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In my personal experience the speed of the game play has less to do with rules and more how well everyone knows the rules. Plus if the players have their actions already decided when it is their turn or if they spend time when it is their turn deciding what to do making everyone wait.
I say this cause I have seen a fairly simple fight in White Wolf Storyteller game take way over a hour. While I have seen a fairly large fight in Rolemaster with all it's charts only take about 30 mins. In both cases it was more about the people playing than the rules.
I only bring this up cause what peoples personally experiences with a game will color their responses despite how fast or slow the game is with the same level of players. If that makes sense.
Pathfinder slows down a lot as the characters get up in level.
There are techniques to help with this, but mostly those can be applied to any game, so that's not any help in comparison.
One thing to note is that not all games are equivalent in what they're attempting to do in combat. Basically, Pathfinder is slower than DH (might be I don't know) for a reason that is inextricable from the reasons people like it as a game.
If I could put a name on that reason, I would say that it's a game about power collection. Collect enough powers, and the decisions and execution become complex.
Depends on level and classes being used.
I scale the speed at 7~9.
When i play M&M or 3D&T, the speed and freedom of this games makes me wonder why i still play PF, haha.
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hi pathfinders,
I see the game speed come up quite a bit as an issue. I was just watching a Dark Heresy review and he was saying that game zoomed along quite well when the action started up. In your experience how does Pathfinder fit in, in terms of speed? I guess the fastest and the slowest games you've played would be the bounds of this scale. 1 being fast, 10 being sloooooooow.
booger=boy
The fastest by a mile is Savage Worlds. The rest is trickier. From fastest to slowest in my experience:
Savage Worlds (with no miniatures, I hate using miniatures in rpgs)
Godlike/Wild Talents
Feng Shui
New World of Darkness
"Between" World of Darkness (Orpheus, Adventure!, etc.)
Old World of Darkness
Legend of the Five Rings 4e
A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying
AD&D (no minis)
Star Wars Saga (no minis)
D&D 3rd/Pathfinder (no no minis)
Exalted
Shadowrun 4e
Savage Worlds (the one time I saw it used with miniatures)
D&D 4e (I can't figure out how to avoid minis to my satisfaction)
D&D 3rd/Pathfinder (with minis)
If I put nothing in parenthesis, those are games that assume no minis to start. But yeah, those are the games I've had enough experience with to really judge.
So, uh, yes, I do find 3rd edition D&D to take quite a while, but as long as there's no minis, it's still acceptably fast as far as I'm concerned. It's the minis I hate. They drag everything to a grinding halt and create a visible difference between you the player and you the character. Yuck.
I'll still play a game with minis, but I sure as hell won't run one.
It's slow, but slow isn't necessarily bad. I don't think a game of speed chess is superior to a game of regular chess, for instance.
On a scale of 1-10, I'd put Pathfinder at a 6. However, as Evil Lincoln mentioned, Pathfinder has quite a change in pace from low to high level. To break it down, I'd say 1st level Pathfinder starts at a 3 plateau's at a 6 through levels 5-12, and ends up at an 8 by 20th level.
Here's a first attempt at rating some other systems:
1 - free-form roleplaying
2 -
3 - D&D, QAGS
4 - AD&D 1st edition, Storyteller (early editions), New World of Darkness
5 - AD&D 2nd edition, Storyteller (later editions), Rifts
6 - Pathfinder, D&D 3.0, D&D 3.5, D&D 4th, GURPS
7 - Shadowrun (all editions), HERO
8 - Rollmaster
9 -
10 -
To me, speed itself is not a goal. A fight can take 2 hours as long as it's 2 hours of fun. However, many times the slow pace can make you feel irrelevant and makes it plain boring just watching someone else roll a bunch of dice over and over.
While I agree that speed is not the goal of playing out a scenario, I think speed should be a design goal of the game system - to allow for more time roleplaying and less time figuring out how much damage to subtract on a hit.
Two of my least favorite parts of Pathfinder are critical hit confirmation rolls and iterative attacks at differing bonuses. Both really add to the "watching someone else roll a bunch of dice" problem.
Another factor is that each player decides what to do when their initiative comes up, instead of deciding at the same time and then resolving the turn like you do in Rolemaster for example. RMFRP, while needing much more bookkeeping, is actually pretty fast because of how turns are declared and then resolved.
Funny that you would mention Rollmaster as "Fast" while I was writing my earlier post rating it "slow". I've only played Rollmaster once, so I'll defer to your opinion on that.
The staggering amount of bonuses from various sources that go on and off almost randomly is another source of delay as the GM has to recalculate everything on the fly more than once almost every fight.
Amen brother!
I agree with Evil Lincoln that Pathfinder gets slower at higher levels. It also seems clear to me that the more participants in a combat, the longer it takes to play. The worst case I have seen was an 11-round combat with 20 participants (6 PCs, four allied NPCs, and 10 opponents, at APL 8) that spanned three sessions. At three hours a pop, that totaled up to 9 hours of play to resolve 66 seconds of action. Now we're not the fastest group of gamers by any stretch of the imagination, but we're not exactly dragging our feet either.
Savage Worlds is the other system we use and it flies. Mass combat in particular has been a revelation (yes, I know this isn't comparing apples to apples). We ran a proof of concept test using the Battle of the Hornburg (Helm's Deep). I can't remember the exact numbers, but it took something like 20 minutes to set up (that included creating the NPCs Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and a Uruk Hai commander from scratch!), and 10 minutes to run. The inclusion of "Wild Cards" (PCs) actually did impact the final outcome: the forces of Rohan lost the battle, but Saruman's forces were significantly reduced. Not bad for 30 minutes.
On the upside for Pathfinder, the long combats buy me time to figure out what comes next after the fight.
SPEED:
Fastest Game:Cyberpunk
Middle Game: Hero System
Slowest Game: Role Master & Pathfinder are about the same, with the countless hours of looking up rules.
On a scale of 1(fast) to 10(slow), I'd give Pathfinder a 6-7 IF players are planning ahead. When you get the people that space out until someone reminds them it's their turn and THEN they start trying to figure out what they'll do, it goes to a 9 easily.
It's not a video-game, but it moves as fast as it can; I enjoy the play *experience* or whatever :P
When you get the people that space out until someone reminds them it's their turn and THEN they start trying to figure out what they'll do, it goes to a 9 easily.
Indeed, sloppy attention can take a 3 minute encounter to 30 minutes or longer (no blame).
Minis sped our 3.5 game up. So did having a talk with the guy who always waited until his turn to decide what he wanted to do. When he eventually moved away, it sped up more. It sped up even more when the player who only likes playing fighter-types got back to playing her favorite fighting character. It sped up even more when the person who doesn't like spells much didn't have to deal with them anymore. It got even faster when the new guy came in; he knows what he wants to do, and doesn't argue if he needs to heal somebody; very, very cooperative and decisive player. I am looking forward to starting our new campaign. Pathfinder ought to be our fastest game yet, now that our most impulsive and craziest player is back in town.
As to other RPGs and Wargames i've played, same holds true. It's going to be a combination of the right props for the right people, the right character type for each, how engaged they are, how well they know the rules, or how willing they are to trust you when you advise them if a thing will or will not work.
It's probably not a coincidence that the more trust there is, the faster the game goes.
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Players shouldn't have to crack a single book during a session, at least not without already knowing exactly which page they are flipping to and why.
Oh, I don't know about that. Detect Magic is a cantrip but its description runs to a hundred plus words and that's not counting the two tables. Seems like a little book-checking on things like that shouldn't slow things down too much.
Now, that said, I personally supplement my character sheets with personalized spell descriptions, descriptions of extraordinary, spell-like, and supernatural abilities, class and race abilities and so on simply so I WON'T have to look things up and so that the math on things like "X per level" is done in advance, but that's pretty much the same thing as looking it up in the book, really.
Slowest Game: Role Master & Pathfinder are about the same, with the countless hours of looking up rules....am I the only GM that would say "alright Ted, you have 3 more sessions - either get it together with knowing how your character works, or you can't play this (whatever element keeps requiring looking up rules) anymore."
And as a GM, if I don't know exactly where to look to find the ruling I need in the book - I make a call on how it works for now and make a note to look it up after the session so I'll know it if it comes up again.
...and I also only ever answer a request someone makes to hand them a book with one word "Why?" Players shouldn't have to crack a single book during a session, at least not without already knowing exactly which page they are flipping to and why.
Actually, yes, you really are the only GM who has ever done that, you should feel ashamed.
JUST KIDDING!
...am I the only GM that would say "alright Ted, you have 3 more sessions - either get it together with knowing how your character works, or you can't play this (whatever element keeps requiring looking up rules) anymore."
That's something I could never see myself doing. At least not the way you worded it.
And as a GM, if I don't know exactly where to look to find the ruling I need in the book - I make a call on how it works for now and make a note to look it up after the session so I'll know it if it comes up again.
Yeah, I totally do that all the time.
...and I also only ever answer a request someone makes to hand them a book with one word "Why?" Players shouldn't have to crack a single book during a session, at least not without already knowing exactly which page they are flipping to and why.
I would never do this either.
My list:
1- Dark Heresy
2- Star Wars WEG edition
3- Old World of Darkness
4- New World of Darkness (only because I know the old rules better)
5- Deadlands (Not no dangblasted Savage Worlds. I like my colored paper clips!)
6- Torg (and worth every second)
7- D&D 2nd Ed
8- 3.5/PF
9- Don't really have a nine. Maybe the one time I played MERP
10- Rifts. Oh. My. Slowness. two hours for one turn of combat. I know it's not fair of me to put that at the top since I was running 16 players at the time.... Still though, because of that experience Rifts is forever associated as the slowest game in existence in my mind.
I meant to imply (and technically did so given the use of the word 'more') that there had already been multiple sessions of Ted slowing down the game because of constantly needing to reference books during the session.
It's not like I have some strict ruling about how much time you have to get used to a character and its abilities - I just don't feel I should let your desire to play a character you can't keep track of impede everyone (your self included) having a good time playing the game and moving on in the campaign.
That's never bugged me and I've once had another player complain about that situation either. So I suppose that I just don't have a personal context for why I'd say that. Let me clear here, I don't begrudge you for that, or think that you're wrong. I just doubt I'd ever tell someone that.
I do this because, in my experience, 99 times out of 100 the player is asking for the book because they have a question they want to know the answer to and it is either a) something I can answer for them less time than it takes for them to ask for the book and tell me why they want it - if they had just asked me the question in the first place, or b) completely irrelevant to the current situation and resultant in them being distracted.
I apply the rule of not opening a book during the session unless it is absolutely necessary to all of the games I have ever played - it's a large part of why I ranked Pathfinder, which seems to have a common rating of 7-8, and AD&D (which you rated at a 7 yourself) as being a 3.
Insisting that the players know how to play their characters without an open book = faster...
If a player has a rules question, I tend to prefer if they look it up themselves. It beats slowing down their turn to ask me, or worse yet, interrupting another player's turn. Of course I don't mind answering questions, but I think hands on experience with the books gains an advantage of speeding everything up in the long run.
Also, I don't think I've had a problem with someone getting distracted by a rulebook since I was 12, but I've heard about it enough times to believe I've just been lucky that way.The reason that I rank PF as a 7 isn't so much because of time spent looking up rules. It's because overall, in my experience, hit point and level based systems are inherently slow. This gets compounded by iterative attacks and less often used spell/abilities that do need to be looked up and adjudicated which come along with mid to high level play.
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Weird. I think Rolemaster runs super quick when you know the rules. Everything is streamlined and runs off the same system. You don't have to learn any subsystems nor modifiers really - you just need to know where the relevant tables are, which doesn't take much. Spells typically have three sentence descriptions. We played it for years and got through stacks more encounters per session than playing DnD or PF.
Granted, it probably looks intimidating to someone who doesn't know the rules yet.
The speed of the game is also directly effected by how well each player knows his/her character, their role, and their abilities.
The player who spends 3 min during combat trying to decide what spell to cast slows down play, as does out of character chatter and metagaming.
To address the metagaming at our tables, during combat you may include a statement of up to 6 words to your party members along with your actions that round. This way some of the more veteran players can yell advice to their comrades if the need arises.
In our larger game of 10-12 players, if you don't have your action ready on your initiative you get skipped and are counted as holding until you decide what to do, at which point the initiative order is shuffled to accommodate this.
Again, to me it comes down to knowing exactly what your character can do and exactly what each ability does without having to flip around in the book every time. Make a cheat sheet with commonly used abilities and die rolls for yourself if that helps.
If you have a good software ready for use, like MapTool with a proper framework, speed keeps very good. It is slowed only by players who can't decide what to do or by quite unusual effects that require more thought. For the rest, everyone can concentrate on the scene rather than in "uh... so I have to roll a... d8, was it? And I have to add Strength plus... let me see, I have a +2 enhancement bonus and........."
overall it is pretty slow
i got a 21 on my knowledge local, so that means you learned the DC 15, 20 stuff
each new book adds new slow...hexes, curses, guns , ki etc....all these new stuff PCs can do..and conditions, conditions, conditions
the fact people say use this software, and there are flowcharts for grapple show it work!!
so
PF is about 7
Savage worlds is about a 3-4, it has opposed roles, bennies to get re-rolls, and a wierd wound system, that can slow it
Barbarians of lemuria is about a 2, that is fast
freeform games aren't overly fast...you can often counter what another says, use alarms if you think someone has said something that cant be carried forward etc.....they often have some mechanic, which may be slow.
The One Ring is about a 5
Rolemaster is about the same as PF
all in my H.O
Pathfinder's slowness stems from the following on a mechanical level.
1) A hodge-podge of mechanics, each with their own refresh rates. 4e was a significant improvement in this regard.
2) Iterative attacks.
3) Death-by-Cheese Grater.
My systems in order:
1 D6 WEG
2 Feng Shui
4 Basic Roleplaying (Call of Cthulhu, Glorantha)
4 D&D 4th edition
5 GURPS with reference cards
7 Rolemaster
8 Pathfinder
10 Hero
On a social contract side, what matters most is making sure everyone is thinking about what they're going to do before their turn to declare comes up. The guy reading his comics or the woman knitting while waiting for their turn to come up - at which point they need a 2 minute recap of everything that happened before they can decide what to do - they annoy me.
Who I'm playing with makes the biggest difference.
Yeah, once Derek and I start talking about movies and 1e, rolling for initiative can take upwards of 30 minutes...
Just to be the odd one out:
I found Dark Heresy to be way slower than Pathfinder. Both games ran fairly quick when starting out, but I found Dark Heresy to suffer more from abilitybloat and modifiers than PF. I was the GM, and ended up canceling the campaign when they were just a few ranks away from pre-ascension cap - the absurd amount of rolling and such the assassin had to do each round for example was bogging everything down.
Personally I don't mind how long or short the actual combat takes, it's when some players takes way longer than the others, either due to character abilities or taking ages to think only in their turn. And PF can be pretty bad there (classes with pets, summonings, henchmen and what have you).
I totally agree with those who said it depends on the players, if you have players that figure out their actions before their turn, the pace can fly.
A lot of the time, if a battle is straightforward I have every player go at once. My players don't cheat so that important trust allows me to speed up battles when sessions are running late.
Besides, if my players were to cheat, then I would cheat and GM's cheat HARDER!
In some of my PF/D&D experiences, the DM sets 1 minute to you start and end your turn, using a hourglass to measure the time.
Some DMs i know don't allow Animal Companions and Summons, and that too helped to shorten the time between players.
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Starts at 2, ends at 9.
Low levels are easy. High levels can get very complicated with all the buffs, conditions, spells effects, spell-like effects, supernatural effects, extraordinary effects, terrain modifiers, interpretation of the rules, etc.
Side note, I find Mutants and Mastermind to run very quickly, but note we don't use tactical movement rules, and we're loose about the combat rules in general. I find my various PF games much more structured.
D&D 4e (I can't figure out how to avoid minis to my satisfaction)
I've done it. You just have to focus on using more minions and critters with powers that don't 'move' things, and let your players know that powers that focus on moving will be not as useful. Keep it to one non-minion enemy per fight and it's pretty doable.
i have had a very limited interaction with different rpg titles only playing, wolrd of darkness: changling, vampire, werewolf, dnd2.0, dnd3.0, dnd4.0, pathfinder
what may look wierd is i put console/pc games in the list as a baseline to what i consider the fastest game speed in my mind.
1-4 rpg/ online mmo games. due to rules/optimization learning curve,
2-6 dnd2.0. everyone knew the rules, and worked well together, minis sped up the game. =]
3-6: dnd.3.0 dnd 3.5 . players worked well together and helped eachother out. also home rules that helped speed play within the limits of the game, and minis help speed the game up. =D
4-6: pathfinder. relearning new core rules. enthusiasm in game.
6-8: any world of darkness game. by proxy of so much fluff the game slowed, and that was a good thing. no minis =[
9-10: dnd4.0 . due to a bad player dynamic, learning new rules, constant change of dms, finally disintrest in the game due to online message board fan base, minis did nothing to speed up the game =(
Slower then L5R, faster then D&D 4.0 (two games I also like). That's all I can say.