How long do your combats tend to last?

[SangoProduction]

In terms of rounds, in the games I played over the last decade, the combat encounters tend to last about 3-4 on average. Bosses with their little activities and phases and what not tend to be allocated more time and effort. (Though an unfortunate number of "bosses" I've seen thrown around are just balls of HP. Very boring.)
Much longer and it truly feels like a slog. If it's not at least 2 (barring crits), then it does feel a bit anticlimactic for a roll-initiative fight.

But perhaps I'm a bit of an outlier, and just got an incredibly strange set of coincidences with the games I got into. I mean, the majority in the last decade being online ... Jesus Christ it's already been 10 years since I've started playing online. Anyway.... wow I feel old. Did you know World of Warcraft is old enough to be a legal adult?

Anyway! Realizations of one's pending mortality aside, it might have been a set of coincidences that lead to my perception of the "accelerated" combat encounters.

How long do your combats tend to last?

[Firest Kathon]

I would say most of combats have been less than 10 rounds. But some of those longer ones were quite memorable.

One issue I always see is the real time it takes to run those combats. Of course it differs between groups, but my groups tend to be on the slower side. And when a round takes 15-20 minutes or more, people just get distracted and no one wants to spend 2 hours in the same combat (unless it is a memorable boss fight).

[Martin Greywolf]

This isn't really a meaningful question in 3.5 for anything other than game balance - unlike in 5e where you can have your full set of actions per round at level 1, 3.5 steadily increases this number. Not only do you get multiple quick attacks, casters get access to more and more quickened spells if they have the desire to use the spell slots, and the enemies are keeping pace via some of their own abilities being free actions.

If you take 5e and have two characters, one level 1 and the other level 10, there won't be that much difference between how many real world actions they do per turn if they have their math and choices prepared ahead of time. Sure, they roll more dice for that one attack, but still. A 3.5 character will potentially have a lot more of these real world actions to do, and if you aren't running long adventures where you have to manage resources carefully, they will be free to use more of their free action stuff in a given fight.

To answer the question, fight against a challenging group of enemies, about 5 turns, if there are reinforcements introduced, who knows. Those 5 turns at first level are about 30 minutes of real time at low levels and about an hour and a half to two hours at mid levels unless you ruthlessly ban players discussing tactics mid-fight. (with that ban, or if you get a group that has a knack for quick tactical decisions, make it 15 minutes and an hour) Never ran a group of DnD that made it to 15+, so I can't speak on that.

[AnonJr]

Ours vary quite a bit - from 2-3 rounds (couple homunculi threw oil flasks, sorcerer cast burning hands :smallamused:), to a dozen or so rounds. We've had a couple run longer, but that's because the BBEG threw a hoard of mooks at us. None were hard to dispatch, there were just so many...

[pabelfly]

So this is for my table with 3-4 people

General encounter - about 4-5 rounds, roughly an hour
Boss encounter - about 10 rounds, roughly an hour
Large-scale enemy encounter (30-50 enemies) - about 10 rounds, 2-3 hours

[Kurald Galain]

In terms of rounds, in the games I played over the last decade, the combat encounters tend to last about 3-4 on average.
That is also my experience, although around level 8 and up it gets shorter (2-3 rounds on average), and if you have six players it also gets a round shorter (2-3 at low level, 1-2 at level eight and up). These are all averages, so outliers exist.

And, longer combats tend to be the more interesting ones, yes.

[lylsyly]

At our table, no matter which of the seven of us are DMing it always seems to run 3-5 rounds.

[Elvensilver]

Really depends on the number of player characters and GM - with my four-player-group, fights mostly do tend to go for some rounds, I'd like to say three to five.

With two players (and different GMs in that group...) fights take longer (in the absence of sucessful safe-or-sucks against single opponents at least). I've had players worrying about their round/level buffs running out even at mid level, so sometimes nearly ten rounds.

[Thurbane]

Our current party is level 7, 5 characters. Combats tend to take from about 4-8 rounds or so. Not a super optimized group.

[Gorthawar]

My party consists of 6 fairly optimised level 9 characters. When they get the drop on the opponents and have time to buff combats are over after 1-2 rounds. Most fights take about 2-4 rounds with the odd boss fight reaching 5.

[icefractal]

I find that it depends significantly on encounter conditions - how spread out the foes are, how cautious they're being, what the layout is like. And that doesn't correspond to difficulty either - there's been "fairly tough" fights that took less than two rounds, and "easy" fights that lasted 6+.

I guess, in general, I'd say something like:
< 1 round: rare
1-2 rounds: short but not that uncommon
2-4 rounds: about normal?
5-7 rounds: longer than typical
8+ rounds: rare

[Elkad]

As the DM, I'm typically aiming to make combat last 5-8 rounds.

That doesn't mean 1-round combats don't happen, but they are rare.
Rarer than the 20 round ones.

Getting back in the fight after the ghoul paralysis (2-5 rounds) wears off is fairly common...

[Kitsuneymg]

2-4 is typical for standard encounters or book-based bosses. When a GM in our groups really gets going, it can be as many as 20. That was for a multi phased boss that uses raid style role mechanics that we had to figure out, with essentially resource draining DPR and shield minions that needed to be engaged and “turned off” to hurt the boss. It was epic and we felt accomplished when we finished. But it did take three four hour sessions and ended our 1-20 game.

My other group is newer to pathfinder. Because I tend to make “big” fights have a lot of set pieces and let the bad guys who spy on the PCs prepare well for their tactics, it can be as little as one round nuke up to 17 rounds to chase off an evasive dragon who was reluctant to engage them with in close range.

We use a lot of third party pathfinder though. Spheres and sometimes Path of War mostly. So the standard encounter tends to just get nova-Ed to death by level 4-5. Current level 2 Reign of Winter has capped at three rounds, but averages 1.5. Everyone gets to act, but often only the fast characters get two actions

This tendency toward short fights is why we hate short duration non-swift buffs. That’s a design space that needs to go away.