Wrong facts about D&D3 combat?

[Arnwyn]

We generally use miniatures for many combats. This slows things down if players are trying to determine optimal movements. I suspect folks like Bullgrit and Mournblade94 eschew them, since they haven't mentioned them.

Miniatures vastly speed up combat for us. We've been using them long before 3e, and before we used them, combats were much slower. Minis make things go fast for us.

Bullgrit's speed of play seems reasonable and comparable to ours.

 

[Mournblade94]

I have always used miniatures with 3rd edition D&D. I didn't always do so with second edition.

I find combat is MUCH quicker with the miniatures, otherwise EVERYTHING hinges on DM description. That can get cumbersome.

 

[malraux]

As an experiment, you can perform right now, do this:
Stop what you are doing, look at your watch, and wait 60 seconds. Don't do anything else other than wait for 60 seconds. See how long that is. Then do 120 seconds. Most people find it a surprisingly long time.

Bullgrit

Hey, that describes my 3e combat experience. It is excruciatingly boring and long. That's why I began to gate 3e combat. And yes, I'm pretty sure about my time numbers. I always used a laptop to manage my character in 3e (to properly apply all the spells, buffs, magic items etc.) So I had a clock to watch to see how long it took.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

Is this amount of complication an aspect of every combat you’re in? I could see this number of variables maybe happening in the climax fight with the BBEG, but every fight?

Out of curiosity, how frequently do your players gain in level? How often do they gain new magic items that grant more than a static plus to hit? And how often do you use unfamiliar monsters? In most cases, one of the biggest slowdowns comes from either the DM or the Players looking something up in a book that they do not know off the top of their head. If your games advance in level more slowly than average, than there is a good chance that your players are more familiar with what their characters want to do.

When your player is resolving the actions of is summoned wolves, he knows exactly what they will do; They will attack at +X for XdY+Z damage, and resolve a trip attempt. Do that enough times across enough games, and both that player and the DM will have the trip rules down cold. Likewise, if your players often use the same buffs, they will typically have the modified values on hand, ready to go.

But complicated fights like the one you commented on can easily happen nearly every time. All that has to happen is for the game to allow for the '10 minute adventuring day', and for the players to need to roll out the heavy guns more often than not. If the only thing your summoned monster can do is attack and trip, running it is easy. But if it also has a handfull of spell like abilities, and inflicts ability damage on some attacks, or has attacks that also require a saving throw against something, things can bog down.

By this point in the thread, I think that everyone will agree that your experiences with 3rd edition combat are perfectly plausible, but many people have simply ran into unusually complicated combat. It really does come down to which parts of the game actually come up during play, and how familiar everyone at the table is with those particular rules.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Is this amount of complication an aspect of every combat you’re in? I could see this number of variables maybe happening in the climax fight with the BBEG, but every fight?

My guess is that this is a factor of the difficulty of encounters. Encounters that are set at EL=APL or below are fairly easy. For an optimized group they are so easy that they often won't take damage or use more than a spell or 2 to win. This is especially true the more enemies you use, as the way the math works, if you use 32 Orcs at level 8(a perfect valid encounter for level 8 characters), then they need natural 20s to hit any front line fighter and they die to a fireball whether they make their save or not. Against encounters like this, the enemy doesn't normally get to attack and turns go quick: The wizard fireballs, all of them in the area die. The sorcerer fireballs, the rest die.

This is the extreme example, but the encounter becomes more and more difficult the closer to one enemy you are fighting. For instance, six CR 2 monsters are an EL 7 encounter. They have about as much chance of winning as the 32 Orcs do against a level 8 party.

I've played with enough groups to realize that the fast ones are used to fighting against enemies of low challenge levels. When you are used to a round going by with no chance of anyone dying, you are more than willing to roll your attack and damage dice together and say "I move to here, I hit AC 25 for 10 damage, go."

If, on the other hand, your average encounter is one enemy who has a CR=APL+2...well, people are a lot more careful. Throw this same group against a Clay Golem and it hits 50% of the time, has 2 attacks per round, can take out an average fighter in a single round of attacks if they both hit and it rolls well and makes the cleric roll 18 or higher to even be able to heal any of the damage....then people get VERY careful and recalculate their bonuses all the time, carefully plan their movement around the board and spend extra time choosing what spells to cast.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

As a 3E and Pathfinder loyalist, and especially as a 3E and Pathfinder DM, I think the game bogs down at the high-mid levels and higher, in terms of "time per turn." (As I said earlier, I think high-level combats might actually go faster, due to the "one round, one kill" factor.) I do think that a fair amount of it is caused by players, generally due to lack of prep and/or decision paralysis, but by no means all of it. Fixing -- or at least substantially ameliorating -- that problem is one of the top three hopes I have for Pathfinder. I'm certainly not going to say that anybody who says he or she hasn't experienced this is lying, or even mistaken, but I will say that I'm pretty damned surprised to hear it.

 

[Hussar]

Well, not quite that simple, but pretty close.


/snip

Monopoly is better than Go (WTH is "Go," BTW?) if you're wanting to play Monopoly (which, by the way, we also speed up when we play it).

/snip

Enlighten yourself my friend: The Game of Go

Go originated in China, where it has been played for more than 2500 years. It is most popular in East Asia, but has gained some popularity in other parts of the world in recent years. Go reached the West through Japan, which is why it is commonly known there by its Japanese name. Additionally, many Go concepts for which there is no ready English equivalent have become known by their Japanese names.

 

[Psion]

I find minis speed up combat with them when you need them, and slow them down when you don't need them.

A complex combat with large parties on each side and area effects? Yeah, use minis (or illustrations on graph paper, whatever).

The monk dips into a back alley and gets accosted by 2 rogues? You'll spend more time setting up the minis than resolving the combat.

 

[malraux]

(As I said earlier, I think high-level combats might actually go faster, due to the "one round, one kill" factor.) I do think that a fair amount of it is caused by players, generally due to lack of prep and/or decision paralysis, but by no means all of it.

IME, that can make the problem worse. If there are fewer rounds but heavy casualties, then finding out if bless stacks with bard song is really really important, as is moving in the most effective manner possible, as is picking exactly the right spell. I think it encourages analysis paralysis.

 

[Dausuul]

One possibility that just occurred to me: Might it be that, in general, people's turns take longer with characters who were created at high level than with characters who worked their way up (and thus had time to master their tactical options one at a time)?