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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Harr" data-source="post: 4785830" data-attributes="member: 47190">This is a great thread I feel, because it genuinely addresses real problems that you have in-game. I'll try to answer you as fully as I can.Level 6 going on 7 currently. in our former campaign we got to level 11.4-5 hours a session.Almost without exception 3 per session. I design the adventures that way; 3 combats and a smattering of small roleplaying and trap/puzzle encounters. Always enough to resolve the current quest and storyline within a single session.Combats? 30-40 minutes. I keep track of the time and if we hit the 40 minute mark I cut it short. To be able to do this I almost always design the combat to be resolved on something other than "the other side is all dead". For example, "get out of the church with the figurine intact" type of stuff.Whether the "monsters" actually end up all dead in the end is irrelevant and XP is awarded on basis of success or failure of the objective and nothing else.4, sometimes, 5, sometimes 3.My players never 'roleplay' cause it's silly to them (and to me). What they do enjoy doing is dealing with and solving challenging, puzzling and dramatic situations, and making important choices about the story, and seeing what happens.(Yes I realize the distinction is blurry, but the critical difference is that my players really could not care less about the history, background, personalities, emotions, insecurities, etc of their characters, or pretending that they are actually real people in any way).For every combat that takes places we have one or two 'social' or 'puzzle' challenges (note these are NOT the 'skill challenges' of 4e; they are fully dynamic and improvised) in between that decide how the next combat might start or take place and how the story will turn out in the end.Of course it does. Silly to expect or want it not to; a big part of the game is literally a board game. We like it that way and enjoy it all the more for that.(I would raise an eyebrow at the people who declare that it never does, or give a big PFFT to the idea that that would be a bad thing in any way, but eh, we all have our different experiences and they are all valid and all that <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> )I used to, not any more. It's more about designing the session to be cool within the scope of the rules, than trying to make the rules fit the scope of your session. It's a subtle difference which I have learned gradually.I guess other people might help you a lot more than I, considering, but what I have taken to doing is to distill the "roleplaying", ie the non-combat parts of the game, into the pure choices the party has to make to move the narrative along. So it's common for me to say something like "You walk into the corridor, you see the Baron and a girl are here yelling at each other. The baron grabs the girl by the wrist and pulls her forcefully into his room. He's got like a sneer on his face that you don't like. You wanna let him go or you wanna try and stop him?" (With full consideration of any other idea the players come up with of course).With a bit of experience this sets up a nice little rhythm of bang, bang, bang, bang: Stuff happens, what do you do. Stuff happens, what do you do. Stuff happens, what do you do. And so on. On the other hand, this leaves NO time whatsoever for anything like "He flicks his head back, arranging his almond-copper hair into place, thinking about how much he wants his father to be proud of him," or that kind of stuff. I don't really have any patience for that myself anyway, and neither does anybody else at my table luckily.Eh, if the player is the "mess around and be funny" type he'll find ways to do so anyway, in my experience. Metahumor, that kind of stuff.Like I say above... there are ways to make the session exciting within the rules. These ways are all very subtle, they are also all very personal and unique to the group of players, and can only be achieved through constant playing, practice, and thinking about what YOUR particular players want. If they're all about the roleplaying and posturing and play-acting, they won't kind you hurrying or even cutting the combats. If they're about the tactics and the decisions and the doing of things, they won't care that your baron doesn't flick his golden hair back before saying something.The trick is knowing that everybody always says they're about everything. Everybody always says that they have good combats AND good roleplaying AND good challenges AND good stories, but you know what, really, it's always slanted to one side... people just won't admit it. It's just something that you have to find out and discover for yourself. But just knowing that you do helps a whole lot <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Hope this helps you in some way and hope you are able to improve your game.</blockquote>

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