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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7057843" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm afraid you didn't even understand the question.    How much gaming experience do you have?  Try running a combat with 6 PCs and 7 henchmen versus say 40 ogres of diverse stats and weapons in a 3D environment (ledges, pits, etc.) in any edition and see how long it takes you.   Ironically, depending on how you stat it up, 4e might actually be the fastest play (minionizing most of the ogres).  Do you think that's an unreasonable example?  The opening combat of 'WG4: The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun' with its mixed combat involving in total scores of norkers, ogres, hill giants, ettins, and mountain giants (and lots and lots of flaming oil) is potentially much more complex than that.BECMI does combat really fast in 20x30 rooms with 4 PC's versus a single foe.  It does pure burn down/slog/grinds faster than most of the other editions.   But 3e can be brutally fast in situations like that as well.But perhaps even more importantly, later editions of the game tend to both dissuade the DM away from creating combats of that sort and even more importantly eliminate the need to bring in that sort of thing in order to have a compelling combat.  There are upsides and downsides to that, but you can't possibly believe early edition combat is significantly faster than more recent editions in practice unless you are building recent edition style combats in older editions and resolving them with the world rules.  If you build old school style combats like the cascading fights with the humanoids of 'Keep on the Borderlands', where soon whole tribes get pulled into the fight or the potential cascading fight with hill giants in G1: Steading of the Hill Giant Chieftain, they bloody well will take hours in earlier editions as well.I'm not a big fan of number inflation over the years either, but the thing you are neglecting is that hit point inflation in many editions was matched by damage inflation.  If every attack does more damage, the time to burn through a stack of hit points doesn't necessarily go up.  It may even go down.  I had a combat with an 80 hit point cleric last half a round in 3e, and was over in sub 3 minutes real time, because the rogue achieved surprise and won initiative and dealt 80 points of damage before the NPC could even react.The real question isn't how long the combat takes, but how grindy and uninvolved with the drama it feels.  BECMI all too often feels like it should have a 'run combat' button that you push to get it over with.</blockquote>

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