Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="WizarDru" data-source="post: 5522438" data-attributes="member: 151">My experiences, FWIW, entail from Basic to AD&D to GURPS (for 15 years!) to 3E to 4E as my primary systems.  A common thread has existed through all of them:  combats generally take the amount of time they take based as much on the players as the options available.In A&D, there apparently were tons of options.  I say 'apparently' because my groups never used many of these rules that apparently were in the game.  That melee facing stuff listed up on page 2/3?  I vaguely remember seeing it somewhere (the DMG, maybe?) but we never did that.  We still enjoyed rich tactical options, though...because there were few rules we did use, the DMs usually improvised when necessary.  Sure, you straight up stabbed a dude in every edition and certainly in Basic and AD&D...but you also sometimes tried to trip him, knock his sword away or activate the pearl that turned you into a half-demon and dived head-first onto the back of a rampaging purple worm and drove your bloodthirsty intelligent sword under it's plating in hopes of killing it....or maybe that last one was just me.  Moving on.My point is that IME, the length of combats was at least partially dictated by circumstances of the combat, player knowledge of the rules and then finally rules complexity, but that increased specifically detailed tactical options did not, in and off themselves, necessarily breed longer or slower combats.The longest combat I've ever played in my entire gaming life was the climactic battle at the end of the Forge of Fury.  The party entered the dragon's lair and then proceeded to engage him...FOR EIGHT HOURS.  It was our first dragon combat under 3E (Sunless Citadel's pathetic pet dragon didn't count, IMHO).  Was it long?  No doubt.  But players still remember it as Epic and Engaging and not a little bit Legendary.  It's length had more to do with each person parsing his options Very Very Carefully and checking rules, deciding what to do and discussing how to coordinate with each other.A couple of years later, we ran a combat where the players (now Epic) engaged an entire Githyanki Invasion Force numbering in the hundreds, including astral marauders, gish, dragon knights and undead abominations sent by Vlakith herself...and it only took about two and half hours.  Because by that time we'd been playing 3E for nearly five years and everyone was very comfortable with the rules and their roles, despite having far more tactical options in their hands.This was true for my groups and I for AD&D and 3E, it was true for us for GURPS and it remains true for 4E.  Increased options can certainly slow a game down, especially if a player is unfamiliar with the rules or choices...but it isn't necessarily a given or a 1:1 correlation, IMHO.</blockquote>

Verification