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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5610072" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.</blockquote>