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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercurius" data-source="post: 5882709" data-attributes="member: 59082">Here's the situation. My game group is finishing up an adventure and we're at a crossroads. We've been playing 4E and everyone is a bit burnt out with it, mainly because of the length and dominance of combat, especially the annoying intricacies of conditions ("Wait, am I just Prone and Dazed or am I also Slowed?"). We've played our characters up to 16th level and are fine with either starting at 1st level or continuing on with these characters. I've thought of transitioning the group to Pathfinder and running them through an Adventure Path, but am worried that 4E to Pathfinder is out of the frying pan and into the fire. We were hoping that the 5E playtest would be out by now, but who knows when that's due. 13th Age sounds intriguing, but that's not until August. We don't want to switch from D&D (so please, no recommendations for Savage Worlds! I like SW too, but I want otyughs and hit points <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />) but we want a simpler, quicker game than 4E, something with support and, due to time constraints, pre-published adventures.To put that all another way, I'm being super finicky and trying to have my cake and eat it too. Here are my criteria in summary:1) Within the D&D family ("d20 games")2) Quick(ish) learning curve from 4E3) A decent amount of published material, in particular adventures (or easy to convert to from other forms of D&D)4) Quick but tactically rich combatThe last is the key and perhaps something that may be too much to ask. We like the tactical nature of 4E combat, we just don't like how much time it takes. In our last session we played from about 8 until 1; we played two combat encounters, the first of which took 2.5 hours and the second of which took 1.5 hours - so 80% of the session! If we could even just knock that down to 50% we'd be fine.One thought that came to mind is spending a bit of time "weeding" 4E of the less interesting elements of combat, namely conditions. We're already reducing monster HP by 20-30%, but I'm thinking more like 50% might be better, with an increase in damage by 20-30%. Any other ideas along this vein? Is there a paired down version of 4E out there, complete with powers but without all the extra stuff?Sorry for the rambling post - I'm in a bit of a hurry but wanted to get this up in the hopes of replies by this evening. Any ideas? Thanks!</blockquote>

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