Speeding Up Combat

[Ranis]

These are all fantastic ideas. Thanks a million, guys.

And yeah, I keep it pretty fast-paced, as combat should be. The problem is that the only way I can really challenge them is to put up enough appropriately-sized monsters for them to fight, because they just swarm anything big that I put up there. This often requires me putting PC classes or templates onto existing monsters; last week I had them fighting a Formian Myrmnarch with 15 Cleric levels and had raised a bunch of the hiveminded plagueborn formian zombies. It was a titanic fight, but it took the better part of two hours.

I dunno, maybe it just bugs me that normally the day moves at the speed of plot, then 24 seconds takes the better part of 20 minutes.