Encounter Length

[Piggy Knowles]

OK, so I see this fact tossed around all the time stating that most combat encounters don't last more than five or six rounds. Sometimes I even see people claim that it goes even shorter.

The thing is, my own personal experience is that this is very much NOT true. While we get a few encounters that last this long (or are even shorter), most go quite a bit longer - usually twice as long.

Generally a round is spent getting into position and putting up general buffs. There's a few rounds of initial engagement, while whoever is doing battlefield control will try to isolate groups of enemies. Enemies will fall back and regroup, and we'll try to cut them off. We'll focus our efforts on a few areas, figure out who their threats are, etc. There's always a fairly tedious mopping up process, too. And if there are any goals other than to just straight up kill the opponents (protect the person/MacGuffin, neutralize rather than kill, destroy the four orbs, whatever), it generally takes even longer.

Now, I will say that combats I've played in are usually DECIDED in five rounds or less. By that point, if we can't neutralize their bigger threats or control the flow of the encounter, we're probably in a pretty bad place. But that doesn't mean that combat only lasts that long.

So I'm curious - how long do most people's encounters last in 3.5? Is it that the groups I've played in are just overly cautious? Or are most encounters run against fairly dumb opponents (opponents that continue to fight until they die rather than retreating or regrouping, that don't try to avoid being split up, don't use terrain or tactics, etc.)?

I should point out that this has been the case for me in multiple groups, with optimization levels across the board. In fact, the more optimized a group I'm with, the longer encounters usually take. The lockdown method of BFC that is pretty popular (and overwhelming) is also pretty time consuming to do properly. It doesn't help that more optimized groups tend to bring out more optimal opponents, who frequently use the same sorts of tactics that we do.

[Kol Korran]

most of the battles (about 2/3rds?) in my group i think take about 5-8 rounds i think. some are mush shorter (1-4 rounds) nearly a 1/3rd of them. these are usually the ones where the party ambushed or was ambushed, or with a great disparity of CR and party level (both directions). this doesn't include the pre buffing one side did beforehand though. but it wasn't a part of the actual fight.

and then there are the 10-20 rounds combats, which are usually against very very tactful opponents, or with especially troublesome (i use terrain and different goals, but this means more than that) who comes up once in a while (5-10%) but which are often the more memorable ones.

the party i think is efficient, but not that optimized (except for the cleric)

[Flickerdart]

5-6 rounds? That's hella long. Most encounters in games I'm part of don't pass the 4 round mark. Both the PCs and the enemies know how to bring pain.

[Diarmuid]

I agree, 5-6 rounds seems to be the norm for my group. We are a 6 person party so there's a lot of actions going around but there are very few combats that occur from far enough away that there's time for "buffing and BFC" that will have any real impact on the combat.

[Piggy Knowles]

5-6 rounds? That's hella long. Most encounters in games I'm part of don't pass the 4 round mark. Both the PCs and the enemies know how to bring pain.

I'm curious, in your shorter encounters, do you find you're doing much BFC? I find that locking down the battlefield is almost always effective, but usually slows down our encounters.

[Chained Birds]

The only times a battle exceeds 5rds, is when my 4-PC party square off against a BBEG or in certain encounters with large, cavernous areas with scattered enemies (Can't AoE or Cleave well if the enemies are 20ft away from one another most of the time).
I do find it humorous that my 3.5 Barabarian loves long encounters (Better use of Rage/Frenzy) while my PF Barbarian loves short encounters (PF Barbarians do rages/round instead of rages/day).

[Flickerdart]

I'm curious, in your shorter encounters, do you find you're doing much BFC? I find that locking down the battlefield is almost always effective, but usually slows down our encounters.
Yes; battlefield control and other auxiliary modes of combat are useful in mitigating the amount of pain that enemies can bring. The vast majority of PCs I've seen could one or two-shot themselves with the kind of damage they deal, so an enemy with comparable firepower needs to be handled carefully in order to avoid PC casualties.