D&D General What flavor of D&D has the fastest combat?

[Nightfly]

My least favorite thing about D&D is waiting half an hour for my turn to come around in combat.

So which flavor/branch of D&D has the quickest combat, in your experience? I assume it's some varierty of OSR, but please enlighten me.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I think the 5e version of Doctor Who (Doctor and Daleks) use a completely revamped combat sequence to make it more cinematic. I think it could work well if revamped.

Given, I havent read the game, so someone with better experience could explain it better than I do.

(IIRC @overgeeked was the one with a positive experience of the system)

Any other ''D&Ds'' with a simple action economy (as mentioned, oldish edition and OSR, more often than not) have pretty short combat sequence where the outcome is rapidly known.

 

[Cruentus]

For me, Basic/Old School Essentials - lower HP all around (fighters get d8 HD), and each character gets 1 action per combat round. And since you’re not having to constantly push the buttons and pull the levers of your character sheet to figure out what to do, turns go quick. Coupled with monster hitpoints also being lower (ancient red dragon has max 88hp), yeah, it’s quicker.

 

[Sacrosanct]

B/X is the fastest, and I don’t think it’s much of a contest. Much fewer abilities or powers to worry about. Anything not an attack is a flat ability check pretty much.

 

[Oofta]

B/X is great for fast combat. Roll for initiative, all the PCs die, roll up new characters. As a bonus, you never get to high levels where combat tends to bog down. Easy peasy!

Actually I find that 5E (and most versions of the game for that matter) run fairly quickly at lower levels, especially if you stick to core rules. If you're not playing high levels and still waiting half an hour for your turn? The issue may be the players (analysis paralysis or simply too many players), not the system. Of course if you have a barebones system like B/X, that may fix things as well.

 

[cbwjm]

Anything pre-3e, or their clones. Once 3e have monsters Con scores and more hp, combat started to take longer. Before 3e, your fighters would be quite likely to drop an orc in a single hit, a 5th level wizard casting fireball had a good chance to roast a band of ogres, and a 3rd thing I can't think of at the moment.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

Any edition where 1) the players know their character's abilities and are paying attention enough to be ready on their turn and 2) the DM has a sense of the motivations of the enemies so not every fight becomes an automatic "fight to the death"?

 

[overgeeked]

My least favorite thing about D&D is waiting half an hour for my turn to come around in combat.

So which flavor/branch of D&D has the quickest combat, in your experience? I assume it's some varierty of OSR, but please enlighten me.

Moldvay and Cook B/X or Old-School Essentials are going to be some of the fastest, if not the fastest around. Each other edition of D&D adds boatloads of complexity to the characters and piles of hit points, which adds time to resolving combat. With the exception of 5E, which is faster to resolve than 3X or 4E, but no where near as fast as 1E or 2E...or B/X.

 

[Nightfly]

Thanks for all the replies. Not surprised that everyone is saying Basic. I remember my games back then going very quickly, but then again, we were 14.

Follow up question: any preferences among the various OSR games on this front? Is Shadowdark (for example) faster/slower/same as Basic?

 

[aco175]

Fastest- B/X, 1e, even 2e. Funest, not those from the player side of things. If the game takes away all options except a basic attack, you get only one option and fast play. 3e likely went too far with all the buffs and ACs of 40+. 4e with the powers were cool from a player side, but led to players looking for the best option each attack and made things slow. Not sure if 5e is a good combo between everything.