.
I think if a particular edition of D&D cannot support that style of play, it probably isn't the one for me, rather than there being a deficiency in my style of play. I also don't see why there can't be a version of D&D in the mold of 1e or 2e that allows for running narrative path games. 1e after all launched the Dragonlance adventure path, and 2e was the edition that launched all those campaign settings. If old school gaming cannot accomodate Narrative path GMing, then all those campaign settings were a mistake. Heck, maybe even GDQ was a mistake.
No, the Narrative Path school of GMing has a serious problem with allowing the consequences of player bad luck. There is nothing about player choice when you are hit with a save or die and the enemy spellcaster won initiative, or a huge spider hit you with a type F poison.
When a 4e wizard tries to use Thunderwave against a phalanx of hobgoblin soldiers... then yeah I kill him. When a player fails a saving throw and dies, there is no player choice there, only bad luck.
But I'll take your larger point that Narrative Path school of DMing does want to see a satisfying conclusion to the story. But it isn't like we're a minority of DM's or anything. Most people do a campaign as a story, rather than simply a sandbox dungeon crawl. Even if the DM is a sandboxer, he probably has a player or two who wants his character to tell a story and have an arc.
I think if a particular edition of D&D cannot support that style of play, it probably isn't the one for me, rather than there being a deficiency in my style of play. I also don't see why there can't be a version of D&D in the mold of 1e or 2e that allows for running narrative path games. 1e after all launched the Dragonlance adventure path, and 2e was the edition that launched all those campaign settings. If old school gaming cannot accomodate Narrative path GMing, then all those campaign settings were a mistake. Heck, maybe even GDQ was a mistake.
Celebrim
Legend
All things being equal, I agree. That wasn't my point.
And the main thing that makes a 4e fight long and complicated is the same thing that makes 3e fights long and complicated - ever changing arrays of ongoing effects.
However, there are two things that speak in favor of 3e in terms of overall combat speed. First, with all the situational and movement inducing effects in 3e, it's much harder to run minor fights in 4e without the map than in 3e because 4e makes the characters themselves much more complicated terrain. And secondly, fights in 3e are balanced to require fewer turns and in the simple fights this is especially true, so all things being equal - so long as there aren't lots of buffs and such in play - the trivial 3e fights involve much less redundancy than the 4e fights.
Where 4e shines in this comparison is at high levels, because 3e will eventually be seriously bogged down with status/buff/debuff bookkeeping, whereas 4e is designed to play out basically the same at every level.
I guess I am being dense here if the player can't think of the right thing to say then no matter what edition you are playing they are not going to be able to role play it out.
If I had a situation like you described I would ask the player well what do you want him to do. Then I would maybe give advice on how to phrase things or just say okay roll your diplomacy. If they roll well then the guy does what they want if it is in reason.
And by in reason I mean something that the NPC would be willing to do because they don't think it will get them either killed or big trouble. If you want them to do something that might do those things you would be using a bluff not diplomacy.
It should not be rendered moot. Unless there are some very extenuating circumstances going on the DCs for social skills are pretty much set. There is a chart that says what a certain roll is needed to change an NPCs attitude depending on what they start with.
That does not sound like our table. We joke, we putter, we get snacks. But when it is your turn to act, you're generally expected to be ready.
That MAY mean asking the DM some questions about whether something works a particular way or not. If so, hopefully, you've got a Plan B at the ready.
Even so, we have players at the table who have to read every power they have- SLOWLY- every time to figure out what they want to do. And these are guys I've been gaming with since 1998, and had been playing since the days of 2ED.
A lot of factors go into the speed of combat. #1 has got to be familiarity & comfort with the system and your PC's abilities within it. That veteran player who has to sort through his powers each time just doesn't connect to 4Ed the way he did with 2Ed & 3Ed. Its simply not as intuitive to him. Me? The only thing that slows me down is if I get distracted with other players' actions and didn't hear my name called by the DM, telling me its my turn to go. (That happens about 25% of the time.
)#2 is probably design elements like how tough the foes are supposed to be. 1Ed & 2Ed (and even 3Ed) had critters that were supposed to be like fighting wet TP one on one, but if they had good leaders, could take down mid- to high-level parties. See "Tucker's Kobolds." 4Ed critters, but for minions, are considerably tougher one-on-one across the board. 2 kobolds standing shoulder to shoulder nearly took down our party's fighter in our 1st adventure. That would almost never happen in 1Ed or 2Ed, and would be pretty rare in 3Ed as well. Yet it happened another 2 times in that adventure in that 4Ed campaign.
#3 is going to be sheer dumb luck of the dice. Last week, our DM expected us to have a hard time with a particular encounter, and was all set to have it be the last thing of the night. Instead, my Starlock opened a jumbo sized can of whupass (his first crit of the campaign plus another nearly maxed out roll) on the Cave Troll (or whatever it was), more than bloodying it in the first 2 rounds of the combat, before it closed on him. Then I teleported away and let the fighter & Wizard finish it off with a good blow from a flaming axe and a Magic Missile. Despite its reach and fearsome bonuses, the Troll didn't hit a single PC before falling, and round 5 was mopping up. Total time from starting to draw the map and setting up the minis to final coup de grace: @15 minutes.
As a result of a tough encounter turning into a cakewalk, we managed to get another encounter started before we had to end for the evening. (The DM photoed the battlemap so we don't screw things up when next we meet.)
And this happens from time to time. A few weeks ago, it was the fighter who used a burst melee attack while surrounded and critted on nearly every attack roll, including the one on the leader.
Well, some spells DO have half damage or other effects on a miss.
Again, it depends on a lot of things. Personally, I agree that 4Ed combats don't seem to take appreciably longer than 3.X ones, but I know a lot of people on these boards- rabid fans of 4Ed included- have complained about "grind."
Last edited:
