I really like D&D 4E. I’ve been happily playing it since the day it came out, and I’ll continue happily playing it until D&D 5E comes out (and possibly past them as well). I think that, in many respects, it’s the best edition of D&D.
However, after having played it for the last 18 or so months, and having read the experiences of many other groups online, I think it’s worth commenting on some of the problems I see with the core of the game.
And by that core, I mean the combat system.
D&D, in every edition, has at its heart a combat system. I believe that it’s the best heroic fantasy combat system there is. The way that Armour Class, hit points and polyhedral dice interact may not be realistic, but it is fun, and when I play a game I look for fun. Apparently, so do the designers of D&D – especially if you look at the 4E DMG. So, D&D has a combat system and, in most games, combat is going to provide a fair core of the activity.
Games designers tend to want individual players to get a chance to do something fairly often. If you have to wait 20 minutes before you can do something, people tend to lose interest (unless listening to what else is happening is entertaining of itself. It can be). It could be accurately said of high-level D&D 3E that it took entirely too long to resolve one player’s turn. In my final session of 3.5e, every player save one had a laptop which they used to roll their dice and track their modifiers and often ahead of time. Nathaniel spent all of everyone else’s turns working out the results of his attack. Those last combats went by pretty fast… but required an exceptional and frankly unsatisfying solution. There was no hanging on the die roll of the other players – would they hit and save you or miss and doom you all? Nate would just reveal how much damage he’d done and we’d move on.
One of the great triumphs of 4e was to give players more options than just “I hit the monster”, whilst keeping the individual turn lengths down. Why, then, are people complaining about how long combat goes?
Here’s one of those little facts about the length of a turn that I’m pretty sure most of you know already: Part of it is the time taken to resolve the action. The other part is the time taken to choose the action to take. And it’s that second part that 4e has a problem with.
The funny thing is that it might not actually take that long for a player to choose an action, but if it is the wrong action, the amount of time it takes to resolve combat increases just the same. As a simple example, if you’re faced by three ogres, combat will end quickest if you concentrate on one ogre. Some groups don’t do that, and so combat takes longer.
The other (hidden) part of this is in the character builds. Nate and Adam are two champion min-maxers (I say that in the nicest way). When they gave Josh some helpful advice on how to build his character, it suddenly changed from being “just ok” to being rather good. (I still can’t say that it’s the most useful character in the group, because Josh has Greg, Adam and Nate to contend with…)
Put those three elements together, and the cumulative effect are combats that can take greatly varying amounts of time. This is not, in itself, a problem. Well, it is, but it’s something that you accept as a trade-off for having players doing more than saying “I swing my sword at the ogre” each turn. It’s something you can live with, as a designer and a player.
Where things get interesting is when you start designing around how long combats ought to take.
It has now been some time since I regularly played AD&D, but I’ve got a feeling that an average combat would be somewhere in the realm of 20-30 minutes to resolve. Some would take more, some would take less. At low levels, all it might take was a single spell from a magic-user!
In 4e, it seems the average time for a combat, the time it was designed for a competent group to achieve, is about 1 hour. I have a couple of problems with that length in any case, but problems really comes for other groups who aren’t as efficient as my group at getting past combats. Once a single combat takes 2 or more hours to resolve, you’ve used a fair whack of your gaming session. It’d be great if that variance could be reduced.
So, does 4E assume too much that the group will be effective at running/playing combat? My suspicion is that it does, and this affects people’s enjoyment of the system.
Related topic: Pacing of Adventures
Is 1 hour a good time for an average combat to take?
The key part of running a good roleplaying session is getting the pacing right. D&D might have a combat system at its heart, but it isn’t just about one combat after another. It’s the context those combats come in that are so important: whether you’re overcoming monsters on your way to save the princess, or exploring a old pyramid, or seeking to find the real reason the giants are now invading the kingdom. Combat is great fun, but it also is a great pause in the story you create in the session. Yes, occasionally something will happen in the combat that advances the story, but – in my experience – that’s the exception, not the rule.
What I’ve discussed so far relates to the core of D&D 4e: the structure that make the game work. I’m now going to look at the game in play, using the campaign I’ve run with the published D&D modules for examples. Let’s look at the compounded effect of long(ish) combat and combat-heavy adventure design:
There are a lot of combats in the Wizards adventures. The wonderful Rodney Thompson recently started a thread on EN World on their adventure design. At present, my group is getting towards the conclusion of the second Paragon adventure, Demon Queen’s Enclave. The combats we’ve been facing have been difficult, consistently of a danger level above the average party level. (One hint for designers: It’d be nice to know what level you expect the party to be when they face an encounter in a multi-level adventure. We’re mostly 16th level now, I think we should be 17th level, but I’m not sure when that should have happened.)
Tougher combats take longer. When *every* combat is a tougher combat (where are the easy ones, guys?) then you spend a lot of the session sitting there getting through tough combats. There are eight combats in this final section: the characters have breached Orcus’s realm, and are now assaulting his final stronghold to deal with his champion. Where are the natural break points? I’ve got a feeling that you should get through most of it and be left with only the final encounter to go in a single session. It’s taken us a lot longer than that – especially as we don’t run 7 hour sessions… and that’s presuming that all we did was combat!
But why is running this in a single session useful? Well, in my experience it is because D&D works best when the players are very clear on what their goal is. (Which is that context the encounter takes place in I mentioned before). When two ogres appear to bar the PC’s way, the first thought in the players’ minds shouldn’t really be “oh, another combat”, but instead, “They’re blocking us from finding the princess. How do we get past them?”
If the interruption takes too long – and an hour is likely that, two hours is certainly that – by the end of the combat, the players have likely lost their original focus and then need to regain it. If you have two really long combat in the session, likely they’ve spent very little time thinking about what their actual goal is and the game has degenerated into a set of combats.
A long combat? Great for the finale – defeat the Giant King to save the princess. At the end of it they get their reward and it’s all over. On the way there? Not so good.
Thinking about this just as a design consideration: after a combat, it helps if players are reminded of (a) their goal and (b) how overcoming the challenge has contributed to this. It’s not necessary after every combat, but it helps. Of course, not every goal will be as clear-cut as “save the princess”, but having consequences for a combat beyond “the monsters are dead” and perhaps “treasure, hooray!” helps elevate it in significance.
The other point about long combats is that they detract from the significance of other encounters and discoveries. Really, discoveries are something that the 4E adventures in the Heroic and Paragon tier haven’t done that well. You could see nods towards it in Pyramid of Shadows – and it had a great backstory to go with it – but not enough of it was visible to the players, and there really wasn’t enough meat for the DM and players to make it fantastic.
Adventure pacing is a tricky thing to pull off. Often, it’ll feel too linear and railroaded. Sometimes, you have to leave it in the hands of the individual DM. However, when individual combats take so long, it’s hard for even that DM to pull it off.
There’s more to say on this topic, but I’m going to retire now to collect more of my thoughts.
Combat should be part of an adventure because it’s exciting and dangerous and reminds you of why you should have done something safer. However many D&D combats aren’t dangerous, because it’s no fun if everyone dies. Also, there are too many rules and they take too long. I glanced at the 4e books and as soon as I saw how much was related to combat I realised that D&D was no longer for me – it’s a combat system with some other stuff. Half of D&D players seem to want more clear and specific rules, half want to return to the good old days when things were simple, and half don’t realise they’re in both camps and can’t have all the things they want.
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