Just an odd thought, after reading a comment by Fiasco on combat consuming more time in recent editions of D&D(3E and 4E), is how much the time you spend in combat while playing D&D is affected by the system.
I've played 2E, 3E and 4E. Combat does indeed take longer in 3E and 4E than it did in 2E, but for the most part when I played 2E back in the 90's and when I ran it again in early 2008 this was balanced by the fact that we fought more often. I'd say roughly the same amount of time was spent in combat regardless of edition(at least in my experience), but the faster combat of 2E simply resulted in fighting more often.
Amount of time could well work out the same so its really just a question of taste as to whether people prefer shorter combats but more of them or a couple of long, drawn out combats. Of course, if combats are shorter you can choose to fill the time with more of the other things while in 3E/4E if you want combat, you are automatically investing more time into it.
Quote from: Fiasco;331815Amount of time could well work out the same so its really just a question of taste as to whether people prefer shorter combats but more of them or a couple of long, drawn out combats. Of course, if combats are shorter you can choose to fill the time with more of the other things while in 3E/4E if you want combat, you are automatically investing more time into it.
Even still, you can spend much less time fighting in the new editions by only having 1 or 2 a night, though that can play havoc with resource management and the abuse of such.
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;331818Even still, you can spend much less time fighting in the new editions by only having 1 or 2 a night, though that can play havoc with resource management and the abuse of such.
In my experience, 1 or 2 combats
IS the night in 3E/4E. It could easily account for at least half of a 4 hour session.
Quote from: Fiasco;331819In my experience, 1 or 2 combats IS the night in 3E/4E. It could easily account for at least half of a 4 hour session.
Depends on the group. 3E tended to be somewhat fast at low levels(1-5) and could take 2+ hours for a single fight once you got to double digits, depending on players and what they were playing. For 4E, I'm a fast paced DM, with players who've been playing 4E since May '08, and I can average 4 fights in a 4hr session with 1.5-2hrs of non-combat mixed in. When other people DM and I'm on the player's side, it tends to be slower. RPGA bears this out, as I can DM an RPGA Adventure in less than 3hrs consistently, while some of our other RPGA DMs can't do it in under 4hrs to save their lives.
Yeah, this is close to my experience (despite my personal preference of avoiding combat entirely and focusing either on wealth accumulation or completing story objectives and gaining the corresponding story awards). Before 3E, we had a lot more fights but they were shorter duration.
I don't believe in the "wall-to-wall fight" formula that took a hold on 3e and pretty much dictated 4e design.
In 3e, I typically have one fight a night... and about 4.5 hours of non-fight play. Fights rarely take me more that half an hour unless it's a climactic slug-fest I designed with lots of baddies.
It did take longer before I started cracking down on fighter types who would not remember which attack bonus went with which of their iterative attacks went with what dice, and made them either jot down their rolls or come up with a color code.
Once I fixed that, I actually found high level fights went quicker than low level fights if I was familiar with the group and they were familiar with their characters.
I don't have experience with post-80's D&D but if you don't mind me generalizing...
I'd say that even though multiple fights in System A can take up the same amount of time as a long fight in System B, you'll also "get more done" in System A because fights have a way of moving things forward in a decisive fashion.
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;331826I don't have experience with post-80's D&D but if you don't mind me generalizing...
I'd say that even though multiple fights in System A can take up the same amount of time as a long fight in System B, you'll also "get more done" in System A because fights have a way of moving things forward in a decisive fashion.
Agree with that. IF you look at a straight dungeon crawl, the old systems handled this quicker.
Quote from: thecasualoblivion;331803Just an odd thought, after reading a comment by Fiasco on combat consuming more time in recent editions of D&D(3E and 4E), is how much the time you spend in combat while playing D&D is affected by the system.
I've played 2E, 3E and 4E. Combat does indeed take longer in 3E and 4E than it did in 2E, but for the most part when I played 2E back in the 90's and when I ran it again in early 2008 this was balanced by the fact that we fought more often. I'd say roughly the same amount of time was spent in combat regardless of edition(at least in my experience), but the faster combat of 2E simply resulted in fighting more often.
Not in my experience playing First edition, in the sense that many people I knew were playing their share of fights, of course, but the time spent fighting wasn't anywhere near the amount of time spent on tactical encounters in the average 3.x/Pathfinder RPG or 4e game nowadays.
I wonder how much of the "back to the dungeon" philosophy behind 3e is to blame for that. AD&D was played in a wide variety of ways, and not just dungeon crawling/wilderness encounters. 3e in this regard was the first step to refocus the game on dungeons, carefully crafted tactical encounters and so on. 4e is just a continuation of this design philosophy that went further in the land of "since it's about dungeon, we don't need profession skills, we don't need crafts..." et cetera. It's the same logic taken a few steps further, basically.
Quote from: Fiasco;331827Agree with that. IF you look at a straight dungeon crawl, the old systems handled this quicker.
Even if it's not a dungeon crawl, combat has a way of clarifying the situation to set up the next non-tactical decision(s) by GM and players.
It's true that the more simple the combat system is, the more willing players will be to have their characters engage in it, so that the total session time spent in combat will often be the same for a simple or complicated system
But at least with a simple system you have the choice of not spending hours on a combat.
A mate of mine runs a GURPS Banestorm game, early on they had a fight with a dozen gargoyles, it took two and a half sessions, which since their sessions were fortnightly meant that they were fighting for more than a month of real time, or about 8 hours of session time. And it was less than 30 rounds, which in GURPS is 30 seconds of in-game time.
Six weeks or eight hours to resolve 30 seconds is a bit extreme. And perhaps with better GMing and playing they could have resolved it in just one full session, 3 or so hours. But if they wanted to fight at all, they had no choice, it had to be at least a session, because that's the way the system is.
Simpler systems give you more choices, complex systems less choice.
I would say in our D&D (2e) games a 4 hour session would break down into
30 mins of faff - snacking, talking about football, etc
60 mins of fighting - usually a couple of small fights but sometimes 1 biggie
120 minutes of social interaction
30 mins of exploring/problem sovling
Of course it depends on the game but the fight number would rarely go above this maybe with some rare exceptions.
Under D&D 3.x, my group would typically handle three to five combat encounters per six hours of play. This was level one to seven though.
The thing I like about 4e, as I've said before, is that if you can make each fight kind of like the fights in Jason and the Argonauts- or the funky battles in the 70's Three Muskateers.
I think we're averaging around 5-6 fights per 5 hour session in my 4e sandbox game.
Lemme see, last session had:
Fight with Ettin, immediately followed by
Fight with Ettin's big brother
Fight with Ankheg
Fight with Vine Horror
Encounter & flee from Roper
Fight with 3 Ankhegs (which killed 1 PC).
Previous session had:
Fight with 3 Dire Wolves
Fight with Fey Panther
Fight with 6 Orc Warriors
Fight (shooting at) Orc Warrior & Hobgoblin Archer
Encounter and flee from dozens of Orc Warriors
Fight with 2 fire beetles
Quote from: Elliot Wilen;331830Even if it's not a dungeon crawl, combat has a way of clarifying the situation to set up the next non-tactical decision(s) by GM and players.
This mirrors our experience as well. The easier and faster the fight system is the more we are likely to use it. So if you look at a session there still may be 2hrs spend fighting, but broken up over several smaller fights. So you may follow a pattern of story, fight, story, fight, story fight. Where as in a more complicated and drawn out system it usually just goes story, fight.
So I much prefer the former. It seems pointless to me to build a session around just throwing in one fight because you don't have time to do anything else.
Most of combat is choosing not to run away. Except in rare circumstances, players do not need to engage in combat in as much the same way as they do not need to engage in any aspect of the game. The fact that you and your players pursue combat as regularly regardless of edition is notable. As is how much longer individual encounters last in progressively later editions of D&D.
What I'd point out is how much more exploration of the map it is possible to accomplish in previous editions rather than later ones, if combat seeking is constant. And, if engaging in noncombat elements of the game is either important or irrelevant to your players, than your group's preferences should become clear. They will either gripe the combat encounters are taking too long or aren't detailed, varied, and/or long enough.
So much depends on the players.
If you have people who know their characters and their abilities and the system, then even Rifts combat moves swiftly.
If you have a couple of gamers who never pay attention to the rulebook, and never remember which dice to use, then combat will take longer.
I personally LOVE combat scenes so I revel in details and the excitement. So if a fight takes 1 hour or a major fight takes 2 hours, I'm cool with that.
In my D20 game (Legion, running with Star Wars D20 Revised) I usually handle 1-3 combats per session.
In my RIFTS game its usually 1-2, but our sessions are shorter.
In Amber and Pendragon its totally variable.
Back when we were playing the epic RC D&D campaign, it was easy to do a metric fuckton of combats in a single given session.
RPGPundit
My ideal session has probably 3 separate fights taking about 10-15 minutes each, about 90 minutes of exploration and problem-solving (including running away from, sneaking past, or tricking your way past several more potential fights), 15-30 minutes of in-character playacting (likely including talking or bluffing your way past at least one potential fight), and 15-30 of miscellaneous joking around and off-topic banter, for a total of about 3 hours of play, plus another half hour pre-game and a half hour post-game for socializing, kibbitzing, and bookkeeping. If combat takes up more than about 25% of the total session (either because there are a ton of separate fights or because each fight takes a long time to resolve) I get bored.
In our recently concluded 4E game, a fight would typically take 3 hours to run. That's pretty much been the case since we hit the paragon levels.