What was your largest/longest single combat?

[kigmatzomat]

Thirteen players (plus Tewligan's spare personalities). Five spellcasters. Several hundred draconians. One crashed flying citadel. Three battlemats. No plan. Sixteen rounds. 8 hours.

 

[Tinker Gnome]

I think one of the longest fights I ran maybe lasted two hours. They were fighting an evil mage in a floating city and he had summoned 8 demons to fight them.

 

[LordVyreth]

The longest one I finished lasted 2 full game sessions, so 8-12 hours or so. A party of 6 18-19th level characters or so along with a pirate ship full of semi-friendly NPCs of various levels and flying in a sea of endless fire against a sizable Salamander Navy. Sizable included a flagship with a high level Salamander ranger commander, various leveled Salamander crew, a fire fiend from the Tomb of Horrors, a red dragon, and a dragon-shaped fire elemental (again from ToH with revisions.) As the fight went on, the party also had to deal with a traitor among the pirate ship crew and a magma-themed homebrewed undead monster. Not sure how many rounds it was, but

The longest fight would have taken at least three full game sessions to finish, but sadly the campaign ended mid-fight. Epic level combat + online RPGs does not an easy gaming experience make.

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

I don't think we've ever gone above a good four hours. Although we did interrupt a campaign in the middle of the "final" battle which we still have to resolve, and it's been probably around a year since the last session...

AR

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

nearly 11 years.

3-4hrs/session; 5 sessions/week; 50 weeks/year

All one battle?

 

[The_Universe]

I once ran three consecutive sessions of combat, with no rest for the Characters (though the players left and returned several times. ). In rounds, I think it was somewhere near 127, but I can't say that for certain. It was epic.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Two stand out in my mind as being Really Long.

The shorter one was in a 3.5ized Return to White Plume Mountain; my (newly half-ogred) Int-8 melee cleric had time to get through a Maze spell while the half-orog Ninja Spy played follow-the-leader with a pair of lava golems, using a Staff of Frost to keep conjuring walls of ice on the floor to slow them down. I forget how long that was, but in the 20+ rounds area. The main tank actually had time to get back up from being knocked down.

The longer one in time was the super-long big fight with a beholder mage and a hag covey. My tiefling rogue first got Forcecaged, and then burned a Candle of Invocation to gate in a Planetar to help out. The beholder mage blanched, tried to banish the planetar, and instead managed to banish my rogue, and then gated in a fallen Solar to occupy the planetar's attention. The UMD rogue used both of his Defensive Rolls for the day to avoid death, too. We actually wound up the fight around, oh, 4:30 AM, and by the time we finished play, the sun was up. I have no idea how many rounds it was, but I'm thinking 20 or so, just really long rounds due to loopiness.

Brad

 

[IronWolf]

Let's see.... I think it was 4 hours, 50 rounds and we were fighting a ton of Hill Giants, Stone Giants, ogres and goblins.... Oh wait! It was Crothian's game I was in! It was by far the most fun I have ever had in combat, though my dwarven cleric was way more of a combat medic than how I usually play him. But that was just the nature of the battle.

 

[Snotlord]

5 hours, 14 rounds. 3 characters, 3-6 drow ncps, iron golem, 1 demon running through a drow temple. A lot cooler than it sounds

 

[painandgreed]

Hard to say. It was a long time ago but I know it took two long (8+ hour) game sessions. Following a particualarly bad winter, bandits groups all across the country took the oppertunity to raid and enslave villages. Our heroically good group started fighting these bandits, slowly working our way up the food chain till we finally decided to free one of the enslaved villages. We attacked the fortified village and even with spells took a good fight to get inside and kill all the bandits and their evil cleric leaders*. We free the enslaved villagers and gather them up to go back to our village because our combat has set the fort on fire and it was burning down. We realize that in letting the bandit guards in the fields escape inorder to catch the fort off guard, they were warning the bandits that controled the other enslaved villages. We have to get back to our village that night, set up defences to meet the bandit force we expect to attack us as soon as possible. That was the first game session. We get back in the morning with the people we freed just in time to send some people for help (who will not be able to get to us in time) and form up our defences when the bandits arrive. It begins with a battering ram manned by villagers chained to it and slave drivers using whips to urge them on to out gate. We all take sides of this moral delima and some of us shoot at the slave drivers, others shoot (and kill) the villagers with our missle weapons to keep them from bashing down out gate. Meanwhile, bandits attack us with their missle weapons and evil clerics begin to hit us with their spells. They're fresh while our spell casters had used most of our spells the previous day and had not been able to rest to get them back (this was 2E). Somewhere in there, I got held for somewhere over 10 rounds. Since we were out of any sort of dispells, I take off to go get dinner and come back several hours later to about the time the spell wears off and which point they have broken down the gate and the fighting has become a pitched battle inside our fort. I enter the fray again and we keep fighting, barely winning over the bandits and evil clerics.

*We later put together that the horrific winter conditions, subsequent refugees, and the bandit uprising had been their doing.