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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Levitator" data-source="post: 3368939" data-attributes="member: 40099">Holy Moly!  You guys get in 13 encounters in a session?  I thought we had a lot of encounters by averaging 1 an hour!   And we use DM Genie with its autoroll feature, and I've been told by a lot of players that our combat flies.  To make it even faster, we have a 12 second real time rule (you have 12 seconds from the start of your turn to begin declaring actions, or you are considered delaying).  For us, a 6th level, 4 person party, fighting 4 equal creatures (8 combatants total), in a fight that lasts 10 rounds (our average, we do a lot of outdoor encounters on really big maps), takes about 20-30 minutes.  I think that means we average resolving the average combat round in less than 3 minutes.  In a 5-6 hour session, we typically spend between 2 and 2 1/2 hours in combat, with the rest being storyline and roleplay.  I don't think the group would like much more combat than that, but even if they did, I don't think we could get 13 encounters in per session unless I just lined them up back to back and skipped a lot of detail in between.  Levelling is a bit slower for us because I give 50% of Core for killing creatures, and give the rest as roleplaying EXP.  So my players probably level on an average of around 15-17 encounters/level.I guess I'm a bit of a speed freak, so I'm always looking for ways to speed up combat.  I thought that the combination of using DM Genie and its autoroll feature and our 12 second rule made it about as fast as possible.  I mean, we don't even throw dice and we don't get through 13 encounters per session.  I would love to hear more about how you are able to run combat so quickly.  I don't want to derail your thread though because I really like this idea of going epic at an earlier level.  Feel free to PM me with tips on running combat faster.  In fact, I like your level cap idea so much, that in our new campaign that just started last Sunday, we are going to try capping at 10th.  We don't usually go beyond 12th or so normally, partly because the party levels up a little slower than Core and partly because we feel like the game bogs down (in combat) after 12th level.  I thought that we would dip our toes in the water first and try capping right around the time we would normally be wrapping up a campaign and try pushing it a little further past with the cap idea and see how the players like it.It will be a while before I'll be able to report our experience, as we only game every other week.  So the party levels up about once per month or so.  3 of us are old-timey gamers ('78, '80 and '81) so we prefer a slower progression.  I was tempted to try out the 6th level cap on this campaign.  But I have triple digit hours into the design of this campaign, and was too afraid to throw something new in that might throw a wrench in our gears by needing to get used to a new way to progress.  Overall though, the group unanomously likes the idea!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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