Quote from: Shipyard Locked;883119I'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.

This depends heavily on the players' appetite for combat, the skill and speed of th GM with the combat system, the interestingness and complexity of the situation, and so on.

I've usually run combat-oriented games for combat fans, using TFT and GURPS. TFT is simpler and faster than GURPS, though once you get good at GURPS, it can be nearly as fast. Requiring players to be ready with their action when it's time for them to say what they do, helps a lot. So does having the GM do most of the rolling and resolution without mentioning the game mechanics - just describing what happens as he PCs are aware of it, and moving the counters appropriately.

My players don't seem to be visibly put-off by heavy combat except in the rare cases where there is a massive battle and I play it out on the map with counters and stats for each of 100-200 fighters, which has sometimes taken 2-3 sessions, with the PC's only getting to do something amidst all the NPC combat. I developed some systems to speed up NPC combat without sacrificing too much detail, though, which helps.

In a session that involves several little combats separated by some non-combat, I'd say you can fit a small fight per hour in pretty comfortably. Or more for short/small/simple fights. A fight between just 2-4 people can be done in just a few minutes with a fast GM.

Of course, if you allow people to check and discuss rules and options during combat, and don't know the rules well and so on, then that can go on and on. So I don't allow that. As the GURPS GM advice section says, "when in doubt, roll and shout" - resolve it as makes best sense to you, and discuss and master the rules between sessions.

OSR games are super fast and furious for combat. In either LotFP or DCC or Appendix P (Dark Albion's house system) or Arrows of Indra, etc., I can easily fit a half-dozen fights into a night's gaming, and often more.

Now, Aces & Eights on the other hand has a super-detailed combat system and it would probably not be a good idea to have more than one gunfight per night.  Two or even maybe three if it was one-on-one showdowns; but the system gets more complex and slows down more the more people who play it.

I have a large group (8 PCs)

My AD&D game could comfortably fit a dozen fights in a session, ranging from small skirmishes to much bigger fights with 20 - 30 enemies or even more. Generally, any number of fights still left plenty of time for exploration, problem solving, planning etc ...

Currently playing Hackmaster (current edition), and it's more like 1 to 4, depending on size and difficulty, and combat heavy sessions tend to involve combat and combat-planning, with not huge amounts of time left for anything else.

Edit: And I see that I've just given an answer that is almost identical to Pundit's immediately before me, choosing equivalent systems with very similar answers.

Further edit: Oh, in my GURPS X-Com game, UFO and alien base assaults were set up as ongoing combats on very big maps that took up the vast majority of a session, essentially run as a tactical wargame. That's not really indicative of the speed of GURPS combat though, as the more "story" oriented missions generally culminated in a single combat (or, sometimes, none at all) that was completed a lot faster.

The world has gone mad, mad I tell you!

I think of The Fantasy Trip (melee/wizard if you like) to be one of the crunchiest tactical fantasy combat systems out there, and it is rare for a fight to take longer than 10-15 minutes, unless it is huge ('yuuuge!!!') or no one at the table knows how to play.

I refuse to play games that are much slower than this; it just isn't fun. And for some reason, the same games that make combat drag on forever tend to have rules that make it nearly impossible for player characters to die. So, both slow and with a highly predictable outcome.

I run OD&D, and with 4-5 players and a similar number of enemies a single combat turn runs in 2-3 minutes, and at lower levels a combat will last 4-8 combat turns.

When I ran OD&D in NYC I often got 4 or 5 combats into a 2 to 3 hour session.

That's one advantage of the OD&D one minute combat round, abstract everything, all creatures get one attack, all attacks do 1d6; it can run a combat blazingly fast.

well im with several others on this i think its heavily dependent on a large number of factors.
 some of the biggest are likely to be
>system used
>number of combatants
>experience of gm / players involved

for example in a white room situation i can see the log horizon trpg
both playing very fast with 4 to 6 ish fights in a 4-6 hour session if the player know what they are doing
or 1-3 fights with luck if they dont

Quote from: RPGPundit;883753Now, Aces & Eights on the other hand has a super-detailed combat system and it would probably not be a good idea to have more than one gunfight per night.  Two or even maybe three if it was one-on-one showdowns; but the system gets more complex and slows down more the more people who play it.

You know I would be interested in seeing you try Hackmaster 5e after mastering Aces & Eight. From what I understand the combat system is very similar.

Quote from: estar;883935You know I would be interested in seeing you try Hackmaster 5e after mastering Aces & Eight. From what I understand the combat system is very similar.

It is, but for one gigantic difference, the firearms combat using the "Killer Crosshairs"-like ShotClock.

HM5 has nothing like that, has not as fine of round timing, and the criticals are different.  If you have mastered A&8 combat, HM5 will be simple.

Quote from: Doom;883150Indeed, 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.

Yep  YMMV, big time.

Majority of the 4e combats we ran were 30 minutes +/- 5 minutes.  The others were big epic set pieces designed to last a chunk of time.

2-3 depending on the session's or more accurately, the players' goals.

Is that for any particular system or all systems?

Hackmaster 5e has an awesome looking app for combat.  I tried my best to sell HM to our group, bust sadly in the end it didn't go- though it did get us to play AD&D again- TOEE. We did do a few mock combats in HM 5e and they were really fun.

For something like AD&D- which must be stated we ran very much like basic, 4-6 combats could be gotten through in a 3-4 hour block of time.  Mind you these were standard encounters- "You enter a room- 5 orcs are playing cards..." type of stuff.  If it was a large battle, that would take longer.

3rd edition d&d, and moreso 4th edition- God, the combats took forever.  For 4th, a single combat would take at least an hour- most times more.  I know that there's players who will say that they everyone was on their toes and their combats only took 30 minutes- but, shit- that wasn't the case with us.  Everything about 4th was a slog for me...

Sommerjon- for your 4th ed combats- were all the players "johnny on the spot"?  or were me and my friends fucking slugs...    the latter could be so very true here....

Quote from: RunningLaser;884097Hackmaster 5e has an awesome looking app for combat.  I tried my best to sell HM to our group, bust sadly in the end it didn't go- though it did get us to play AD&D again- TOEE. We did do a few mock combats in HM 5e and they were really fun.

Jolly's insanely detailed app has never seen public release (I presume that's what you're referring to), but there is an excellent pdf I use for running combats which makes managing the status of about 16 monsters/NPCs remarkably simple.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;883119I'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.

If your RPG game has rules for combat rounds that your group plays by, and you do have combat during a game session, expect the majority of your game session to be a long hard slog with little to no amount of role-playing or anything else getting done.

The answer is 1 here.


Now if you treat combat like any other task in the game, a group can get at least 3 or 4 or however many good combat scenes done in real-time during a game session. And still while role-playing.

The answer is several here.