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! :D )
- 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.
That's way too friggin slow for 5e. It's not the mechanics, it's the GM or group dynamics. 5e combat, for all my other criticisms, is fairly fast.
Yeah, low-level 5e should be fast. Maybe you should offer to call the initiative? I find that prompting people to take their turn can help a game zip along, although I say that as a DM...
The group probably spends like 5 minutes per player on each turn.
I was thinking of using a modified "side initiative" to speed things up. Basically, each team declares their turns at once, then you roll initiative afterwards to see what order it was resolved in.
Having everyone decide at once should speed things up, though I wonder how I could remember all the nuances of each declaration during the turn.
Have them decide before initiative. Then remind you in turn order. If they want to change no problem, as long as they do something when you ask them.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;999697The group probably spends like 5 minutes per player on each turn.
I was thinking of using a modified "side initiative" to speed things up. Basically, each team declares their turns at once, then you roll initiative afterwards to see what order it was resolved in.
Having everyone decide at once should speed things up, though I wonder how I could remember all the nuances of each declaration during the turn.
For a slow group, declare up front can be even worse than cycling. What you need is a way to keep things moving, but breaking up decisions into manageable chunks. Different GMs have different capabilities when it comes to dealing with input from the players. I can usually handle 3 or 4 players going at once, so I made my initiative system support that:
Side-by-side, where players roll initiative but foes do not. Foes get a set target number based on their initiative values (usually, 10 + Dex Mod). Players that hit that target go before the monsters. Those that do not, go after. With a large group, this usually means that it evens out. When it doesn't, I'll tell a couple of players to wait until I've processed the rest. (Usually, there are a couple trying to decide anyway.) You can typically handle "at end of your next turn" issues with common sense rulings.
If there are a lot of monsters and/or high variance in foe initiative targets, I'll divide them into two groups (or very rarely, three), with people hitting the lower targets but not the higher ones going in the middle. This usually isn't worth it except when a "boss" monster has a much higher or slower initiative than the rest of the monsters. For regular fights, even that's not necessary. Just use the average initiative target.
I do not allow "delays" to see what other people are doing in your "initiative group," though if a lot of people are going at once, I don't heavily police it either. That is, if I call on you, you have to go. If you want to wait and see what someone else does, you lose initiative. For savvy players, this encourages the ones that know what they want to do to enthusiastically jump in and go, to give their allies a bit more time to decide. I really don't care, as long as we are moving things along.
This system was specifically and heavily play tested for a large group of players where about half of them are prone to indecision and bogging things down in play. It has worked very well. The version I'm describing above is more or less the final product, thought I've accumulated a few "rulings" on top of it since. On spell durations, for example, I tend to use the end of the "round" for resolution, but don't always count the round where it was launched. If you cast a spell with a "1-round" duration, it doesn't start the counter until the end of the current round.
First you should have a little chat with your group, and tell them that it is time to take the game to the next level by taking the training wheels off. Explain how the game is supposed to run, and point out how much faster and furiouser it is. Explain how to give effective statements and where to find into on the char sheet. Make sure everyone knows their characters abilities and has a general idea of how to run that build. Also, write a Post-It note for every player summarizing the 3 most likely things for his character to do during combat. Put relevant stats on where needed.
Then, take charge of initiative. Determine initiative as usual. Manage it with a set of index cards; one card for every PC and monster or group of monsters. Stack them hi-top, call the top unit, and cycle it to the bottom when it is done. Repeat as needed.
The important part that you call the cards clearly, if necessary by talking over any table chatter, and make sure to prompt the player, i.e. "Torek is up, Mark. He's badly hurt, the mage is down, and you're surrounded by ravenous toebiters. What will Torek's action be?"
You don't have to be rude or confrontational, but you do need to set the pace and run the game. Master those Dungeons!
There are a variety of ways you can try to speed this up, but you will always struggle against human nature if a combat system presents everyone with some sort of decision tree and there is no rigid time constraint on how they make that decision. The proof is in the pudding: most people with significant experience with 5E think a fight takes an hour, except for a few who think it might take 2. If the point of your game is resolving melees then this is fine (assuming you have an hour to kill!). If you are engaged in an adventure that might have a half dozen fights in a night of play, you are in for a long night and will not get to spend any time doing anything else. This really isn't acceptable to me; I am not interested in playing any table top rpg where the average combat takes more than 10-15 minutes to settle, start to end. And a good system for classic dungeon crawl style adventures should let you finish a fight in 5-10 minutes. Otherwise you aren't going anywhere or doing anything other than combat. D&D just isn't good enough as a combat engine to make that a good game. If you want to spend your night resolving a couple of fights, you should be playing a designed-to-purpose dueling game (e.g., melee) or a table-top miniatures skirmish game (e.g., Mordheim).
How could a combat even last 5-10 minutes? Like, a combat beyond fighting two goblins or something. Even if everyone took their turns quickly, the amount of turns + the descriptions would make it take a while. Was it really that fast in older systems?
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;999706How could a combat even last 5-10 minutes? Like, a combat beyond fighting two goblins or something. Even if everyone took their turns quickly, the amount of turns + the descriptions would make it take a while. Was it really that fast in older systems?
There's a minimum time you can hit that is largely based on a few factors:
- The complexity of the system in play.
- The understanding of the players of that system.
- The willingness/ability of the GM and players to take the steps necessary to not waste time.
- The number of players and the degree to which the game scales for number of players.
- The degree to which fights are designed to be balanced, difficult affairs. (That is, if some fights are unbalanced, then people running or getting wiped out will tend to lower the average fight time.)
There are other, more minor issues, which may affect particular groups, but most gains you are going to get in reducing combat time will be in addressing one or more of the above.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;999706How could a combat even last 5-10 minutes? Like, a combat beyond fighting two goblins or something. Even if everyone took their turns quickly, the amount of turns + the descriptions would make it take a while. Was it really that fast in older systems?
People who know how to play BD&D or OD&D can resolve a fight with a few people on a side in 10 minutes. Easily.
Quote from: fearsomepirate;998930I'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.
This is a solution that may or may not help depending on the cause of the problem. If everyone is collectively discussing each action, it might help.
On the other hand, sometimes the problem is everyone drifting off into a daydream during everyone else's actions. When it is their action, they are lost. They need to get their bearings, and their slow action pushes others to zone out.
If zoning out is the problem then banning crosstalk makes it worse. You want to encourage people to be engaged even when it isn't their action.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;999706How could a combat even last 5-10 minutes? Like, a combat beyond fighting two goblins or something. Even if everyone took their turns quickly, the amount of turns + the descriptions would make it take a while. Was it really that fast in older systems?
In 5e you roll initiative once. So thats one thing less you are doing every round. As a DM I usually tell the players what the AC is of the opponents so they know their base to-hit and I dont need to call it out every round.
For me as a DM and player round goes a bit like this
1: Possible maneuvering. Oft mostly skipped once we are in melee.
2: Roll to hit, or some action like casting a spell and let the DM know.
3: Roll damage if its a hit. Oft with a descriptor of what you were doing like "I swing my sword at the ork in front of me and put alot of effort into it. (6 damage)" Or at some tables I just call "I hit the ork for 6 damage" or "I hit the ork pretty good(6 damage)."
4: DM narrates what happened. like "Your attack really rattled the ork that time. He looks like he wont be able to withstand another." and variations thereof.
5: Move on to next player or monster in the initiative line.
So a round usually resolves in on average 2 minutes each.
That sounds just like 5e though. And are you saying you didn't use Initiative in older editions?
Some good suggestions here, the main thing is not to allow committee meetings in the middle of combat. Declare actions, roll init and go.
Quote from: saskganesh;999761Some good suggestions here, the main thing is not to allow committee meetings in the middle of combat. Declare actions, roll init and go.
Like the "Bend and Snap," works every time! :p
Older editions have one major strength that often gets pitched as a weakness: there just aren't that many tactical decisions to make in combat. People who don't understand the game might get tangled up in the rules governing charges, weapons of unequal length, etc., but that stuff is all deterministic - once you know how it works it doesn't take any time. And other than goofy stuff you might make up now and then to spice things up, your movement amounts to: enter combat, stay in combat, hover around fringes of combat, or flee. And attacks are more or less dialed in. You either make one or you don't, and it is obvious how you execute it. Receiving attacks is just as simple: you don't have any decisions to make; you either lose hit points or you don't. Half the second-wave games were written to expand this and give everyone more decisions. And it resulted in some good combat engines...all of which way too deadly and/or slow to play D&D the way people are accustomed to playing it. If you want a game where a lot happens in an evening, the simplicity and minimal decision making in pre 3E D&D is terrific.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;999706How could a combat even last 5-10 minutes? Like, a combat beyond fighting two goblins or something. Even if everyone took their turns quickly, the amount of turns + the descriptions would make it take a while. Was it really that fast in older systems?
It still is that fast in many systems:).
Taking away the grid will speed things up, too. I've noticed games I run on roll20 are much slower than games I run IRL because there is a great deal more dithering about where exactly to place your token for Pareto optimal combat effectiveness.
I think the fastest quasi-realistic combat system I've played is Melee (or, equivalently, TFT). If there are only two players and both know what they are doing and both are controlling only 1 or 2 figures each, then you can resolve a surprisingly granular, nuanced fight in 10-15 minutes. That is what the game is designed for: quick, interesting table-top gladiatorial combats. And it works for that. But, as soon as you throw in 3-4 players or a combat between a party of 6-8 PC's and hirelings vs. 30 orcs, you are pretty screwed - that is going to take an hour or two even if you are working hard to be efficient. The abstract nature of 'classic' forms of D&D keeps the ball rolling pretty fast even in this latter situation. I can resolve my squad of 10 orc archers shooting into a party with literally one roll of a handful of dice, a spear charge by another squad is not much more difficult, and a group of experienced players can be cajoled into sorting out a round of action fairly quickly, just because they don't honestly have that much to figure out. The things that take longer are 'spotlight' moments, like a thief who is sneaking around the edges of a fight or a wizard who won't pull his thumb out of his ass and make up his fucking mind about what spell he wants to cast that round. These sorts of situations require a proactive, semi-bully DM to keep moving.
Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;999756That sounds just like 5e though. And are you saying you didn't use Initiative in older editions?
Each edition has a slight variation on initiative (and much, much text has gone into discussing the nuances of each). The differences have real consequences, but for our purposes here they just boils down to which use group or individual initiative and which roll for initiative every round and which just do so at the beginning of combat. 5e is a middle ground--there is individual initiative, but it is rolled once and then you proceed from there (and there's nothing like held actions or whatever to mess with this combat order). Ostensibly, 5e should be one of the quicker-combat editions. However, virtually every class has multiple possible options during combat, so there is more decision-making than in other editions. so...
Quote from: Larsdangly;999782Older editions have one major strength that often gets pitched as a weakness: there just aren't that many tactical decisions to make in combat. People who don't understand the game might get tangled up in the rules governing charges, weapons of unequal length, etc., but that stuff is all deterministic - once you know how it works it doesn't take any time. And other than goofy stuff you might make up now and then to spice things up, your movement amounts to: enter combat, stay in combat, hover around fringes of combat, or flee. And attacks are more or less dialed in. You either make one or you don't, and it is obvious how you execute it. Receiving attacks is just as simple: you don't have any decisions to make; you either lose hit points or you don't. Half the second-wave games were written to expand this and give everyone more decisions. And it resulted in some good combat engines...all of which way too deadly and/or slow to play D&D the way people are accustomed to playing it. If you want a game where a lot happens in an evening, the simplicity and minimal decision making in pre 3E D&D is terrific.
...pretty much this. Or, to expand, most of the tactical decisions that determine the outcome of combat (other than when the spellcasters decide to cast spells, which is a rare-but-gamechanging event) occur
before combat starts. Sneaking and gathering information, negotiating with potential allies/potential enemies, preparing traps/bottle-necks/ambushes, these are the decision/agency-points of OSR D&D. During combat, it is mostly attack/rotate-to-the-back-line for fighters and hireling soldiers, fight most rounds and occasionally heal for clerics, fight or stay out of the way for thieves (most of their contribution was before combat or perhaps sneak attacking someone and then running for their friends), and deciding to use a precious spell, lobbing oil, or just staying out of harms way for the MUs. Not inherently better or worse, just a different spot to place the decision-making.
Quote from: Willie the Duck;999841Each edition has a slight variation on initiative (and much, much text has gone into discussing the nuances of each). The differences have real consequences, but for our purposes here they just boils down to which use group or individual initiative and which roll for initiative every round and which just do so at the beginning of combat. 5e is a middle ground--there is individual initiative, but it is rolled once and then you proceed from there (and there's nothing like held actions or whatever to mess with this combat order). Ostensibly, 5e should be one of the quicker-combat editions. However, virtually every class has multiple possible options during combat, so there is more decision-making than in other editions. so...
It's also when the person makes the decision versus when they need to commit to the decision. If, for example, you have 4 players and a GM, and every player is actively engaged at all times, and nearly always has a good idea of what they will want to do as the situation is shaping up, working its way around to their chance to act again--then it doesn't much matter what initiative system you use. The differences in time between them will be very slight, You can pick an initiative system for other reasons, such as what it does to the decision making or the like.
As you may away from that set of parameters, then the usual suspects in group communication, process flow handling, and other such issues begin to manifest themselves. If, for example, the GM has a difficult time handling more than one player at a time, then something will need to be done to manage that issue, such as using cyclic initiative or a caller or something else.
Also, one of the major innovations of 4E that 5E decided to stick with is the concept that everyone has a way to contribute to combat every round. That sounds like a worthy goal (not one I agree with, but I understand why some people think this sounds good). And, the concept introduced in 3E and retained in 4E and 5E, that every class has a relatively broad suite of abilities not unlike the suite of spells magic users get to call on. This too can seem like a good idea, at least as a general goal. But when you combine them and flesh them out, you get massive character and NPC records (because of the long chains of abilities that you have to keep track of), and lots of people making lots of nuanced decisions every round. Then you are resolving 2 hour combats. And then you might as well be playing D&D Encounters or something, instead of a real adventure.
I'd say the change in 4E was that everyone has something to do, but the overall list of choices is relatively short. However, the change was poorly implemented, in that it met the goal but broke other things. In 5E, they kept the goal (for the most part), but pulled back on strictness of it to mitigate some of the 4E problems. This puts 5E in some middle ground between something like Basic/Expert versus 3E. You can make an argument for how close it skews to one or the other, but it is definitely a simpler set of things to manage than 3E. Furthermore, many of the choices that are there are much easier for even a casual player to manage than the 3E suite. Sure, technically a 5E fighter players, for example, needs to decide every round if they want to use Action Surge or Second Wind. But those are only problem for raw novices that are still learning the game, and once used, go off the list of options for that fight. Collectively, it can appear to be a lot, but the choices for any one player in any one round are there, but not onerous. Having a much shorter list of spells prepared is wonderful, again, once the initial learning curve of the prepared list, manage the slots, is navigated.