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Message: <blockquote data-quote="wedgeski" data-source="post: 9353787" data-attributes="member: 16212">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.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).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:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">So many spells! As I mentioned, wish is a big contributor to this.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">This also affects the DM. Your bad guy has a few rounds to make an impact/deliver its fun quotient into the encounter. Complex foes with spell-like abilities often have six good moves and one great one. You're always searching for the great one. Prep mitigates this.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">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.</li> </ul>There's also a bit of rules lawyering, and the occasional rollback when someone realises their action played out incorrectly. We have table rules in place to curtail this, but again, at such high levels, it can happen, and we wouldn't want a TPK based on a rules mistake.</blockquote>

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