Quote Originally Posted by Kurt Kurageous View Post
From another thread, combat is still the primary focus of 5e.

1. How much session real time are non-BBEG complex encounters (defined as monster numbers > party numbers and monster stat blocks > 1) taking at your table?

2. Are you ok with the time it's taking?

3. If not ok, what have you done to add/remove the session real time it takes to run a complex combat?
[Apologies for wall of text. I don't run 5E very frequently lately, but took notes tonight for the sake of this thread. Here's my writeup. -Max]

They always take longer than I think they do. Had a short adventure tonight where the players wound up beelining almost directly for the objective (i.e. they got lucky with the maze and skipped all the dead ends, almost) which meant they really did only five encounters: laundry room (2 Rodents of Unusual Size/giant rats), lavatory (gray ooze that they never realized was there), sewage tunnel (4 giant rats, 2 goblins), wine cellar (three statues, two of which were gargoyles, plus a Black Pudding), and guards outside the hostage room (6 githyanki warriors). And yet somehow it took two and a half hours.

I'm 100% OK with the amount of time it's taking, because they players were fully engaged in interacting with each other the whole time, making plans about what they should do next and how they were going to survive what was happening to whom at the moment. Probably the longest encounter was the first one, when they were trying to decide who was going to enter the door to the laundry room and, once the rogue detected the giant rats hiding under the piles of laundry, whether they were going to fight the rats or attempt to decoy them away by capturing stray cats and feeding them to the rats. The actual fighting part of the encounter was over in I think about ninety seconds and three attack rolls once they actually engaged, but the encounter itself took much longer, partly because all three players were new to 5E and two are new to RPGs, so they were still getting a feel for what the world was like and what they could do.

The way I see it, the goal isn't to get through a certain amount of content, it's to provide the players with a fun experience. If they spend two and a half hours having fun with each other, but they take thirty minutes to kill a couple of gargoyles and a black pudding, oh well. They don't have to be a well-oiled SWAT team.

...However, I think it would have gone quite poorly if I'd used vanilla PHB initiative, because that initiative system would have forced two of the three players to sit around doing nothing for most of the night, every time it was someone else's turn. I would much, much rather have players talking to each other about what weapons might be able to harm this black pudding and whether they can have the NPC fighter grapple the gargoyle and stick its face in the black pudding--I would rather that than have them take turns talking to me declaring actions and rolling attacks and damage and waiting while I roll attacks and damage for the monsters.

My initiative system is nothing special, it's basically just AD&D initiative where everybody says what they're going to do and then we roll dice and resolve it, but here's a thread with an example and discussion. Because these are new players I didn't even really explain the system to the players, I just had all of the monsters Delay in almost every combat unless the PCs were surprised, so it basically just turned into "PCs go, then monsters go, then PCs go" except for a couple times when it mattered which PC went first (because of sneak attack adjacency) so the PCs rolled initiative against each other.

Combat length is tied directly to the amount of decision-making that happens during combat. Complex and interesting combats with lots of decisions take a while, but they don't feel like it because they're interesting. Simple combats with few decisions to make are fast even when they involve a lot of dice rolls. (I hit you, you hit me, until one of us dies... you can do ten rounds of that in two real-life minutes.) For new players, even simple combats are interesting and time-consuming because they're still learning the game rules/gameworld. Uninteresting combats should be brought to an early close.

Case in point for early close: we were out of time for the end of the githyanki fight, so I made a judgment call about who was winning at that point and told the players, "If I roll anything but a 6 on this d6, you guys win the fight and successfully rescue [the hostage] and recover [the treasure]." I think they rolled a 2, so they won, and then they asked me questions about the meaning of certain clues and what was in the parts of the dungeon they hadn't gotten around to exploring, and we all went home satisfied.