I'm looking for data followed by opinions here.

Name some systems. Then, based on your experience, state the maximum number of fights you can 'comfortably' fit into a single reasonable length (4-6 hours) session for the chosen system(s).

Comfortably in this case is defined as not feeling like a slog or chore to the players or the GM.

I'm starting this thread because I feel like the designers of systems that are intended to feature a lot of combat are often extremely optimistic about how fast and frequent fights actually are under their rules. I want to see how others feel about this.

ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG can comfortably fit in at least two combat encounters during a 4-6 hour session between an equal number of foes and characters, or a few powerful foes against five characters. That includes explaining rules, narrating combat, magic and using the theatre of the mind, instead of miniatures and hexes, to illustrate movement.

Naturally, I am its creator so I understand all the nuances. Our playtesters are also running combat on their own from the GM's chair, and takes the same amount of time because they understand the system.

We recently had a new GM run a single instance of combat, and it took an hour at most. When adding in magic, it took roughly 1.3 hours.

This seems like a 'how long is a piece of string?' question and is equally impossible to answer. I don't care how fast or slow a version of D&D is, I'm always going to think it's a chore because I just don't like many of its assumptions. Most people playing the Boardgame Titan for the first time are going to think it's hellishly drawn out and tedious, but can be played with great speed by players who are expert with the rules and the game can zoom along. A combat in RuneQuest can be drawn out and complicated but nevertheless hugely exciting but will never be played by people who "don't like roll-under systems", equally a combat in RQ can end in a single round since a resolution doesn't depend on hacking everything to bits.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;883119I'm starting this thread because I feel like the designers of systems that are intended to feature a lot of combat are often extremely optimistic about how fast and frequent fights actually are under their rules. I want to see how others feel about this.

I feel kind of feel the same way.

I also feel like, despite any evidence to the contrary, I am always overly optimistic about

• How quickly my players will decide what their PC is going to try to do this round in combat.
• How long it takes my players to roll the dice and announce the result.
• How long it will take for our group to play out any given interaction with NPCs.
• How long it will take the players to plan (outside of combat) what the group is going to attempt to do next.

But I don't blame the designer for any of that. That's on me.

Quote from: Bilharzia;883130This seems like a 'how long is a piece of string?' question and is equally impossible to answer.

Despite mostly agreeing with this, I will still try to answer.

For Honor+Intrigue it depends a bit on the experience level of the characters involved. Expert and better duelists effectively get additional actions which extends the duration of a combat round.

Pawn opponents (the H+I Mook-equivalent) can be fought and defeated (the usual result) quickly. You could have easily run half a dozen or more combat encounters with Pawns in a 3 hour session.

Retainer level opponents will take longer. If the Retainer is an expert duelist, even longer still. Unless the session is non-stop fighting 1 encounter with Retainers per hour is about as fast as you can play out.

Villain level opponents take a lot longer. One combat with multiple Villains and Hero PCs can take 2-3 hours.

Playing BFRPG with my students, we can fit 1-2 fights per session. Here are the caveats:

- our sessions are ~40 minutes long, INCLUDING farting around with setup (grabbing dice and character sheets, running back to lockers to get lunch, etc)

- our PCs are all low level

- the PCs spend a lot of time getting into fights with stuff they shouldn't, and are often killed as a consequence (see previous point)

My DCC group is harder to measure, because we can go entire 4-6 hour sessions without any combat, and they try to make every fights unbalanced in their favour as possible. We have had four or more combats in a session without noticeably reducing the time spent exploring, planning, and roleplaying. They are pretty much the complete opposite of my school group.

Indeed, how long IS a piece of string?

I had 4th edition D&D fights go over 3 hours consistently--but that was with 12th level characters, 8 players at the table. Around 8th level, you can be confident of around 2.5 hours a fight.

I've had 4 hour sessions of 2E D&D go through half a dozen or more distinct battles, with 4 players, around third level (man, shoulda seen how many plastic figures I had to put away after that day, well over 50...)

Level, number of players, significance of battle (4 orcs is different than a dozen orcs, though both could be encountered in the same adventuring day).

That said, when I build a dungeon for a regulation 4.5 hours of play time (start at 6:30ish, end at 11ish), I need at least 4 decent battles in that dungeon. Now, that's for 5th edition D&D, roughly 4th level characters, 5-7 players.

Bottom line, YMMV, big time.

With Fractured Kingdom most of the demos are kept to around two to three fights per 3.5 hour session. This assumes all players are first timers and will need rules explained to them. We do have some demos that have up to 5 but it's designed like a modern dungeon crawl, escaping from an underground research facility.

With Metahumans Rising low level combat has been speed up quite a bit with the introduction of Background Characters (aka Mooks). These help simulate taking down street crime and some low level villains.

The demo has 5 potential encounters.

Spoiler

A battle with a medium sized gang of super jocks aided by a lightening powered super villain. A three way battle between a corporate hit squad  and more super jocks joined by a gargoyle. A race to stop a roiding out football player from demolishing everyone on the field. A shakedown of several now mutating super jocks. With the climax potentially involving a full super team, the two super villains from before plus the rest of their team, a large mob of now mutated jocks and their new leader, and the corporate hit squad. However, depending on if the players tackle the story, that fight fight may just be a small band of mutated jocks and half the villain team.

However, the more scenes in which the players are successful building up to the climax the few foes they have to face. So, I've never had a session go where the players actually have all four lead in encounters and still face the full villain team at the end. Generally, at least one of the villains gets taken out in a lead in scene and occasionally so does the hit squad.

While I agree with Bilharzia ... hrm.  

I do GURPS, and my sessions are approximately 6 1/2 hours long.  There's a fair bit of digression (a room full of old friends who see one another only once a fortnight), and a long lunch break.

If we're talking a mano-a-mano, that doesn't take long at all.  But the battles my group tends to get into involve at least four PCs, two party NPCs, and a couple dozen bad guys.  If that takes as little as an hour, that's pretty quick.  I don't commonly plan for more than one of these a session.

The largest battle in recent decades involved five PCs, 27 party NPCs (I am not making this number up) and various allies, spread across a city center against a massive bad guy horde, as the climax of a four-year-long plot arc.  That one took the better part of two sessions.

My 4e game (level 26) has 1 fight per 3 hour session, it's been that way since around 11th level. At 1st level it was 2 fights/session. Not sure we've ever had 3 fights in a session.

When we were playing D&D4e, we never managed more than one fight in a session, and it would never take less than 2 hours. So if we got towards the end of our slot and it looked like a fight was about to break out, we'd stop and be ready to run it at the start of the next session.

By contrast in 13th Age which came next, we could easily get 2-3 fights without breaking the usual flow of a 4 hour session.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;883119Name some systems. Then, based on your experience, state the maximum number of fights you can 'comfortably' fit into a single reasonable length (4-6 hours) session for the chosen system(s).

This is very hard to put into precise numbers, since there are many variables involved (number of players, their expertise level, number of opponents, etc), so rather than break things into details, I'll settle for time:

When we assume a session to be 3-4 hours long (and that it starts no later than 6 PM), then the sweet spot according to yours truly is 1 tactical encounter no longer than 30 minutes per each hour of play, or 2-4 no longer than 10 minutes/hour.

The real problem starts with over 30 minutes long encounters per session. If there are "summons" involved (creatures summoned/controlled by combatants), it's really exhausting.

Systems? Pathfinder, d20. I rarely touch anything more complicated than this.

Fun fact:
The longest single, continuous fight I recall was 4 PC x 2 NPC (+1 additional DMPC) in Amber RPG. It featured multilayer reality environment similar to  Inception movie and it took +/- 5 hours for PCs to win this Armageddon.

I think that in order for any data to be meaningful, we need to quantify exactly what we meant by a ' fight'.

Pick any system you like, and a fight with a pair of kobolds is likely going to take less time than one against horde of orcs that outnumber the party 6 to 1.

Also, party composition affects combat times. A group light on, or with no AOE capable magic will take longer to get through a bunch of foes than a group heavy with magical power.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;883234Pick any system you like, and a fight with a pair of kobolds is likely going to take less time than one against horde of orcs that outnumber the party 6 to 1.

Not my experience with D&D4e compared to ACKS. A standard 4 PCs vs 10 opponents fight took on average 2.5 hours in D&D4e. By contrast we ran a 29-member PC+Henchmen party v 60-odd raiding tribesmen skirmish in about 1.5 hours in ACKS.

I should note we use a battlemat and tokens/minis for both systems.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;883234I think that in order for any data to be meaningful, we need to quantify exactly what we meant by a ' fight'.

Pick any system you like, and a fight with a pair of kobolds is likely going to take less time than one against horde of orcs that outnumber the party 6 to 1.

Also, party composition affects combat times. A group light on, or with no AOE capable magic will take longer to get through a bunch of foes than a group heavy with magical power.

While we're comparing apples to spandex with Metahumans Rising a fight with two Kobolds would likely take less than a turn. An action from two players or less than 5 minutes. Assuming they are like the classic D&D Kobolds, they would be build as an extremely low threat.  

If we used the same measure with Orcs outnumbering the PCs 6 to one, these would be slightly more powerful background characters, likely with a leader of some type. This would likely constitute a large mob and may take 2 to 4 turns depending on how creative the players get and the toughness of the Orc leader. So between 20 and 45 minutes.

Now if we're talking 3872 Orcs as a GM I wouldn't run this as a combat but as a Disaster to encourage players to get more creative in their narration and use of powers. Something this scale would likely take around a hour to a hour and a half.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;883234I think that in order for any data to be meaningful, we need to quantify exactly what we meant by a ' fight'.

Pick any system you like, and a fight with a pair of kobolds is likely going to take less time than one against horde of orcs that outnumber the party 6 to 1.

Also, party composition affects combat times. A group light on, or with no AOE capable magic will take longer to get through a bunch of foes than a group heavy with magical power.

Well, sure.  If the OP is looking for a genuine survey of "how long a fight takes in X system," then we'd need to run a number of test fights, with the following parameters in mind:

* Low skill vs high skill;
* Low armor protection/defenses vs high AP/D;
* Low supernatural aid vs high supernatural aid;
* Numbers on each side;
* Use of optional rules/"light" options/splat rules;
* Familiarity with the rules by all parties;
* Relative aggression of all parties;
* Availability of battlefield insta-healing;
* Willingness of the table to allow dithering ...

There are probably more.  

That being said, just by way of example, again using GURPS ... if we have veteran players running a combat between three or four 50 pt shmucks, all unarmored, none with shields, zero magic, and with a GM keeping things snappy, that's going to be over pretty quickly unless everyone's hanging back and fighting very defensively.  I doubt the battle would take five minutes, and it could be over after the first round, a minute flat.

My current group, by contrast, has four wizards (ranging from 135 to over 300 pts), and one beleaguered NPC spearwoman trying to protect them as best she may.  One of the wizards is a combat specialist, one an elementalist with good combat punch, one the same but a relative rookie (the 135er), and one a utility caster with damn near no ability to put hit points of damage on an enemy unless he hauls out his arquebus.

The last major battle they fought was defending a frontier fort against an orc horde, with about 15 useful locals aiding in the defense, four of whom were armored and trained legionnaires.  THAT one took over three hours.