Ive been playing in a weekend D&D campaign now for a few weeks with a group of total strangers down at a new hobby shop in town. Granted some of the players seem very new to roleplaying and the game in particular but the GM is an old hand and Ive been gaming forever. In our first few sessions we literally spend 3 hours or so on 2 or sometimes a single combat. We are in a dungeon environment sure but its 5 minutes of adventure and then 3 hours of tactical boardgame.

Is this how D&D 5th typically flows? Are the combats usually that time consuming?

I'm about to run a campaign of my own a couple months from now and I'm praying I can pick up the pace, reduce combat to merely a PART of the adventure and not the whole dang thing but maybe its unavoidable.

Whats your experience been?

That sounds more like 4e, though high level 5e combats can be slow. Low level 5e should be fast.

We are all 3rd Level at this point. There is a lot of time spent deciding on and announcing options. Seldom, myself being an exception, do the players just swing and roll. The various specialty abilities are cool but really slow things down.

How big are the combats?

They can take a while if they are against tough opponents. If it's against some goblins it can go faster.

5e combat is pretty middle-of-the-road as far as speed goes until you hit the higher levels. It's not fast, but it definitely isn't that slow. It definitely shouldn't take  3 hours for a single fight unless it's a really epic showdown with a lot of moving parts. It sounds like your problem is the players, not the system. I've seen similar things with my own group when people don't pay attention or don't think about their actions ahead of time. A prepared player can finish a turn a relatively short amount of time, and that's even counting multiple rolls and narration. When people hem and haw over their options or have to figure out which dice to roll again, then you're looking at several minutes for a single person to take a turn. That's when fights really start to drag out.

If that's what is slowing your group down, the best thing to fix it would be knowledge. The better everyone knows their options, the faster they'll be able to make decisions. If they know their characters and pay attention, you should see the speed of fights improve dramatically. If you're still having problems at that point, then it's probably more an encounter balance issue.

How many players do you have at the table? I run an 8 player table (realistically, 7, as often someone can't make it), and I don't think even the epic battles take 3 hours (totally had them in 4e, though).

I suspect maybe you've got some particularly lethargic players, or you're letting them talk and think too much for their turn. At 3rd level, there really aren't enough cool powahs in play for it to take that long to decide what to do.

Put in a "decide in 60 seconds or you lose your turn" rule.

How many players?  The default initiative rules work fine for the 4-5 player game (usually).  For every player you add, it gets steadily worse.  If some of them are wishy-washy, it will get exponentially worse, because the ones with short attention spans will mentally "check out" while others are moving, then take forever on their turns.  The whole group has to pull together to stop that.

I run a house ruled version of side by side initiative with 7-11 players, and routinely finish fights under 30 minutes, even with players in the 7th to 8th range.  It's a very rare, epic fight that goes longer than that.  It's not uncommon to do a standard fight in 15 minutes.  I expect it to get closer to 45 as the cap when they hit 11th or higher, but maybe by then we'll be experienced enough to get it shorter.  

From various testing of the house rules with this group, my estimate is that the same fights with the default initiative rules would take somewhere between 1.5 to 2 times longer, just to give a frame of reference.  

3 hours for a fight of 3rd level characters, even a bunch of them, is so slow that it has to be multiple problems, with both GM handling it and the players.

I've been running 5th.  Even with a grappler it doesn't take that long.

Quote from: rgrove0172;998893Is this how D&D 5th typically flows? Are the combats usually that time consuming?

I'm about to run a campaign of my own a couple months from now and I'm praying I can pick up the pace, reduce combat to merely a PART of the adventure and not the whole dang thing but maybe its unavoidable.

Whats your experience been?

For level 3 characters even for a multi-enemy fight I cannot see a combat going that long? That sounds really weird. What is being done that is dragging out the battles so badly?

From experience so far with 5e combats have been over in anywhere from 10-30 minutes each depending. That includes maneuvering and the occasional ability use. Seems about 2 minutes per round on average. Sometimes faster, sometimes slower. That oft mentioned battle with the bullywugs and frogs took about 9 rounds and was over in about 18-20. Sometimes a combats gone by about a minute a round.

I've seen it happen. Players want to have every single turn be a group decision on what power to use and where to move. You just have to put your foot down and say there can't be any cross-talk on a player's turn.

There's a lot of variables, but on average... I'd say 5e fights take about an hour. Quicker in the early levels. Dont know about 11+.

Definitely not that. That's crazy slow, barring mass combat battles.

They most likely are failing in the following:
- not learning the mechanics and have to be constantly reminded.
(Solution: stop helping them and feign ignorance each time they ask beyond the 10th time. if you don't know how it works, then i guess it has no effect until you learn it! )
- they are dithering like it is a turn-based strategy/tactics game with pause feature.
(Solution: old skool got it right the first time; order of operations is decide privately, declare openly, roll for initiative. anything else ends up favoring slow players dithering and pondering as if every move is chess.)
- they are collaborating like they are a gestalt of slow chess players...
(Solution: as above, because old skool got it right the first time. AND an egg timer. AND no bullying other players what to do. AND the best PCs are allowed to do is yell across the battlefield (table) ONCE, during their action, and HOPE the other player does it NEXT TURN. nerfs that bullshit, stat!)

Or you have inexplicable gaming conditions that none of us could reasonably predict, like you game in a strange temporal distortion field.

These are old people problems and not so likely about the system. Fifth edition is involved and mid-grade crunchy, but nothing like that. It dropped combat time from 3e and 4e across the board by almost a magnitude.

Quote from: Psikerlord;999020There's a lot of variables, but on average... I'd say 5e fights take about an hour. Quicker in the early levels. Dont know about 11+.

I've run a lot of high level 5e, I'd say for levels 16+ an hour is still typical.

That seems very long to me. But it may be right.

Quote from: Opaopajr;999022Definitely not that. That's crazy slow, barring mass combat battles.
- they are dithering like it is a turn-based strategy/tactics game with pause feature.
- they are collaborating like they are a gestalt of slow chess players...

I think this is an inherent tendency of games with individual turns. I've lost count of how many times the fighter in one of the games I'm running asks the party for consensus on whether he should use Action Surge.