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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Woas" data-source="post: 3364416" data-attributes="member: 16317">My problem with the concept of time isn't just with dungeons. I have a problem with in-game time of combat just in general whether it be in a dungeon or on a city street. But it does heavily relate to time in dungeons.Sometimes I feel that 6-second base is just too fast. The most recent example of this was about six game sessions back the adventuring party was involved with some ship-to-ship combat. Now, the combat went smooth and took us a usual amount of time to play through it which was fine. But after 45-minutes or so (this is how long it took to run the combat) when the battle was over I was recapping the events and then one of the guys at the table asks the $6,000,000,000.00 question, "So, how long did all of that take in game?". And when I thought about it... and entire combat on sea where two dozen plus people were jumping across ropes, boarding ships, slaying and casting spells took six rounds. Six rounds! Thats 36 seconds! I mean, if you were to somehow render that combat on a computer with 3d models in real-time, the sails would nearly look frozen in space as there wasn't even enough time for the wind to move much. All the action would look like it was on fastfoward and flash infront of you eyes and be over with before you knew it.Evne with the understanding that perhaps when an adventurer attacks an opponent, it isn't like that character is just making one swing with their weapon: but could represent multiple attacks to add to the flare/story-telling (in effect, not having any in game result. Just window dressing to flower up the combat). But still, in the end, a round is six seconds no matter how much you dress it up.And here is where I believe a major part of the problem of time spent in dungeons is derived from. Say you had about 15 encounters for one floor of a dungeon prepaired. Five of those ten are actually traps. So that is ten combats that we can assume are going to be "fair" (around the correct EL and what not for the party) with no crazy wild card encounters that are too hard or too easy.Now for my gaming group that ship combat I described above isn't that atypical. Combats for us can put in a good six-ten rounds and by then a clear victor (either the party is going to be retreating by then, or the opponents have been all but beaten) is present. So taking the average of eight, that means on average the party is engaged in combat for 48 seconds game time. So ten 48-second encounters is going to occupy on average an astronomical six or seven minutes of the characters in-game life. When the characters have 12-16 hours in a day to be active, those seven minutes isn't going to cut it.Add on the top of that, assuming correct ELs and CRs for those encounters and the party should have expended a majority of their "resources" by the fifth or sixth encounter anyway! So now we're down to only six 48-second encounters before the party has to completely re-charge. So that by the time the party hits this point where they will need to recharge, the in game time has only progressed maybe an hour if you add in time spent searching for traps and treasure around the dungeon. Perhaps less? But never a "good days worth" of adventuring.Obviously there are ways the alter this with changing EL/CRs for the encounters but you walk a fine line with trying to keep everything equal. If you lower average difficulty you also tend to lower the # of rounds it takes for that combat to be done and over with. If you try to increase the # of oppoenets per encounter to make it longer overall, then your also raising the EL/CR.</blockquote>

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