You realize most action MOVIES don't resolve their big fights in 5-15 minutes right? Asking a board game with dice and 4-6 people trying to decide what goes on to move faster than a movie is asking for just a little much don't you think?
Yeah, I tend to agree with this. I also don't really think that super fast has much to do with 'cinematic'. My definition of cinematic is a big action scene, like the log flume encounter I described above from one of my games. It has over-the-top high stakes action, lots of drama, ups and downs, some degree of plot, and generally a wide open expansive feel to it. Its like an action movie scene, which is exactly why we use the term cinematic to describe it. Indiana Jones chasing the truck convoy and leaping onto the truck and battling the German soldiers was cinematic action. Like n00bdragon says, I find it hard to imagine that a fight like that can be played out in 5-15 minutes.
Frankly I've never seen any fight in the history of my playing D&D that was done in 5 minutes, not even "5 orcs in a room" in 1e. Fights take about 15 minutes just to set up, get established, and start rolling through turns usually. Even in 1e's orc fight it will take 3-5 minutes to resolve a round of combat if anything happens except rolling to hit. If the cleric has to decide if he's healing or not and the magic user needs to decide if he's using his one spell or not then it is going to be a 5 minute round. It will take in 1e at least 5-8 rounds to finish up that fight. IME 5 orcs in a room is 30 minutes of table time from soup to nuts. I can do an equally simple 4e fight in 30-40 minutes. I contend the mythical super quick fight just never existed and the few times it happened it was utterly trivial (one skeleton, 3 kobolds, etc).
I mean, I think that if a fight is SUPER slow, then sure it is likely to feel less exciting and dynamic. I think it is worth using reasonable metrics though and not trying to design around things like 5 minute combats that have never existed in any game. 4e combat could be slow for a lot of people. I think ONE reason it felt slow was that people didn't design encounters that played to the strengths of 4e's system. A 45 minute toe-to-toe no-movement beatdown between a level 1 party and 6-8 goblins is going to be DULL. Like I said earlier this would not be so big a problem in say 1e where at least you were worried that every hit was a PC down and dead, that at least put some tension in it. The 4e version will be dangerous, but not to the same degree of uncertainty, and all the cool powers and whatnot just don't matter if the fight is a bunch of people packed into a featureless room with no space to spread out, and no motivation to move around. Once you get this sort of dull sardine-can thing going then it BECOMES slow because the players aren't really engaged in anything interesting, so they wander off and BS, etc.
The flip side of this is that the 4e cinematic fight will be a LOT cooler than the 1e version. 1e actively punishes you for being bold. Most characters have first of all no defined known ability to do stuff. There isn't a rule to say if the fighter can scramble up the water wheel and break through the window. If he does he's likely to take some damage somehow, and he's got 1d10 hit points... Of course sometimes 1e PCs will do crazy stuff, either because the player just stops caring if they survive or the situation is so bad they're dead anyway. 4e by contrast has a rich system of powers, skills, and ad-hoc checks that covers everything. The PCs, even at level 1, are fairly tough, etc. A harsh DM that wants a gritty realistic sort of game can of course quash the over-the-top stuff, but if you SAY YES and just up the ante and fail forward when possible then it produces a level of craziness that in my long AD&D experience was VERY rare in that game and generally only happened in a narrow range of levels (IE once you hit 6th or so PCs were tough enough that it STARTED to be possible to do some crazy stuff, once you got past about 9-11th level it was better to just let the casters deal with it).
In terms of DDN what I see right now is that the PCs are now a little on the weak side. They aren't as glass like as low level AD&D characters, but players still tend to hold back some in the games I've been in. The first playtest HP levels felt much better to me. Still, the current numbers alone aren't hopeless and can probably be tweaked up some for my style of play. The question is then about skills, 'powers', and ad-hoc actions. DDN seems to be advocating a more "if you're not trained then you probably can't do it" theory on skills, but it is hard to tell where it will end up. The "open" skill list risks default incompetence, but if the DM understands how to use the system (I'd say stick mostly to ability checks) its workable. The only disappointment here is the flat math which means 20th level PCs are still going to be doing the same stunts as 1st level ones. As far as "page 42" type stuff both systems are the same basically, though I'd expect you're most often using a skill in DDN.
DDN's 'power' system (character mechanics) IMHO is a problematic area. While fighters for instance have martial dice they have no mechanism for really extraordinary martial feats. Everything is basically 'at-will' with them. Since you need to pick up specific maneuvers to use with your dice its hard to know what should be allowed to any random fighter. Similar issues exist with the other non-casting classes. Frankly I'd rather just see a power system so I am clear on what the PC DEFINITELY can do, with the explicit understanding that they can try things other powers would do but they have to use page 42 and it won't be as easy/effective as if they had that power.
Mostly it feels like the 'crazy stuff' is magic and the casters are there to do that. The fighter feels like he's supposed to stand up front, use his martial dice trick when it looks useful, but mostly just stand and hack while the casters deal with whatever isn't in front of him and toss buffs/heals as needed. I guess that's pretty AD&D-like, but even if it takes 5 minutes (which I doubt) there's nothing much in there that makes a fight feel like an action-movie scene. IME with DDN playtest fights are fairly static affairs.
