Players changing what they want to do on their turn then having to look up another 7th level spell for me to adjicate. Because there are so many options, mastery over all those options is a lot harder; I find that the HP increase actually doesn't matter at all, and that PC damage outpaces the HP bloat, especially if optimized. But players having to scan their spell list of 20+ spells and then decide the best one and then change it due to what the player before them did adds a lot of time. It mirrors low level, just worse due the increased number of options.
I thought it was interesting both you and
@wedgeski call out scanning long spell lists as contributing to longer combat time. It actually sounds like this is two separate issues that when combined become a more noticeable problem...
The first issue is what you say - long spell lists. The second issue is the 5e default initiative sequence rules. I wonder if initiative were structured different, could it reduce the "waiting for spellcaster to choose" & "oh no wait I want to cast a different spell" effect?
And would such a change offer meaningful reduction in the time it takes to run through the combat?
I would first say: we've had long combats throughout the campaign. I haven't noticed the proportion of time taken with combat going dramatically upwards as we climbed to higher levels.
@TheSword mentioned their
17th level group taking 1.5 to 2.5 hours for a significant combat. That's slightly horrifying to me - I'd want to do everything in my power as GM to avoid that (except maybe a campaign ending)! Does that not track with your own high level experience? Or another way to ask the question, have significant combats always been 1.5 to 2.5 hours (or whatever value) regardless of low level or high level?
I see two forces at work. On one side, mechanical complexity tends to combats being longer, true. On the other side, from a campaign design and prep perspective, a 17th-level session looks radically different than a 5th-level session: fewer bump-in-the-road, attrition like encounters, and more of the deliberately designed, set piece encounters with tricky objectives that aren't necessarily "kill the bad guy" (as previously discussed).
This change happens for a couple reasons I can think of. First, resource-drain encounters seem insulting to the players at this level, partly because the encounters-per-day baseline has basically fallen apart by this point in their progression, but also because the PCs have too many tricks, and the players have exponentially more imaginative freedom. Second, any combat encounter at this kind of level can be a knife edge. We're rolling dice, after all. A bad save against a finger of death or a plane shift, and that's all she wrote for that PC, and then potentially the party. I intrinsically dislike the idea of ending a long campaign with an encounter I threw in at a moment's notice. or spent 5 minutes designing. So, that's a potentially interesting DM psychological mechanic at play (something I think is often overlooked when discussing the game).
I admit – due to my lack of experience with high level play – I have a hard time separating "this is what makes a good high level adventure" vs. just "this is what makes a good adventure period." For example, when I'm presenting challenges/obstacles to the players, even with a random encounter (what I think you meant by "bump in the road"), they're always serving double or triple duty – maybe foreshadowing, maybe providing a clue, maybe illuminating some worldbuilding, maybe hooking a specific PC, maybe draining resources too. So that line between
this is just good practice VS
this is a change to make in your approach to high level... is muddy for me.
I notice when you mention the knife's edge swinginess of high level play, you cited two spells. I wonder, in your experience, is the swinginess of high level MAINLY associated with specific save-or-suck spells? (i.e. and not other PC or monster features) Could your group enjoy high-level without those save-or-suck spells being implemented in such a swingy way? Or is it precisely that swinginess that they enjoy?
But back to your question, the largest factor at our table is decision paralysis, on both sides of the screen. Lots of reasons for this:
- So many spells! As I mentioned, wish is a big contributor to this.
If
wish could not emulate an existing spell, would that help address this issue? Or is that just a pebble in the oceanic problem of "so many spells"? And is it a problem during character level up OR is it a problem during play scanning their spell list like
@Shardstone mentioned?
- When players know they're facing Legendary Resistance, they want to strategise more thoroughly. Lots of discussion. I know it's in my gift to curtail this stuff, but if the players are enjoying themselves, I don't feel inclined to. The only rule for how long an encounter should take is when it stops being fun.
Sorry for bombarding you with questions. Are you specifically saying that the
Legendary Resistances mechanic triggers your players to strategize more intently/slowly in order to push through the monster's auto-saving throws? Or are you saying more generally when they know they're facing a boss/legendary monster – the thing they've been saving their powers up for – they then strategize to optimize their effectiveness more (irrespective of it actually having Legendary Resistances)?
What I'm driving at – does the
Legendary Resistances mechanic become (more) problematic at high level by contributing to longer combat times due to an "add on" effect of triggering player careful/slow strategizing?
- High cost of failure. A single wrong move can disadvantage the whole party. No-one wants to be the one that caused the TPK (especially of a long-running campaign). Even experienced players start couching their actions in terms of a questions, not statements.
I'm curious is this basically restating the "spells that save-or-suck" problem"? Or is there more to the High Cost of Failure that's unique or more pronounced at high-level? For example, are you talking about a specific experience with the stunned condition being more common among higher tier monsters?
What I'm driving at – How much of this "excessive risk aversion at high level" is normal emotional attachment after playing with a group for a while? Versus how much is a construct of 5e's mechanics?