Just wondering, how long your average combat lasts?
I have a hard time remembering a combat which took longer than 10 rounds, since I play 3.5E.
I had one epic combat last an entire game session (about 6 hours). However, that involved lots of waves of opponents, and rolled through several encounter areas in the dungeon. It was also very much the exception.
The average length of a combat is about 4 rounds, I think. Slightly more at very low levels, when neither side can reliably hit the other, but it settles down quite quickly.
About 5 to 10 rounds for most in my games. I have had a few big ones that went much longer, though; about 20 rounds give or take a round or two. Those ones took most of entire gaming sessions to resolve.
Considering the size of my group (currently 9 people), most combat that takes less than 5 rounds still will occupy an entire session; most encounters will set up and begin one session, then conclude and mop up (loot, identify, rest, etc.) the next.
Shortest fight: While there have been many encounters ended in the first round over the years, I was shocked last week when the group concluded "Foundation of Flame" in SCAP by taking out Hookface in THREE ROUNDS. Yes, Hookface the Adult Red Dragon. That Hookface.
All I have to say about it is...critical hit with an empowered Orb of Force from the mage, follwed by a diving charge on a flying mount by the paladin...I don't wanna talk about it any more *pout*
Longest fight: The party encountered a Death Slaad as a random encounter when in Occipitus; it fought them competently and smartly for FORTY-SIX ROUNDS before falling.
Employing a cat-and-mouse strategy, it managed to avoid all FOURTEEN characters and was beating them by ones and twos with its summoned automatons keeping the rest of the party busy; but once all of its spells were exhausted, the remaining party members won by attrition.
(Second place goes to the Naga and 1/2Orc NPC in "Secret of the Soul Pillars"; the 1/2Orc was killed in three rounds, but the Naga fought them airborne and amongst the pillars for thirty-five rounds - the party grew to really hate the "Evard's Black Tentacles" spell)
M
The groups I DM for have combats that last beyond 10 rounds on a regular basis. And so does the group I play in. Of course not on every encounter, but this happens independent of character levels.
Just wondering, how long your average combat lasts?
I have a hard time remembering a combat which took longer than 10 rounds, since I play 3.5E.
Most of the combats my players are in last roughly 4-5 rounds. However if it turns into some kind of a running fight then the combat can take a lot longer. Its not that uncommon for my bad guys to have their moral break and then they tend to try and flee to a room with allies or out of the area. Once that happens things can start extending out in a hurry - especially as my PCs hate 'wasting' buff spells and will tend to give chase.
I definitly agree with the poster that said that the larger your battle mat the longer combats can take - its like a batte mat arms race were I play - they just keep getting bigger and bigger and battles can turn into wargames with PCs fighting in three or four different areas while mooks run rampant through the halls.
Hi Dryder,
With this group I currently play with, half of the time we end up entangled in poorly run fights with a DM looking through his notes, trying to run five different NPCs + his monsters and mumbling behind his screen.
Real time: 1,5 to 3 hours for a stupid fight
Game time: around 10 to 20 rounds
The other half of the time things go more smoothly (like when we only face two or three orcs):
Real time: 30' to 45' minutes
Game time: 10 rounds or less
Even when things are "smooth", it still takes a lot of time, because most of the players are new to the game and need help (I can't help mention that one has been new to the game for more than 6 months now and the other for 3 years, but it is not getting any better).
I think I need to change group...
Bocklin
Hi Dryder,
With this group I currently play with, half of the time we end up entangled in poorly run fights with a DM looking through his notes, trying to run five different NPCs + his monsters and mumbling behind his screen.
As a DM, I tend to stumble a lot if I have to run "DMPCs", because of the mental gear shift, and not wanting to have the NPCs hog the spotlight. So I can sympathize in that regard. Does your DM know about the new stat block format? If not, I would show it to him and suggest he study it a bit. It's certainly helped me.
TK
... half of the time we end up entangled in poorly run fights ...
... it still takes a lot of time, because most of the players are new to the game and need help ...
And there are the main reasons why D&D combats can grind to a halt. Fortunately, help can be had:
- Much of what slows the game is poor organisation. If the Fighter's player doesn't have his attack bonus pre-calculated, and has to do it anew for every attack, that's a lot of time lost over 10 rounds, even if each calculation is only a few seconds. If the DM's notes are poorly laid out, the same applies.
So, strongly advocate that your party adopts a standard format for character sheets (if you don't already have one). Ideally, this should be some sort of auto-calculating sheet, such as the Mad Irishman sheets. Also, get spell sheets (or spell cards) for casters, including page numbers for the sourcebooks.
Of course, having a standard character sheet format is useless unless they are properly filled in. Also, where calculations can be pre-done (such as Power Attack modifiers), produce cheat-sheets for that purpose.
Get your DM a set of intiative cards (or a whiteboard and markers). Try to give him a bit more space to lay out his notes. Get him a set of small post-it notes with which to bookmark spells in the PHB and such. And advise that he adopts the new stat-block format.
-- There's also a lot of book flipping involved in combat. This, of course, slows things down. Here's how to reduce the impact of that:
Firstly, any character who wants to use a special combat action (such as disarm) or cast a spell, or whatever, should look up the appropriate passages in the sourcebook. Then, when you announce the action, hand the open book to the DM so he can check whatever he needs to. (Bear in mind that the player's are only active for about 1/5 of the combat round, so have time to check things. The DM is busy the whole time, so doesn't.)
Spell cards and the Fiery Dragon "Battle Box" are both godsends in this area, it should be noted.
Secondly, adopt the convention that there are "player books" and "DM books". By this I don't mean "The PHB is a player book", but rather "this copy of the PHB is a player book; that one is a DM book." The DM books are out of bounds for players. This allows the DM to easily access any of his books without having to hunt it down.
Thirdly, nominate a "rules expert" among the players (better still, nominate 2). The job of the rules expert is to have a good grasp on roughly where various rules can be found in the books. When the DM needs to know about Sunder for a monster's action, you then have three people independently looking it up, and can use the result from the quickest. (Of course, a laptop with a searchable SRD is also very useful here.)
- A lot of time is probably lost through people taking a long time to select their actions. For the DM this is unavoidable - he's busy. However, there's no reason players shouldn't know what they want to do (although maybe not exactly how) by the time their turn rolls around. Therefore, I suggest a 30-second limit on declaring the character's first action of the round. Also, ban having one player advising another on their action _while it is that second player's turn_. If advice must be given, it should be given while that player is waiting.
- Finally, there's dice rolling. There's not too much that can be done here, but one suggestion is to combine as many rolls as possible into one handful of dice. So, roll damage alongside the attack roll. Better still, roll the potential critical confirmation roll at the same time (you need colour-coded dice for this), as well as both sets of damage.
Oh, and be ready to roll the dice when the time comes. If you're casting Fireball, you know you need 10d6 handy when you declare it. You might also need the d20 (for spell resistance). So, have those dice easily accessible, not sitting somewhere in your dice bag.
Hi both!
Thanks for the tips, I am sure that a couple of these would work wonders.
As I see it, our main two problems are:
1 - The DM is a first time DM
He uses his own format for NPCs / Monsters / etc. I have not seen it in details, but since he is new to DMing I would not be surprised if these were substandard in terms of running fights.
He is the "world builder" type and has pages and pages of backstory on the orc leader we will kill next session, but I am not sure he has all the stats and strategies figured out...
Maybe I should present him with the new stats block format.
2 - The other players are "new" to the game and not commited at all.
I am fine with people having different levels of involvement in the game and I know I can't expect everybody to be as pedantic and geeky as I can be when it comes to playing D&D, but there is a minimal level of involvement that everybody should be ready to show. I may be unfair on their behalf, but it is simply not there.
One of them is always grabbing the first die he sees on the table to roll his attacks, be it a D8 or a D12. As long as it's not the "normal" die or "the pyramid", he thinks that's allright and then states his roll, takes a pause, says "no, wait a minute", scans his sheet and adds the figure we point out for him to his roll.
This guy is 29, has a university degree and, as far as I can tell, is mentally sane. But he simply does not care enough to learn the basics (he is the one who has been playing once a month for the last two to three years - and we offered him the PHB for his birthday two years ago).
Luckily for us he is playing the fighter.
Last session, the DM came up with the great idea "no more talk between players during a fight, this is unrealistic and slows things down". End result: the two "new" players could not make up their mind about what to do (good learning for them, they had to make decisions for themselves), but also did not think of options they had (the rogue forgot that he can Tumble to flank; the fighter forgot to state his Dodge-Feat target; etc.).
I'll try and see if any of the solutions above help improve the situation. Thanks for that!
On the other hand, I feel like I have had it (the group has been lame for the past 6 months) and maybe I should focus on the other game where I am DMing and/or try RPGA if I really want to play instead of DMing.
Bocklin
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Hi all!
Thanx for your answers - now I feel a bit more assured, that in my game eveything is fine...
Of course, sometimes, we have a bigger, longer-lasting fight, but normally it's all done in below 10 rounds.
Delericho, your tips are great, I will use a few of them!
Now I wonder, what group takes down Dragotha in less than 10 rounds... ;)
When I DM or play, I try to keep this rule of thumb in mind: A PC (or monster) should be using a special ability/power/attack(see below) every other round.
This lets PCs feel like the abilities they chose are making a difference, and lets the monsters show off their strange powers without absolutely hammering the PCs into the dirt. Obviously, smarter monsters, and PCs, may use their abilities more often, but I find every other round a good benchmark to use.
Through this, combats last a little longer, but the PCs actually come out a little more unscathed, because they actually remember to use their special abilities and often have better teamwork as a result.
(A special ability would be anything besides a normal, straight off the character sheet attack roll. Fighters make use of feats, mages cast spells, rogues feint and sneak attack, clerics buff then attack, etc)
Just my two coppers.
Upon consulting my graphing notebook full of DND notes, including combat charts, it looks like our combats tend to run around 5-6 rounds on average. And off the top of my head, I'd say it takes around 8 minutes to play out a round of combat. So that is 40-48 minutes of real time per encounter.
Of course, our group has 7 PCs, so that tends to slow things down a little more than average. And I tend to pad the "mooks" numbers out a bit when bumping up the Encounter to the appropriate CR for the enlarged party, so that slows it down greatly as well. But to counter that I tend to run the mooks in groups (ie. 2-3 of them that act on the same initiative count and tend to work as a unit)
If it was an encounter of the 7 PCs and a single BBEG, then it would be more like 5 minutes a round.
Upon consulting my graphing notebook full of DND notes, including combat charts, it looks like our combats tend to run around 5-6 rounds on average. And off the top of my head, I'd say it takes around 8 minutes to play out a round of combat. So that is 40-48 minutes of real time per encounter.
Of course, our group has 7 PCs, so that tends to slow things down a little more than average. And I tend to pad the "mooks" numbers out a bit when bumping up the Encounter to the appropriate CR for the enlarged party, so that slows it down greatly as well. But to counter that I tend to run the mooks in groups (ie. 2-3 of them that act on the same initiative count and tend to work as a unit).
This is more or less how I do it as well - and I think for most of the fights that don't turn into running battles 45 minutes sounds roughly correct. Things can slow down if my players get lost or worse yet if they are trying to decide what to do or find that spell or the summoned monsters stats. For me the big slow up is generally collecting the minatures. There is no pre-game time for me to prep minitures ahead of time as they are kept at the gaming house so picking them is a slow down. Monster actions are usually pretty quick as I tend to either know what the monsters are going to do or I have made a round by round tatcics chart and can usually just follow it (its got qualifiers such as at what threshold the bad guy uses his healing and usually comes in two parts buffing (more or less until combat is joined if possible - with some buffing being so good that its used even after combat is joined, Stone Skin for a mage being a prime example) and offencive spell use for once the fights taking place in earnest.
One other time saver tip. This one is similier to teh 'make a player a rules expert (something I do in my game). Basically make a player keep track of the inititive. You've got other things to keep track of and anyway players are always changing their inititivem delaying to do better tactics - they need to be able to corodinate that and hence are likely paying a lot of attention to inititive anyway.
If you can get a laptop at the gaming table, then one of the combat management programs can really speed things up. DM's Familiar is mine. There is also Roleplaying Master and DM Genie.
Let the computer handle tracking initiative, making attack rolls for the DM, and to quickly look up rules. My combats tend to be 4-5 rounds as well but more like 20 minutes.
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(...)One other time saver tip. This one is similier to teh 'make a player a rules expert (something I do in my game). Basically make a player keep track of the inititive. You've got other things to keep track of and anyway players are always changing their inititivem delaying to do better...
Good idea! I will use it next session.
With the new edition the amount of work for the DM (before the game and during the game) got bigger. So any work which is taken away from the DM speeds up things.|
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If you can get a laptop at the gaming table, then one of the combat management programs can really speed things up. DM's Familiar is mine. There is also Roleplaying Master and DM Genie.
Let the computer handle tracking initiative, making attack rolls for the DM, and to quickly look up rules. My combats tend to be 4-5 rounds as well but more like 20 minutes.
I have a laptop, and used it once. DMscreen, DMGenie and all those are really great. But unfortunately my laptop is so darn loud, that my players got nerved and I had to shut it down. Never used it afterwards. But maybe, when I am lucky enough to have a silent one...
Most of ours last a long time, a hour or two for 4-6 rounds of fighting.
With a party of 4-6 PCs, I've found most of our combats run about 5-10 minutes per round depending on the number of opponents, special actions, etc. It's not unusual for us to play for 3 hours but only go through 3-4 combats plus roleplay in between. I'd say most combats go somewhere between 3-7 rounds in my experience.
L
I would say My biggest time saver as DM is to make all 'standard' weak characters with the same initiative score go at the same time. Also, since I am too cheap to by miniatures and still just use dice, I assign a number to the weak monsters so I know which stats belong to which creature.
... half of the time we end up entangled in poorly run fights ...
... it still takes a lot of time, because most of the players are new to the game and need help ...
And there are the main reasons why D&D combats can grind to a halt. Fortunately, help can be had:
- Much of what slows the game is poor organisation. If the Fighter's player doesn't have his attack bonus pre-calculated, and has to do it anew for every attack, that's a lot of time lost over 10 rounds, even if each calculation is only a few seconds. If the DM's notes are poorly laid out, the same applies.
So, strongly advocate that your party adopts a standard format for character sheets (if you don't already have one). Ideally, this should be some sort of auto-calculating sheet, such as the Mad Irishman sheets. Also, get spell sheets (or spell cards) for casters, including page numbers for the sourcebooks.
Of course, having a standard character sheet format is useless unless they are properly filled in. Also, where calculations can be pre-done (such as Power Attack modifiers), produce cheat-sheets for that purpose.
Get your DM a set of intiative cards (or a whiteboard and markers). Try to give him a bit more space to lay out his notes. Get him a set of small post-it notes with which to bookmark spells in the PHB and such. And advise that he adopts the new stat-block format.
-- There's also a lot of book flipping involved in combat. This, of course, slows things down. Here's how to reduce the impact of that:
Firstly, any character who wants to use a special combat action (such as disarm) or cast a spell, or whatever, should look up the appropriate passages in the sourcebook. Then, when you announce the action, hand the open book to the DM so he can check whatever he needs to. (Bear in mind that the player's are only active for about 1/5 of the combat round, so have time to check things. The DM is busy the whole time, so doesn't.)
Spell cards and the Fiery Dragon "Battle Box" are both godsends in this...
Thank you for this interesting post!
Battles in my group tended to take ages when we started playing again. Though, when I started DM'ing, I wrote every world-aspect down, I didn't bother with tactics (simply didn't think of doing it.) Recently I started reading dungeon, and found the tactics sections for npc's/monsters very usefull. So I began to use them too for my games (though, they still need to improved a lot..)
I also started to write a summary next to each monsters/npc's spell/ability... To avoid having to look them up.
My group consists out of well.. three semi-experienced (including myself). The rest are all newbies. I have the same phenomen of a player, that is newer then me, but still already D&D for a year and a half and, isn't really interested in reading the rules. Though, she is a good roleplayers and enjoys D&D a lot.
Anyhow.. just said, battles tended to be exhausting. Last session an improvement happened (due to me writing down notes) and indeed, another player researching things while I was busy. Good point here!
All in all, battles tended to take long (I think I'm striking the 45min limit, not sure about the number of rounds).
Lastly, can you buy a box of spell cards somewhere? And what is the Fiery Dragon "Battle Box"? I had in mind of designing and printing out spell cards myself.. simply because it would really help battle along.
Thank you for this interesting post!
Lastly, can you buy a box of spell cards somewhere? And what is the Fiery Dragon "Battle Box"? I had in mind of designing and printing out spell cards myself.. simply because it would really help battle along.
You're welcome!
I'm not aware of any spell cards product, or I would own a set or two. That said, the product I would be interested in would have to include all the spells from the "Spell Compendium", so only Wizards of the Coast can (officially) produce it. There may be fan-made cards online somewhere, but I've not found them.
The "Battle Box" was a tin box (about 8 inches by 6 inches by 3/4 inch, I think), which contained a whole load of useful things for running combat. It included a set of spell effect templates for common spells (eg fireball) made of light paper, a set of special manoeuver cards for warriors (disarm, sunder, etc), a booklet detailing something (I forget what - I've never used it), and even a mini d20! I found some parts of the box extremely useful, and found the box itself extremely handy for keepign things organised (we used counters instead of minis in my last campaign, and the box was ideal for storage of the counters for the adventure in use).
I know there were at least two versions of the box (d20 standard and Iron Heroes). There may have been others. I don't know if they're still available.
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(...)I know there were at least two versions of the box (d20 standard and Iron Heroes). There may have been others. I don't know if they're still available.
Yes, Iron Heroes and another one for d20Modern.
I just bought it last week and will use it for the first time next sunday.The booklet had some infos about THE ALARM FACTOR in a dungeon, how creatures react, and for how long when the enemy is sighted and known to be there. I don't think I'll use that one either...
The Condition-Cards, however, are really helpful, I am sure of that. I coppied them, so that I have one for each player if the need arises.
The box is 3.0E, but I heard a 3.5 edition should be available sometime this year...
Anyway, another great way to speed up things is having your own cards with all the relevant monster and npc stats. I usually write them in Excel and then print them, 4 on a single page (DINA4 format), than cut them into single cards.
Very handy, because you can write down some infos which in the MM-entry are just referred to.
There are some really good tips in this thread and I will use a few of them next sunday.
Keep them coming.
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(...)One other time saver tip. This one is similier to teh 'make a player a rules expert (something I do in my game). Basically make a player keep track of the inititive. You've got other things to keep track of and anyway players are always changing their inititivem delaying to do better...
Did this yesterday and it worked great.
It takes a lot of work from me as the DM and I have an easier time planning things on the run when I just have to ask one of my players "Who's next?".Even my player who is now responsible for the Ini likes it, because he has such an easy time checking when spells stop working, and so on...
Great tip, worked fine and will be used from now on!
Thanx again...