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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Futurity" data-source="post: 5140386" data-attributes="member: 10738">In my experience, minions don't tend to increase combat length, and are a good way of shortening it, instead. Elites and solos, however, are a surefire way to prolong the length of combat, to the point where I am very careful in when and how I employ them. Except for a couple solo boss fights, I have not to date had a combat last 15 turns. I think I've had a few get close to 10 turns in particularly large conflicts, but most seem to take 3-6 turns at the most. On the other hand, I run campaigns that offer more opportunities for short and extended rests between encounters (storyline events are spaced out more, due to pacing; fast-paced multi-encounter events with no rests between are much rarer) so my players feel more inclined to pop their encounters and dailies in almost every encounter. If a group is tight on resource management, I could see a lot of power-hoarding in anticipation of bigger things to come, and that could slow encounters down.EDIT: Ah, forgot to mention my solo experience. I've run a few one-on-one games. They tend to go more quickly (with only one player) but you want to budget carefully to avoid an unexpected death....favor easy to average encounters and make tougher encounters (EL+1 or more) very, very rare or make sure the soloing PC has companion characters to assist.My wife ran a solo game for me; I played a wizard (level 1) and in the course of the game she threw one combat encounter in with a kobold (skirmisher type iirc). It was a fun and even fight; two kobolds might have been my death, though. She also ran it sans map/minis, incidentally, and that method works rather well in one-on-one games with very few combatants involved.Minions in solo scenarios are tougher. Four decrepit skeletons, for example, can deliver 16 points of damage to a 1st level character if they all get lucky and hit in one round....two or three rounds of that and you have a dead character, should he then get unlucky and fail to polish them off.</blockquote>

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