D&D 5E The Healing Spirit Nerf=Complete Overkill

[auburn2]

3. There is no reason to short rest. Or, rather, there is no reward for not long resting and playing through more encounters in a day. Since the game still has attrition elements like long rests not recovering all hit dice, the cost of a short rest is often not a lot lower than the cost of a long rest. Since a long rest does everything a short rest does and more, the only reason you ever really need to short rest is when you're under time pressure, which simply isn't appropriate for every adventuring day in every campaign. Worse, if your campaign has real time pressure, then you often run into situations where the players can't short rest, either!

I believe you are only allowed 1 long rest per 24 hours, so you would have to essentially skip an entire day to trade a short rest for a long rest. In most campaigns there are going to be ramifications to that.

You might expect to hide out in the pirates bedroom for an hour, but you are not going to hide out there for 19 hours. Lemunds hut is not really viable in the middle of a enemy camp. You can leave and come back but that presents all sorts of problems - another group goes in and steals your loot, the baddies find out someone came in through a secret entrance and now guard it, the kidnappers realize they have been found and split town with the princess.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Ok maybe I am missing something here, but it takes your group 2 hours to roll initiative? If it is minutes, what are they doing for the first 8 minutes, 50 seconds.

I'd say that Critical Role would be far less popular if it took them 2 hours to roll initiative in slow motion . That's minutes. The first 8 minutes, 50 seconds are sponsor thanks, recap of the last episode. The 2-rounds fight lasts from 8 minutes 50 seconds to 36 minutes 50 seconds (so 28 minutes overall), which is nearly 15 minutes per round, which is closer to what I usually see at my table.

 

[guachi]

That seems like an awful long time for a fight.

Longest fights in 5e lasted four hours. One involved 5 PCs, 5 NPCs (each PC ran one NPC) and an attack by about 30-40 goblins that were assaulting a homestead throughout the night and next morning.

Next campaign, which was sadly cut short, I told the players I wanted faster combat to see if it made the game more fun overall. An eight round combat vs. 3 zombies took about five minutes. That last zombie kept making its save. The fast combat made the zombie repeatedly making its save more funny than irritating.

 

[Charlaquin]

What strikes me with the idea that a session could conclude with a long rest is that PC would expect to level every other session at most. I am not sure it is, also, the behaviour observed when people are using story award XP, for example.

I watched an interview with Mike Mearls at one point where he was asked if there were any parts of the game players ended up running very differently than they had expected when designing it. He answered that people don’t let their players level up fast enough, that they should really be leveling about every other session. Which as you observed here, the math does support if you follow the XP per adventuring day guidelines.

Finally, when I read that the idea was to have 10-minutes fight, so 6-8 encounters takes less than half of a 4h session... I am envious of the other players. It usually takes a few minutes to describe the scene of the fight, establish positions and get ready to run the fight... Based on a 3 round average, that's 2 minutes per round for 3-5 PCs and the DM running the monsters. As it often recommanded to avoid solo encounter because of the action economy, even as a prepared DM with a pre-planned strategy for monsters, I am not sure how can each action be resolved with a few seconds per character per round, especially when the fight is designed to encourage tactical thinking. Are combat supposed to be shorter (in rounds and descriptions) than what I usually run? I am not a critical role watcher, but I checked a fight on their show (the midnight chase) that starts with a fight going on... Their experience is more typical of what happens at my table.

From 8:50 to 10:50 they basically roll initiative.
From 10:50 to 12:25, two zombies move.
From 12:25 to 26:05, the PCs act.
From 26:05 to 36:50, that's the second round and consequences of the fight.
That's roughly half an hour where 6 level 2 PCs fight 2 zombies... Not exactly a high level fight and still, it's quite long to play. I'd worry that a 6 to 8 fights would take all the session...

So, there are a few things going on here that make Critical Role’s combats take longer. The obvious one is that they have 6 players, so naturally each round is going to take longer than it would with the expected 4 player party. Another is that they use a grid and minis, which make combat more complex and takes longer to execute than TotM. The Critical Role cast is a lot more expressive with their descriptions than I think most players are, especially Matt Mercer. I believe Matt also asks that his players narrate the material and somatic components of their spells. I suspect he also uses custom monsters, which are often more complex than your typical 5e monster. And, he allows a fair bit of cross-talk during combat. Oh, and his method of rolling initiative is very slow.

I definitely think the 10-minute combat is atypical in 5e. There were a lot of factors in the playtest that made combat run much faster than I think is normal. 15-20 minutes is probably a more reasonable expectation for very simple combats against a small handful of monsters at most. For more complex combats that involve factors like grid and minis, environmental obstacles, larger numbers of enemies, or more complex enemies, 20-25 minutes is probably about right. For big setpieces (which is more the category I feel like the majority of Critical Role combats fall under), over 25 minutes makes sense.

 

[Iry]

So, there are a few things going on here that make Critical Role’s combats take longer. The obvious one is that they have 6 players, so naturally each round is going to take longer than it would with the expected 4 player party. Another is that they use a grid and minis, which make combat more complex and takes longer to execute than TotM. The Critical Role cast is a lot more expressive with their descriptions than I think most players are, especially Matt Mercer. I believe Matt also asks that his players narrate the material and somatic components of their spells. I suspect he also uses custom monsters, which are often more complex than your typical 5e monster. And, he allows a fair bit of cross-talk during combat. Oh, and his method of rolling initiative is very slow.

It's an interesting point that Matt tends to reduce the amount of narration when he runs combat. It doesn't vanish entirely, but it can get pretty brief for many fights. He also favors solo fights. There have been many fights (even the most recent ones) that include multiple enemies, but a high percentage of his boss fights are one big-bad versus the entire party. That has the plus side of giving the players far more screen time than a multi-NPC combat.

What really slows down Critical Role combats is analysis paralysis on the part of the players. C1 definitely had a problem with it, but C2 takes analysis paralysis to a whole new level.

 

[tommybahama]

I watched an interview with Mike Mearls at one point where he was asked if there were any parts of the game players ended up running very differently than they had expected when designing it. He answered that people don’t let their players level up fast enough, that they should really be leveling about every other session. Which as you observed here, the math does support if you follow the XP per adventuring day guidelines.

That is like Adventurer's League speed of leveling. Frankly, I would not like that. I would want to be able to test my super powers in many different situations before gaining more super powers.

What really slows down Critical Role combats is analysis paralysis on the part of the players. C1 definitely had a problem with it, but C2 takes analysis paralysis to a whole new level.

Our group never gets analysis paralysis in combat because our DM defaults the player to the dodge action if they take too long on their turn.