What Should You Be Able to Accomplish in Four Hours?

[Beginning of the End]

The real issue for me is that I want to "get back to the dungeon" and while dungeons are not all about combat, they do tend to include lots of combat encounters. The problem is, playing Pathfinder, a combat will eat an inordinate amount of time, which makes dungeon exploring seem like a slog instead of a fun exploration.

We play both OD&D and 3E and our combats take roughly the same amount of time in both editions. In our experience, the secret is to use old school encounter design in 3E. Also makes for a more flexible dungeon environment.

The only meaningful exception we've found is the use of the sleep spell. (Which is an encounter-ending spell at low levels in older editions, whereas 3E has pretty much eliminated low-level encounter ending spells.) An encounter where our OD&D magic-user pops his sleep usually takes about 15 seconds to resolve.