NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4629918" data-attributes="member: 40961">My experience over the life of 3e was that combats started taking less than an hour, and then grew to take a minimum of two hours.  This scaled as players grew more adept at the game (better players cast more spells) and as players advanced in level.  I ran virtually all my campaigns between levels 3 and 10. The combats that went quickly involved mostly martial characters and mostly regular melee without many (or any) buff spells.  The combats that went the most slowly involved spellcasters or spellcaster/melee hybrids, and multiple buff spells.  In general, I've found that players are good at remembering the effects of buff spells they cast themselves, but poor at remembering ones cast by party members. There were a lot of places that the game could get slowed to a crawl.  One rogue who couldn't add very well trying to make 4 attacks, one spellcaster who couldn't memorize their spells well enough, you get the idea.  I was often able to speed things up by remembering details for certain players, but I'm only human, and I have my own work to do behind my screen. Its also worth remembering that "too long" is subjective and based on what you're doing in that timeframe.  To use a phrase you'll hear more on BBG, sometimes 3e combat felt like 30 minutes of fun packed into two hours.  There are a lot of little things that can make combat seem less tedious- shorter time between turns, mini-rewards as individual enemies die, etc. Regarding the OP's experience, I believe him on most of it, but I do think that his "3 to 5 minutes per combat round" is anomalous.  Really anomalous.  Maybe if his group is made up of only low level characters...  I've done a lot of timed public speaking.  I don't think most people realize just how fast 3 to 5 minutes goes by.  I wonder if this stat is actually based on measurements, or just a gut feel, because I have trouble believing that a 12th level ranger is firing 6 arrows in a round with varying attack modifiers while trying to remember which of the myriad buffs are present from the party's 12th level wizard and cleric, while trying to remember how the target's spells have modified things, all in an average of 36 to 60 seconds.</blockquote>

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