What is your longest encounter?

[Sploosh]

So I joined a group of D&Ders at college this weekend for a 4e game of the keep of the shadowfell. We had a rather large group that had 8 players and a DM. This didn't deter us but we were rather curious how long the fights would last.

Well, we begin a fight outsider of the Kobold cave entrance when a runner managed to sound an alarm. Hearing the alarm, the entire cave was mobolized and we got to fight every single critter in it.

Yes, we fought what was suppose to be over a day's worth of encounters set to challenge 8 PCs at once. The fight lasted 6 hours, a few people were on their last death saving throws but heroically we managed to save them, win by the hairs of our teeth and backs were patted.

What about you guys?

Edit: This isnt meant to be a pissing contest but instead a collaberation of short stories about long encounters.

[jiriku]

The epic battle at the conclusion of my last major campaign ran 6 1/2 hours, spread across two game sessions, and ended with 3 of 4 PCs dead. Victory was purchased, but at a terrible cost.

[Saph]

I can top that by a very large margin.

World's Largest Dungeon, 3.5 game. Fought a running encounter over five sessions, adding up to about sixteen hours of continuous combat.

This took place over the summer when many people were missing games, so to play out those five sessions took us the best part of two months.

Anyone able to beat that?

[Ormagoden]

Mindflayer monk... I'm a mean GM when I want to be.

[jiriku]

Mindflayer monk... I'm a mean GM when I want to be.

I'll see your mindflayer monk and raise you four mindflayer clerics with divine power, heavy flails, and the improved disarm and improved grapple feats. And those were the mooks.

[subject42]

The worst combat that I was ever in was the Quasit fight in Pathfinder's Rise of the Runelords module.

It took a party of four almost eight hours to defeat one monster*. We ended up collapsing the tunnel on her.


*At least two hours involved looking up the grapple rules. I mean, how does it work when you have three two people grappling a quasit, another person with a reach weapon trying to stab the quasit, and another monster trying to attack the person with a reach weapon? We almost had a stack overflow when somebody without improved unarmed attack tried to make a punch.

[Cespenar]

Mindflayer monk... I'm a mean GM when I want to be.

Mindflayer Monk/Kensais with Throwing and Returning tentacles. Yeah. :smalltongue:

[Volos]

Back when I was a player (aka The Beginning of Time as we know it), I had a DM who always forgot the important details. Upon walking up toward the capital city, we found many tracks of both mass exodus and zombie nastyness. My Druid rolled a 40 on his survival check to track and seemed to stay above 30s the whole way to the capital, about a five day trip. After finding one zombie in a basement of an abandonded outpost, we started a chase of said zombie toward the capital for the last half of a day of our five day trip. Upon coming within visual distance of the capital, my girlfriend's bard pulled out her spyglass. The zombie we were chasing made it to the gates of the city, along with a few hundred of his friends.
At this point the rest of the party was thinking of running, even though the zombies were attacking the capital city gates and as far as the story had gone so far, we had a duty to protect the city. My druid came up with a spectacular idea. Using a combination of mutliple entangle and plant growth spells, he was able to ensare most of the zombies. Then using another spell to kill all the vines, he had a good source of timber. Calling upon the cleric with a flamestrike, we suddenly had all of the zombies on fire within a manner of minutes. Then the DM suddenly annouced that there were ten thousand zombies. Somehow the bard had miscounted the number even though she was able to clearly see the palidins at the city gates protecting the city and the insignia on their breastplates and shields. Five hours of dice rolling later and we got to level 15 from level 10.

[thubby]

i had a 3.5 encounter where i just decided to through clones at them.

the encounter took maybe 4 hours because the party cleric was dedicated defense, the wizard/archmage had the reflective counterspell feature, the tank was sword and board, and the only dedicated offense was a venerable elan kineticist with the improved resilience feat.

[Ormagoden]

I'll see your mindflayer monk and raise you four mindflayer clerics with divine power, heavy flails, and the improved disarm and improved grapple feats. And those were the mooks.

Q: Whats the spot check for those mooks?
A: Not enough

[Lvl45DM!]

16 hours spread across three game sessions

Evil party fighting the king of evil and his vampire sister
Of course since we were evil once we won in session two we started fighting each other to get the crown of evil
then in session three 8 our 10 of us were down...and then the king of evil came back as a revenant and the two remaining had to fight him off
Damn that was fun

[Closak]

Desperate all-out battle against what has to be the single most powerful Elder Evil i have ever seen.

It was basically every living thing in the universe VS that one creature.
Even got alternate timelines and planes and dimensions involved in it.

...The universe lost because the guy who was going to deliver the finishing blow rolled a 1.


That took forever.
And then everyone died, the prime material plane, the upper planes, the lower planes, EVERYTHING!
All gone, reduced to nothing.

Damn Elder Evil for being powerful enough to Solo the whole universe.
We were so close too.

[Telonius]

BBEG fight in Shackled City. It took us about 15 hours.

EDIT: Closak, that ought to be in the dictionary next to "Epic Fail." Awesome, gloriously epic fail.

[Eldariel]

Desperate all-out battle against what has to be the single most powerful Elder Evil i have ever seen.

It was basically every living thing in the universe VS that one creature.
Even got alternate timelines and planes and dimensions involved in it.

...The universe lost because the guy who was going to deliver the finishing blow rolled a 1.


That took forever.
And then everyone died, the prime material plane, the upper planes, the lower planes, EVERYTHING!
All gone, reduced to nothing.

Damn Elder Evil for being powerful enough to Solo the whole universe.
We were so close too.

Which one was this?

[Closak]

It was a homebrewed Elder Evil.

It can basically be summed up as "The living incarnation of the concept of obliberation, a being that is literally made out of the concept of destruction"

Turns out that every time something is destroyed this thing get's stronger.
And with all the death and carnage that occurs in a standard D&D universe...Yeah.

So in a way it was the universes own fault it got destroyed.


Typical, almost managed to banish it from reality and then the dreaded natural 1 rears it's ugly face.

[AslanCross]

Desperate all-out battle against what has to be the single most powerful Elder Evil i have ever seen.

It was basically every living thing in the universe VS that one creature.
Even got alternate timelines and planes and dimensions involved in it.

...The universe lost because the guy who was going to deliver the finishing blow rolled a 1.


That took forever.
And then everyone died, the prime material plane, the upper planes, the lower planes, EVERYTHING!
All gone, reduced to nothing.

Damn Elder Evil for being powerful enough to Solo the whole universe.
We were so close too.

That's...so sad. It's got BAD END written across the cosmos with the blood of everything that ever lived. :P

I can't come even close to any of these. The longest I've had was

(Red Hand of Doom Spoiler)

the battle with Ozzyrandion over Skull Gorge Bridge, which lasted us about 4 hours.

[ken-do-nim]

I wasn't involved, but I read about a 1E encounter in D1 with Asberdies the lich that went about 45 combat rounds. Each round was fully detailed in the campaign journal, and it was a pretty amazing read. I don't know how long it took hours-wise.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

Totting up the various session in which it took place, the first attempt at taking the castle in my recent game I ran lasted 12 hours.
We never dropped out of initiative the whole time. Body count in the dozens. All surviving PCs levelled, some had enough to level twice.

It's bloody hard work doing long combats, but I tend to err on the side of realism when it comes to stocking an encounter - a castle has fifty guards, their sergeants, their captain, the Baron's spies, bodyguards, elite guard, wizard, chaplain, etc, etc...

One must always be careful not to get into this, though:
http://shamusyoung.mu.nu/images/comic_lotr89.jpg (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1098)

[truemane]

You all amaze me with your epic-length combats. Mine was just over four hours. DM'ing a party of three, Elven Sword-dude, Wizard, and Pacifist Cleric (before there were rules for this, this was 2E).

They were hunting a Blue Dragon. It was holed up in an enormous cavern where it spent the entire combat up in the stalactites, hiding and climbing and casting spells and using its magic items down at the PC's.

It had an Iron Golem helping it guard its lair. Back in 2E Iron Golems are immune to pretty much every magic spell there is, and can't be hurt by any weapon that's not at least +3.

Party has one +2 weapon. The +3 weapon is in the corner of the cave, and it's protected by the undead skeletal warrior that's holding it and using it against the poor elven fighter-type trying to destroy it.

So Iron Golem bashes, Elf beats on nasty undead, Blue Dragon casts frustrating spells while Wizard tries his best to keep out of the way and cast spells back. Cleric goes from place-to-place buffing and healing.

It was truly epic and still my all-time favourite encounter.

[Yukitsu]

I hate long combats. The odds that some random bad luck offs one of us increases as encounters drag on, so I usually try to have some trick up my sleave that can simply end it. The level 8 gaggle of us vs. a full adult black dragon took 2 hours and 5 rounds, because after 4 of them I got tired of fighting it and shivering touched it. I would have waited longer, but most of the party was faffing about instead of killing it to death.

That's about the length of most of our combats until we hit 7 players, where newbs with endless rules questions during other people's rounds makes us take longer.

That said, a battle that was supposed to take 3 sessions took up the better part of a single one, because it was endless swarms of undead, and we had a radiant servant and a guy with supreme cleave.

[Mercenary Pen]

I tried running a mass combat with 4e just to test my understanding of the system before I did any proper DMing... You had no two sides, neither less than 10 creatures, though some were minions (with reach weapons if I recall). I ended up running it a few hours at a time on and off for a few days, with the play area set out over my bedroom floor for the entire period.

[Starscream]

This isn't so much a fight that took objectively long, but one that took way longer than necessary.

One time the session ran short, so I decided to shoe-horn in an additional challenge right at the end, with the explanation being that the BBEG had set it up to delay them while he escaped.

I was just looking to kill a few minutes while we waited for food to arrive, so I grabbed a pre-made encounter from the Book of Challenges called "Pool of Endless Froglings".

To spare you all from looking it up, I'll explain it briefly. Basically there is a pool in the middle of a room, and a simple puzzle on the wall. To open the exit, you must solve the puzzle. While you are doing so, however, tiny CR 1/10 monsters called froglings are endlessly spawning from the pool and attacking, hoping to overwhelm you before you can escape.

Pretty simple, and the whole thing is just EL 3. My players were 4, so I saw no problems on the horizon. After all, we were just killing time before eats.

But everything went wrong. For reasons that baffle me, the party came to the conclusion that the answer was to take a certain piece from the puzzle and drop it in the pool, which would stop the froglings. Instead of going for the (fairly obvious) solution, they spent round after round debating which piece to drop in, while the froglings piled up.

Even though the book allows them to make an intelligence check to get a clue (and I kept hinting that they should do this), they insisted that it was more fun to solve the puzzle OOC rather than rely on their character sheets. Fine by me, but in this case it ended disastrously.

Sure enough, they decided they had found the answer, had the barbarian wrench one of the vital pieces off the wall, and drop it down the pool. Then we got to do countless rounds of "Fight off the now incredibly numerous froglings while the smart members of the party try to solve the puzzle for real this time, and the barbarian dives down to get the piece he threw in with the endless monsters." And what was supposed to be a quick bit of fun before eating, took up almost as much time as the rest of the session.

Players had fun, though. They decided to retroactively roleplay it as the wizard shouting out "Wait, don't!" while the dumb barbarian jumped to the wrong conclusion and acted before anyone could stop him. And in the end they ended up killing enough Froglings to even get a decent whack of xp (counting it as EL 3 with the number they had to plow through without resting wouldn't have been fair).

[Tyndmyr]

This isn't so much a fight that took objectively long, but one that took way longer than necessary.

One time the session ran short, so I decided to shoe-horn in an additional challenge right at the end, with the explanation being that the BBEG had set it up to delay them while he escaped.

I was just looking to kill a few minutes while we waited for food to arrive, so I grabbed a pre-made encounter from the Book of Challenges called "Pool of Endless Froglings".

Oh god, that's where that watery pit of hell came from? Our monk decided the answer was "punch all the frogs". Idiot. Yeah, that took a while. Good PCs died because of that.

[Cyanic]

About 11 hours spread over 3 sessions, Epic level archon/wizard vs PC group. Stupid contigencies and wish spells flying from both sides.

Quote of the day "I wish he hadn't said that last wish." :smallbiggrin:

[Vorpalbob]

Back in ye olde days of 2nd Edition, one of my friends ran a campaign through hell. There were about 15 characters in the party, including a Fighter with the hammer of thunderbolts, an assassin, a monk, a mage, a robot they found in an earlier adventure, and a bunch of hirelings.

They made it all the way to the Devil himself, who was guarded by hordes of demons and undead. The battle began, with the devil just sitting on his throne as his minions attacked. They killed almost all of the devil's minions, but almost everyone in the party died. at that point, they had been playing for four hours straight. Then, with only the monk and the robot alive, the monk used a ring of three wishes and said, "I wish everyone was alive." The DM took advantage of the poorly worded wish and raised the devil's minions as well. Another four hour battle begun, but this time the party fare much better, and fought their way almost to the devil. The devil used a wish of his own, raising only his minions. The party was close enough to the devil, and while taking massive casualties from his minions, managed to kill him, which killed his minions as well. only the fighter, assassin, and robot survived the battle.

Just after the battle ended, a lesser demon arrived with his massive minion army. however, he didn't attack. he thanked the PCs for removing his opponent, and gave them a large amount of magic stuff.

Clocked in at 12h. 45min. [EDIT] This was over a single session.

This is not a joke. It actually happened