BTW Justin, belated congrats on getting the Line Developer gig for Infinity. :hatsoff:

Quote from: CRKrueger;887198BTW Jason, belated congrats on getting the Line Developer gig for Infinity. :hatsoff:

same :hatsoff:

Quote from: Sable Wyvern;886060I don't see any video evidence of this in your post ...

:nono:

Here you go.

Because slings > Crossbows. heh-heh.
https://youtu.be/JVdq1Z5cSvA?t=177

For the curious, that is a slingshot firing a marble into ballistic gel.

Quote from: RPGPundit;886837As with most things, old-school D&D tends to do it the way we became used to doing things, so we internalized that as the only proper way to do it ever after.

There, fixed that.  :hatsoff:

While working on a seperate project I noticed something interesting.

O, BX, AD&D & 2e combats are faster than 3 and up. Using conversion notes for 5e in particular I am seeing that characters of comprable levels in 5e are taking longer to deal with foes of comprable AC to older editions after a certain threshold of AC.

All 5e classes fight at about the same level as an OD&D or BX Cleric an AD&D Thief. Though even then at after a point they overtake 5e. An AD&D fighter will totally steamroller a 5e fighter due to hitting substantially more often and that is not even factoring in gear.

So with later editions combats take longer due to missing more and the varying degrees of HP inflation. It is though not so noticeable till after level 10. Though 5e combats still zoom along nicely.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;887189Expanding on my last point: The general rule of thumb that major interactions (like investigating a club or searching a suspect's house or most things I'd define as a node in node-based design) isn't something that I try to "force" as a GM. It's just kind of the naturalistic pace at which a typical scenario seems to resolve itself.

I want a typical fight in the system I'm using to fill a similar slot of "meaningful interaction". When it doesn't, the pace of the game goes wonky: If everything else still naturally takes about 20-30 minutes, but every time there's a fight it takes 90-120 minutes (as it does with D&D4, for example), the combat is taking up more than its "fair share" of the narrative space. And if you don't adjust your scenarios to account for this, scenarios that should comfortably resolve themselves in an an evening suddenly bloat out into 3 or 4 or 5 sessions -- they become slogs.

Alternatively, if you do adjust the scenario design to fit the bloated combats, you can quickly spot the deleterious effect they're having: If you had a scenario that previously features 4-6 meaty investigation scenes and 1 combat, you now have 1 combat and 2-3 investigation scenes.

You also discover that the ways in which you can use combat have become seriously limited. You can't have a combat-heavy scenario where the PCs fight their way through four or five encounters, because after just two combat encounters the session is over.

You get similar effects with other game structures, like dungeon crawls. I've found that getting through roughly 20 rooms in a dungeon is generally the point where players feel pretty good about what they accomplished in an evening's 'crawl. But you can't get anywhere near that pace if simply combat encounters are taking too long to resolve.

(All of this remains subject to general variability, of course: Sometimes you'll fireball a group of goblins and a combat will take 30 seconds to resolve. Sometimes the PCs will end up in an epic siege against an entire compound of a hundred adversaries and a single running combat encounter will take an entire session or even multiple sessions to resolve. Although, in practice, that "single epic combat encounter" can often be seen as being several different encounters that flow naturally from one to the next across the strategic field of battle.)

Fine, that is a good argument against fights taking longer than 12-24 minutes (I really need to edit that post). However, there can easily be made a similar argument that most fights (and in most styles of play) should take less than that, preferably half or less the time you need for a typical "node". In essence, they aren't nodes, they're intersections in the connections between nodes.
High-lethality systems are best for that, as a rule, though there are other solutions as well:).

And of course, in some genres or styles of play you just need fights that are as long as a full node, or longer. A duel in a swaschbuckling story can well be the most important part of it, and in fact, the whole campaign so far might have been a means to arrange the duel you wanted. Many players would see a short fight to be a waste in that case.
(Personally, I'd see it as a sign I'm doing everything right - but it is a popular opinion).

Oh, and congratulations "on getting the Line Developer gig for Infinity", which I only learned by CRKrueger's post;).

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;887159OD&D is combat heavy. I am comfortable doing 15+ combats per session.

With how many different sets of PCs?

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;887159OD&D is combat heavy. I am comfortable doing 15+ combats per session.

OD&D is not combat heavy. You can actually get much further by avoiding combats. Chainmail on the other hand...

I think even 20 minutes is high for the average old-school D&D fight.  Sure, you can have fights that last that long, or even longer, if you have a ton of PCs, NPCs, and opponents all using complex tactics.  I have had some fights go kind of long when you have, for example, PCs engaged in tactically defensive combat, like holing themselves up in a tighly-packed formation in a hallway to fight a large number of lower-level humanoids.  Or if they're fighting a couple of big monsters with special immunities, or stuff like that.

But generally speaking, it doesn't go that long.

I suspect a lot of people who think old-school D&D combat is really lengthy just haven't played a lot of old-school D&D.  I further wonder if a lot of those who think old-school D&D combat is really lengthy weren't making use of morale rules...  in 3e and later, combat can take a really long time because the rules are more complex, characters are more buffed up (and monsters in turn more resistant) due to survivability-inflation, and because there are no morale rules so a lot of GMs will have every fucking monster group fighting to the last creature.

In our 3e games, it was largely dependant on character level. Assuming a 10th level party vs. a session of level appropriate ECLs, about 10 in a 4-6 hr session.

In our 4e games, regardless of level, it took approx. 40 min per battle. So in a 4-6 hr session your looking about about 8 battles.

In the few 5e ones we ran, we'd get in about 12 or more in a 4-6 hr session.

Unfortunately for us our sessions are about 3 hours max.

Quote from: RPGPundit;887999I think even 20 minutes is high for the average old-school D&D fight.  Sure, you can have fights that last that long, or even longer, if you have a ton of PCs, NPCs, and opponents all using complex tactics.  I have had some fights go kind of long when you have, for example, PCs engaged in tactically defensive combat, like holing themselves up in a tighly-packed formation in a hallway to fight a large number of lower-level humanoids.  Or if they're fighting a couple of big monsters with special immunities, or stuff like that.

Yeah, the long combats in my AD&D game tended to be ones with a lot of tactical lulls, like cautious PCs being unwilling to just charge through a doorway to engage anything and everything that might be waiting in the shadowy depths beyond; instead spending time exchanging the odd volley while making plans, confirming the rear and flanks were protected, trying to gather intelligence on the number, type and position of enemy forces etc ... In a particular case I'm thinking of, a group actually detached from the main party (who remained to hold the doorway), went to a previously explored area of the dungeon, and came back with a door that they pulled down so as to use it as a mobile riot shield when they finally pushed forward into the room -- somehow managing to do so without encountering any wandering monsters.

Of course, while they're doing this, the enemy is also repositioning, calling up reinforcements and, if given enough time, sending reserves around to try and flank the intruders.

Quote from: Omega;887382OD&D is not combat heavy. You can actually get much further by avoiding combats. Chainmail on the other hand...

I refute this notion. Most of the key elements of the rules are geared towards combat. It is a "Fantastic Medieval Wargame" after all -- and its deadliness often goes both ways. To your "avoiding combats" there's the flip-side of "picking your battles". Sometimes you retreat, sometimes you crush.

And OD&D lets me play with 8 players or more rather easily and still have lightning-fast combats.

Quote from: RPGPundit;887999I think even 20 minutes is high for the average old-school D&D fight.  Sure, you can have fights that last that long, or even longer, if you have a ton of PCs, NPCs, and opponents all using complex tactics.  I have had some fights go kind of long when you have, for example, PCs engaged in tactically defensive combat, like holing themselves up in a tighly-packed formation in a hallway to fight a large number of lower-level humanoids.  Or if they're fighting a couple of big monsters with special immunities, or stuff like that.

But generally speaking, it doesn't go that long.

Even a fight against kobolds can go for 8 rounds if both sides keep missing and/or rolling low damage, IME.
And WTF are your kobolds doing if they aren't using defensive tactical approaches? Getting slaughtered?

Quote from: Nerzenjäger;888029I refute this notion. Most of the key elements of the rules are geared towards combat. It is a "Fantastic Medieval Wargame" after all -- and its deadliness often goes both ways. To your "avoiding combats" there's the flip-side of "picking your battles". Sometimes you retreat, sometimes you crush.

And OD&D lets me play with 8 players or more rather easily and still have lightning-fast combats.

You kinda fail miserably at refuting then.

You trotted out the old "The rules are all about combat! Thus the game is all about combat!" gag.

Try again please.

For me, I didn't see many long combats until 3E. Prior to that most of the battles in my D&D sessions were handled without miniatures and moved quickly. If we did use miniatures (usually because of the size of the battle or because the players at the table preferred them), that usually slowed things down a bit because there was more of a pause with each action as players decided tactics. But 3E is where I really saw combat eat up play time almost every session. Part of that was the mechanics were more grid and tactic oriented, but I also think that is what a lot of people wanted at the time.