Ah. So 4E kept combat at a similar pace at all levels. You are very correct about high level 3E/Pathfinder combat. Fun, but way too much. The concentration and attunement mechanic in Pathfinder would make that game far easier to play. Main reason we moved to 5E was how long it took to play at high level.
D&D 5E Why does 5E SUCK?
Ah. So 4E kept combat at a similar pace at all levels. You are very correct about high level 3E/Pathfinder combat. Fun, but way too much. The concentration and attunement mechanic in Pathfinder would make that game far easier to play. Main reason we moved to 5E was how long it took to play at high level.
CyanideSprite
First Post
The two things I don't like so much about 5e are
1) Everything isn't very cinematic. Say what you want about 4th, but everyone using special attacks every turn was at least a little exciting. I feel like we've had a problem for a long time where using your environment resourcefully is almost always worse than straight up attacking/casting a spell. I almost always have to make houserules and specifically layout my places encounter spaces with enough stuff for the parties to consider doing more than charging in.
2) Some of the spells... Completely indestructable forcefields? Teleporting 500ft in any direction, getting past walls? Detect thoughts IMMEDIATELY on meeting new people? All this before level 10? So many spells kinda break the game. Anyone who is a rules lawyer can get these spells to do anything.
Other than that it's been a fun edition.
1) Everything isn't very cinematic. Say what you want about 4th, but everyone using special attacks every turn was at least a little exciting. I feel like we've had a problem for a long time where using your environment resourcefully is almost always worse than straight up attacking/casting a spell. I almost always have to make houserules and specifically layout my places encounter spaces with enough stuff for the parties to consider doing more than charging in.
2) Some of the spells... Completely indestructable forcefields? Teleporting 500ft in any direction, getting past walls? Detect thoughts IMMEDIATELY on meeting new people? All this before level 10? So many spells kinda break the game. Anyone who is a rules lawyer can get these spells to do anything.
Other than that it's been a fun edition.
At least in my experience, the complexity consists mostly in memorising the triggering conditions - triggering conditions for application of conditions, for removal of conditions (E/S of whose turn?, or on a save?), for bonuses and penalties (eg prone gives certain attacks a bonus and certain other attacks a penalty; blindness effects melee and ranged attacks, but not AoEs, except for fighter AoEs which are stated to affect visible enemies).
AD&D has nothing like as complex as that - Gygax's DMG doesn't make it easy to find, say, all the combat modifiers, but once you have them written down in a list they're fairly easy to apply.
Six to nine effects is a lot, but not (in my experience, at least) insane. A fairly common suite of conditions in my game might be (say) marked, quarried, dazed, prone and blind. It would be rare to go above five effects, but not unheard of. In my group, it's not that hard to get (say) immobilised and/or slowed on there as well; and then of course there's bloodied.
We use coloured tokens placed on or beneath the monster's own token/counter. Whether that's a plus or a minus for tedium is perhaps a matter of opinion! I wouldn't say it reduces the complexity, though - it is just a way of encoding/expressing it.
For me, the 4e approach is preferable to hit point attrition as the be-all and end-all of combat. I wouldn't expect that to be a universal opinion.
Hussar
Legend
If I recall [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], you play in a group of 4 players right? One thing that I think does happen in 4e is that complexity goes up almost exponentially for every player after 5 simply because you do have such a huge proliferation of effects and then effects that start triggering off of other effects. Then you have some classes that start to daisy chain reactions because now instead of having 1 defender in the group, you have three. Additionally, leaders get a lot more tricky to deal with when you have large groups because a lot of powers, particularly dailies can affect the entire group. It's one thing to grant a group of 5 PC's a bonus charge and knockdown attack - that's bad enough. Add in two or three more PC's into the mix, and it gets insane. Additionally because of the larger group, you need to use larger encounters all the time, which again increases complexity. A group of 5 PC's faces off with 3-8 opponents, depending on composition. A group of 7 PC's routinely faces off with double digit numbers of opponents simply because the XP budget gets so large.
Try setting up a battlemat when you have twenty or twenty-five figures every single fight and it gets very time consuming.
Try setting up a battlemat when you have twenty or twenty-five figures every single fight and it gets very time consuming.
Imaro
Legend
I think the problem might have been that, at least according to WotC's own data, very few people play to high levels in 3e so while 3e might have approached or even slightly surpassed 4e's combat length near the end of most campaigns... a big chunk of 3e seemed/was faster than 4e.
Aenghus
Explorer
It's also highly variable from group to group depending on the rule elements they like to use and what level they started the game at, as a lot of groups started at 3rd level or higher. Some spells and abilities can take lots of time to resolve by the book. Summoned monsters, companions, followers and henchmen in particular could add lots of decisions and handling time to the game.
Rules interactions which are tolerable at low level can become intolerable at high level, such as dispel magic effects on highly buffed targets, which if run by the book is guaranteed to pause the game. One high level game I saw had the houserule that dispel magic on a living target was all or nothing, to speed the game along and reduce the efficiency of "victory thru a zillion buffing spells".
It also depends on how good the DM is. I have a very good memory. I was able to commit quite a bit of 3E/Pathfinder to memory including the PCs. This allowed me to run all by the largest of combats very quickly. If you don't have a great memory and a DM willing to commit the information to memory, it would slow 3E combat down substantially. Whereas 4E was short duration effects which the DM had to memorize round to round rather than for the duration of a combat. Made it harder to keep track of.
My group has five players. The number of opponents in a combat can vary between two or three (say a solo and two elites) to twenty-ish (say half-a-dozen standards and the balance minions).
The typical would probably be five to ten opponents.
D'karr
Adventurer
Combat length is entirely a function of the particular group. I played in a game with 3-4 players so the group would be 4-5 players at any given session. I don't think we ever completed a combat in less than 1.5 hours. However, the sessions were totally relaxed so the combat length was never an issue, we still got quite a bit done in the 4 hours we typically played. Even in 5e we have never completed any combat in less than 1.5 hours.
I run a 4e game with 7-9 players. I do my best to provide extremely varied combats ranging from from 1 (hyper-solos) to 20 enemies. Unless the combat is an extremely involved set piece most combats can be resolved from 30 min to an hour. The end cap encounter of a major story arc took 2 hours, and that was with multiple waves of creatures, hazardous terrain and traps, and a skill challenge as part of the entire encounter.
YMMV
I run a 4e game with 7-9 players. I do my best to provide extremely varied combats ranging from from 1 (hyper-solos) to 20 enemies. Unless the combat is an extremely involved set piece most combats can be resolved from 30 min to an hour. The end cap encounter of a major story arc took 2 hours, and that was with multiple waves of creatures, hazardous terrain and traps, and a skill challenge as part of the entire encounter.
YMMV
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
You have to be careful with this 'bloat' terminology. 4e gained almost nothing in complexity across all the supplements that were published, certainly all the pre-Essentials ones. That's because it is a HIGHLY regular system. Every element fits within an overall powers, feats, skills, unified resolution mechanic. If you add 1000 more powers, so what? 2e shows the contrast, every single time something was added to it there was yet another different way to do something, and very soon it was almost an unplayable mess, you had to wade through it all, or do what we did, and just ban everything outside the core books.
3e is somewhat in the middle, but it still turned into a mess, as there are still inconsistencies and the 'infrastructure' was weaker.
Now, PERSONALLY, I think 5e is much more like 3e. If they published 10 supplements, it would be a giant mess too. Its saving grace is mainly that they did a pretty good job of covering the major bases, there's no huge missing piece that begs to be filled RIGHT NOW!
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