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="Dragonblade" data-source="post: 4631060" data-attributes="member: 2804">Heh, our 3e combats were usually about 10 to 15 minutes just for ONE player's turn!Thats why I'm inclined to agree with Cadfan.At low levels such as 1-5, combat can go pretty quickly since each character only has one attack and buff stacks aren't as common.Plus characters with straight damage rolls are easy. Its when you get into higher levels with buff stacks, more complex spell mechanics, and iterative attacks going that things start to get ridiculous. Also when DMing I have to manage multiple monsters with multiple attacks often coming from different pages of the MM. So I'm flipping back and forth. Or I see a spell that a monster has and I forget exactly what it does so I have to look it up in the book and I'm holding up the whole parade.Combat also takes time because there is a lot of on the spot number auditing. Some character will say he hits some crazy AC value, and I'll be like "ok, break that down for me by source. How do you get that number?" So everybody starts pulling out books to doublecheck their math on their buff spells and such and make sure something isn't being improperly stacked with something else.And buffs and debuffs in the middle of combat are a mess. A fighter character has Bull Strength pre-cast on him. Then he gets Enlarged two rounds into the fight. Then he is STR drained by some kind of monster or spell. Then Bull's Strength is dispelled next round. All of that takes time to recalculate especially because those ability score changes cascade throughout the character. And thats only one ability score. Sometimes characters will gain and lose multiple buffs affecting multiple scores and bonuses every round!!!Sure you prep stuff in advance, but that goes back to the problem with 3e prep time. I'm already spending my time building NPCs and monsters for the adventure. Now I have to pre-calculate every possible buff permutation too? Ugh!And published adventures don't make it easier. Stat blocks are often wrong, or they don't adequately break down the buffs involved so I have re-engineer all the monster stats myself. Or the module writers just refer to a page in the monster manual. I HATE that.</blockquote>

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