Battle Times

[Wolfiepegasus]

As the title suggests, I have a campaign running and I'm trying to find a good balance for the party in how many rounds it takes for them to do one encounter. The last encounter we did was about 9ish rounds(somewhere around there) and lasted 3 hours irl....is that bad time, good time, what? I would love some help on getting decent length encounters made.

Also normally battles for the group take about 4 or less rounds.

[Red Fel]

As the title suggests, I have a campaign running and I'm trying to find a good balance for the party in how many rounds it takes for them to do one encounter. The last encounter we did was about 9ish rounds(somewhere around there) and lasted 3 hours irl....is that bad time, good time, what? I would love some help on getting decent length encounters made.

Also normally battles for the group take about 4 or less rounds.

Well, the first question I would ask is "how many people in the party?"

Look, a combat can take awhile. Some can be handled in under 4, some can take a dozen. But three hours for one combat seems really substantial, unless that encounter was some sort of massive multi-stage war between quite a lot of people.

The second question I would ask is "what's the delay?" Do people know their skills, numbers, stats and rolls? Did someone decide to indulge in minionmancy? Were countless rounds spent with the two sides on opposite ends of the room, circling each other slowly? Were players distracted? Did the DM have to double-check rules often?

Lastly, encounters aren't generally balanced, I find, around the time involved in resolving them; they're better balanced around resource consumption. That is, an easy encounter should take relatively little of the PCs' resources (HP, ammunition, spells, etc.); a challenging encounter might take anywhere up to one quarter or one third of their daily resources. Again, that's less about how long it takes, and more about how much it takes.

But yeah. Three hours seems like a lot.

[Flickerdart]

Is it in person or online? I find that when you're playing over Maptool or roll20, fights take about twice as long because players are wont to get distracted and not realize their turn's come up. In person, encounters I've run usually last about an hour or so with a total of maybe 6-7 participating characters. But then, they also tend to go about 4 rounds. 9 rounds and 3 hours seems about right, but the question there is, why were there so many rounds? What were they fighting?

[Wolfiepegasus]

Is it in person or online? I find that when you're playing over Maptool or roll20, fights take about twice as long because players are wont to get distracted and not realize their turn's come up. In person, encounters I've run usually last about an hour or so with a total of maybe 6-7 participating characters. But then, they also tend to go about 4 rounds. 9 rounds and 3 hours seems about right, but the question there is, why were there so many rounds? What were they fighting?

To answer you about 11 custom edited goblins upped by about 8 levels from base. Plus an ogre that never got to do anything (All HDs were 9 here....and due to accidental habit at this point they had max hp). The main issue is that theres normally a bear with essentially an equivlant of Mjolnir and a lupin who can make any jump check and kicks the crap outta everything but they weren't there.

As for the main reason it took so long is that there were about 18 characters fighting at once. There wasnt much distraction so I think it was mostly the hp along with one of the PCs did have to do a lot of checking his stuff again(druid whos a newbie)

I think I might of gone a bit overboard on the sheer amount of enemies(I'm dm >.>). But due to the common nature that battles end quickly.....

I guess the best way to ask is how do I optimize combat for extremely powerful characters so they dont just one shot absolutely everything but not make it impossible for the ones who aren't as powerful(such as the druid guy. Not yet very powerful)

[Flickerdart]

guess the best way to ask is how do I optimize combat for extremely powerful characters so they dont just one shot absolutely everything but not make it impossible for the ones who aren't as powerful(such as the druid guy. Not yet very powerful)
So, 6 characters plus 12 monsters...and there were two characters that normally show up but not this time? Damn, that's a ton of players. Consider forcing them to Battle Royale it out until there are fewer. :smalltongue:

As for the combat, if you're going to have a ton of dudes, make them simple and weak. Goblin runs up, swings a sword, gets hit back, dies. This is his purpose in life, and every player (even the weak druid) gets to feel good about one-shotting a guy. Slap some juicy HP on that ogre to compensate, as well as ablative tactics like the crusader's Steely Resolve, the psion's Vigor, or just DR.

Next time some of your players are absent, consider reducing the scale of the encounter to match - easy when you have 11 copy-pasted goblins involved.

Also, don't force the enemies to fight to the death. If half of their number has been blended in about 30 seconds of real-time fighting, the rest are going to have strong feeling about running the hell away very very fast.

[Wolfiepegasus]

So, 6 characters plus 12 monsters...and there were two characters that normally show up but not this time? Damn, that's a ton of players. Consider forcing them to Battle Royale it out until there are fewer. :smalltongue:

As for the combat, if you're going to have a ton of dudes, make them simple and weak. Goblin runs up, swings a sword, gets hit back, dies. This is his purpose in life, and every player (even the weak druid) gets to feel good about one-shotting a guy. Slap some juicy HP on that ogre to compensate, as well as ablative tactics like the crusader's Steely Resolve, the psion's Vigor, or just DR.

Next time some of your players are absent, consider reducing the scale of the encounter to match - easy when you have 11 copy-pasted goblins involved.

Also, don't force the enemies to fight to the death. If half of their number has been blended in about 30 seconds of real-time fighting, the rest are going to have strong feeling about running the hell away very very fast.

I'm trying to find that balance and thats hard buuuut theres actually only 3 people just running multiple characters with a familiar and what's essentially a pet dragon(wyrmling silver who spent half the battle asleep). However theres a home brew class for one of the people that allows them to make items(its sorta balanced in that they use a writing based magic and have rather bad dyslexia so they have a chance to mess up) and they ended up making a rail gun with the proper explanation on how it'd work and an amazing design. They ended up routing 1/3 of the enemies and killing 3 with it. A lot ran or surrendered rather then actually get killed due to either having a scary lizard lady beating them senseless while just wearing a dress and seeing their friends decimated by a weapon that technically shouldnt of existed(I allow it cause creativity!) Completely destroying their leader. So this was nearly 9 rounds WITH those conditions.

[Twurps]

Have you had any complaints about the length of the battle from your players?
3 hours is a lot, but in our group some players really like a prolonged combat now and then. Just don't do it every session.

[Wolfiepegasus]

Theres no complaints per se. But here's the thing.

In a previous encounter I had a multi stage fight with 6 normal goblins 3 dragons(young adult) and a guy with armor that could be destroyed but he couldnt be harmed till such happened.
We had the guy with mjolnir, the lupin, and what pretty much equates to Sepheroth from final fantasy(level 35 guy btw) and that battle lasted about the same length as that round wise but rl time wise it was about an hour.

I guess my main point is to help get decent encounter help.

[Wolfiepegasus]

I suppose saying that it took about 2 hours before we killed one goblin should be relevant info eh?

[Karl Aegis]

Your players are either horrendously under-geared, have really bad builds, or something else that prevents them from doing enough damage. The first thing to do is to reduce your monster's health from diefic levels to average levels. Really now, maximum health per level is what dieties normally have. The second thing to do is to have index cards for your relevant abilities and monsters. Have the name of the ability on the back of the card and what the ability actually does on the front. Keep your abilities with your monsters in rubber bands or something so you don't lose them.