Like a lot of people maybe, the Covid lockdown brought me back to the hobby after a long hiatus. (I stopped playing shortly after starting college, so it's been about 25 years for me.) I was delighted to find all the great online tools for supporting game play, like DnD Beyond and roll20, a lot of which I can remember imagining we'd have in the future. I also really liked the 5th Edition rules, as the last I'd played was 2nd. I've had an awesome 18 months reconnecting with my old gaming buddies, and reconnecting with the hobby I used to love so much. In fact, I now both play in one game and DM another.
One big difference for me though, is we always accomplish much less than I'd prepared for as a DM. I easily expect 3 (if not 4 or 5) times more progress than actually occurs in a session. It's en extreme rarity, for example, to have more than one combat encounter in a session. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, we have a blast, it's just odd. Why are my expectations so off? The DM of the game I play in has the same issue. I'm curious if other folks experience this. Is it just a result of interacting through Zoom instead of face to face? Do the 5th Edition rules just run slower relative to 2nd? Are we just old guys who are easily distracted?
Combat resolution is dependent (largely) on player system mastery. Players who know their PCs make decisions quickly, even in 5e. My players have gotten pretty good at it and we run through combats nearly as quickly as we can talk about it.
No, I think you're right, but it's a matter of perception.
Although 5e is simpler in design as something like 3e-4e, it's more "robust" than 2e, for sure. My combat sessions generally take ~1-2 hours, depending on how deadly it is, and that generally amounts to 3-5 rounds of combat.
For guys that are rooted on 3e (like me), 5e seems faster in combat, tbh. But I, also, feel a huge difference on how the game plays, as RP now is such a big thing due to cultural phenomenons (like D&D streaming and the general change on perception of fantasy as a whole), the game seems, at least to me, less straight forward. - than the previous go to the dungeon, slay bad guys, collect rewards...repeat.
Now players can spend two sessions carousing through a city with no combat encounter what so ever.
Also, the mechanics are designed to be more open, which incetivizes creative play on several occasions, which might slow the game in terms of progression.
I personally enjoy games more recently tbh. I really think that, in terms of TTRPG, 5e is a very well designed game.
A lot depends on how the players approach combat and other challenges. If they resolve things mostly from a mechanical focus (these are my actions, which I can typically do this with, roll dice as needed, done) it's still pretty fast. If they resolve things more from an immersive focus (this would be a cool/interesting/dramatic/narratively satisfying thing to do, DM needs to tell me how that will be resolved mechanically, roll dice as needed, done) the pace goes down, possibly by a lot; on the plus side, if you enjoy this sort of thing the game will be much more fun and engaging than "I attack the monster with my weapon/cantrip/occasional leveled spell" (similarly out of combat too, you can explain what you do and roll for it or you can play it out and roll for it), rinse and repeat as needed. Nothing wrong with either approach, just saying it depends and can vary a lot.
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I want to just expand on some of what pangurjan said in my own, specific words. If you are going from a random encounter, hack and slash game theme to a deeply plot driven, character action dependant campaign, there is going to be a huge time difference in the resolution of pretty much...anything.
Like a lot of people maybe, the Covid lockdown brought me back to the hobby after a long hiatus. (I stopped playing shortly after starting college, so it's been about 25 years for me.) I was delighted to find all the great online tools for supporting game play, like DnD Beyond and roll20, a lot of which I can remember imagining we'd have in the future. I also really liked the 5th Edition rules, as the last I'd played was 2nd. I've had an awesome 18 months reconnecting with my old gaming buddies, and reconnecting with the hobby I used to love so much. In fact, I now both play in one game and DM another.
One big difference for me though, is we always accomplish much less than I'd prepared for as a DM. I easily expect 3 (if not 4 or 5) times more progress than actually occurs in a session. It's en extreme rarity, for example, to have more than one combat encounter in a session. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, we have a blast, it's just odd. Why are my expectations so off? The DM of the game I play in has the same issue. I'm curious if other folks experience this. Is it just a result of interacting through Zoom instead of face to face? Do the 5th Edition rules just run slower relative to 2nd? Are we just old guys who are easily distracted?
Combat has gotten more nuanced since the early days but I have not experienced that significant of a slow down since my Holmes Basic days... Story progression? Now that has changed. as others have said up thread the focus of the game has changed. In the games I have run there are still Four to Six encounters a 4hr session; only one of which is definitely combat oriented and perhaps two others with the potential to go that route based on PC actions. Role-Play is heavier in my games than it used to be. My experiences (and I can only relate these from my perspective) are that this is what the players desire. My players seem to talk more animatedly about the sessions that had only "talking heads" RP moments that lead up to my BBEG "epic" combat encounters that are the capstones to a plotline than the fight itself.
BigLizard is ultimately right - AD&D monsters had way fewer hit points and this did speed things up, given that "attack" was basically the option for all non-casters. Even though character damage was also massively lower (I think a fighter could start making 3 attacks over every 2 turns (great design lol) around level 7.
However, single monster fights are way too fast in modern D&D if you use regular hit points given in the source books, and without home brewing, boss encounters are over in seconds as the players blow their cooldowns on the big target straight away. It's generally fine at lower levels, and then things get to be a joke against any party that has magic items and feats. I double the hit points of most monsters.
Last week I played out a boss fight that featured:
5 PCs (level 8)
1 friendly NPC, who could make 3 attacks
20 Orcs (built into 5 swarms to speed gameplay up)
1 CR15 homebrew warlock boss, with 320 hit points and 3 legendary actions
The total fight time was just shy of 3 hours. That was to be expected for a major boss encounter. Halving the hit points of the monsters would have brought it down to something like 45 minutes, since as things go down, they then miss multiple turns, players are more defensive, and the increase in game speed is exponential.
Combat resolution is dependent (largely) on player system mastery. Players who know their PCs make decisions quickly, even in 5e. My players have gotten pretty good at it and we run through combats nearly as quickly as we can talk about it.
I'm sure your group is quite quick, but you have to understand it in the context of AD&D combat speed compared to 5e speed. What people think is "fast" today is not the same as "fast" in 1e (old school D&D days). An AD&D combat would take between 30 seconds to 15 minutes, an epic high-level combat involving dozens of combatants might take 30-45 minutes. I don't care if you are masters of 5e play, average low-level combat will take 30-60 minutes, it physically cannot be done faster and the average 5e higher-level combat is 1-3 hours if everyone at the table knows what they are doing and no one dilly dallies.
In my experience (from playing 1e back in the 70s and lots of different non-D&D games through the years) the single biggest slowdown has always been player (in)decision, or conversations between players outside of the mechanics. That isn't to say mechanics themselves don't have an impact, and sometimes the conversations are about the mechanics. I found 3e was very hard for newer players to internalize. There was a lot of squinting at the character sheet, trying to work out what you can and can't do, before even deciding what you should do. A lot of that disappeared when we switched to 5e. But even then, newbie players would spend forever reading through their features and options before Doing A Thing.
I don't buy that older AD&D combat was intrinsically faster than 5e, with experienced players. I've played a lot of 1e and 2e back in the day. The pacing of my current 5e games feels about the same, especially if you account for player experience. The actual mechanics of 5e aren't particularly slow. The d20 system as a whole is as (or arguably more) streamlined than the older THAC0 stuff, and it only gets more so when you take saves and checks into account. Yes, 5e PCs have a lot more options, but navigating those again comes down again to system mastery.
To repeat my point -- players who know their PCs well will make decisions as fast in 5e as they would in any previous edition, and player decision-making is the main slowdown of combat in any edition. Yes, some editions take longer than others for the players to reach that level of mastery, but once they're there, the newer editions are just as fast as the older ones in almost all cases.
Combat resolution is dependent (largely) on player system mastery. Players who know their PCs make decisions quickly, even in 5e. My players have gotten pretty good at it and we run through combats nearly as quickly as we can talk about it.
This is a big factor, and it's also affected by the often more story/narrative focused style of general play that's become more popular since "the old days."
"Back then" your typical D&D game had a group of often stereotypical bookish nerds who all had every rule of the game committed to memory as well as every detail of their character sheet with full understanding of the mechanics involved. They played to slice, dice, and scorch monsters and they all knew how that worked. Books rarely needed to be consulted mid-action because everybody either knew the relevant text by heart or had notes for the specific mechanics on their character sheet. You would never hear a wizard player ask what one of their spells does in the middle of combat because they already knew.
Nowadays a lot of players get into D&D because they're attracted more to the roleplaying aspect and fantasy storytelling. Combat encounters are cool punctuation and are seen largely like the action scenes in a movie; awesome, but if you have nothing but action scenes you get something like an Expendables movie that nobody remembers anything about the plot other than there were some bad guys and Chuck Norris told a Chuck Norris joke (this also describes a typical "old school" game). I recently came back to the hobby after being away since 3.5 and I've noticed that a lot of players consider combat as the part of the game with all the fiddly bits that, rather than spend an hour or two reading about, they can just ask the DM how it works when they get to it. So you hear things like "My character sheet says Spirit Guardians, how many of those can I summon?" or "How much do I heal with Second Wind, again? And if I do that, can I still move or make an attack?" Then the action gets paused while schoolteacher DM explains how said player's character works (often having to explain the same mechanics to the same players every time those players remember/notice they have those abilities) instead of just "As a bonus action I Second Wind for *rolls the d10 they already had in their hand* fourteen HP, then I move over here and attack this guy with my magic longsword, *moves mini/vtt token without asking how far they can move and rolls a d20 without needing to be told what to add* does a seventeen hit? No? Okay, second attack *roll* how about a twenty three? Cool, that's *roll* eleven slashing plus three fire. And that's my turn." Full action economy, twenty seconds tops (in that example, they could action surge to do more attacks, add in a triggered ability of some sort, and it still would only add another ten seconds).
To be clear I'm not complaining about games that feature and even focus on RP elements. I love doing that stuff. But it does irritate me when players don't know what their own character's abilities even are, let alone how they actually work. And that can come into play even in non-combat situations plenty of times, like a cleric player not knowing that they have a spell called speak with dead and start investigating the murder scene like they're in an episode of CSI (with an Int of 11 and no proficiency in investigation) instead of just asking the victim who killed them and getting on with chasing down the villain.
Combat resolution is dependent (largely) on player system mastery. Players who know their PCs make decisions quickly, even in 5e. My players have gotten pretty good at it and we run through combats nearly as quickly as we can talk about it.
Nowadays a lot of players get into D&D because they're attracted more to the roleplaying aspect and fantasy storytelling.
Maybe that's why I don't see much difference. We never played TTRPGs as simple hack/slash kick-in-the-door games. We always felt like we were running a kind of interactive action movie, using characters with goals and (alleged) personality.
Still, I'm mostly talking about combat resolution speed, where a lot of this starts to take a backseat. And even in the Good Old Days, a good GM would try to make fights tactical and interesting, which can slow things down simply because it's not whack-a-mole. Edition has little to do with that.
Agreed, and I'm on board with the kind of game style you're describing. I'm just saying that when combat does happen, I find it annoying when players simply do not know the rules because they never took the time to learn them. That slows things down more than the DM explaining how the supervillain mechanism of doom works and players figuring out how to stop it from activating while still managing to save the hostage dangling over the acid pit. The DM shouldn't have to read aloud every ability and spell description for a player's character once per session because that player is too lazy to spend an hour of non-game time learning those things and making notes so they don't have to request an explanation every session.
I often think our memory plays game. 5E vs AD&D for exemple, initiative is much faster in 5E as you don't have to declare action and roll initiative every round. No speed factor calculation etc... Back in 1E/2E that part was complex.
Both had 1 action and movement. Martial characters for the most part still basically do basic attacks, and spellcasters looking through spell list and casting spells in similar way. One thing that previous editions was faster with is off-turn effects though. Both had opportunity attacks but older editions had much fewer off-turn actions where 5E has more reactions and multiple characters also have bonus actions too that prolong their turn.
Another thing is Damage vs HP, are PCs and monsters nowadays dealing more damage and having more hit points than back then?
A lot also depend on the player's preparedness, some are not planning turn in advance and analyse a lot on their turn. It was true before and it's still today. Some player's turn go fast, others drags. Some DM handle multiple monsters with more rapidity than others etc...
5e monsters have more HP but also tend toward lower AC than in previous editions. You hit more often in 5e but it takes more hits, compared to requiring fewer hits but hitting less often.
I forgot about per-round initiative. That's a huge time-saver for games where you roll init once at the start of the fight. In fact I let my players use their initiative score (10 + dex, AKA passive initiative) if they want, and if I can prepare an encounter ahead of time I'll pre-roll monster initiative. It allows us to get right into the fight without that big prep time. I realize you can do this with older editions, but only kind of. Re-rolling initiative every round doesn't really mesh with pre-rolling or using passive init.
If you want to go by strict RAW, 1e had round phases, per-class attack modifiers instead of a standard, and I think different weapon speeds? Most people didn't do a lot of that, though. And most of 1e was technically pre-THAC0, which made to-hit calculations a bit heavier to work out. Love or hate it, the d20 system is easier to use. Almost every different thing you do in 1e/2e is like its own minigame.
The actual mechanical crunching of 5e is pretty fast. Almost everything is just d20 + mod vs DC, and the mod is almost always the same number or one of a small set of numbers, and in combat the DC is just the target's AC. I think the "slowest" mechanical process is when someone casts a spell that calls for a saving throw, and the appropriate save has to be referenced. Even then, though, it's not too bad.
So basically slowness is part player part edition problem and thus highly influenced by each respective table based on the ability of each participant to resolve turn quicker or slower and on the edition mechanics to run down everything smoothier or bumpier. So it depend on many factors i shall say ☺
Combat has gotten more nuanced since the early days but I have not experienced that significant of a slow down since my Holmes Basic days...
I'm sorry mate, but come-on, I call BS all over that. No significant slow down? Seriously? I promise you that I could take a group of people who have never played D&D or trained chimps (your pick), teach them to play Holmes D&D, have 5 combats in the time it would take you to complete a single 5e combat with expert Veterans of the game.
And I think you are looking at previous editions with rose tinted glasses. Yes creatures had lower hp and died to one or two solid hits; but those same creatures were harder to hit as well. Older editions had more swing and miss, it saves, its magic resistance shrugs it off, than not. and unless you were handing out +7 vorpal holy avengers (and other nonsense items or levels for that matter) like they were candy on beggars night in those older editions your bonuses were just not all that impressive to begin with.
So basically slowness is part player part edition problem and thus highly influenced by each respective table based on the ability of each participant to resolve turn quicker or slower and on the edition mechanics to run down everything smoothier or bumpier. So it depend on many factors i shall say ☺
This is my take as well, for the most part. I do think some editions have more streamlined underlying mechanics than others, but player experience overshadows that. Once players get proficient with their current edition and don't burn a lot of mental processing time, the purely mechanical differences start to dominate.
Having said that, per-round initiative is pretty expensive, time-wise.
Agreed, and I'm on board with the kind of game style you're describing. I'm just saying that when combat does happen, I find it annoying when players simply do not know the rules because they never took the time to learn them. That slows things down more than the DM explaining how the supervillain mechanism of doom works and players figuring out how to stop it from activating while still managing to save the hostage dangling over the acid pit. The DM shouldn't have to read aloud every ability and spell description for a player's character once per session because that player is too lazy to spend an hour of non-game time learning those things and making notes so they don't have to request an explanation every session.
This is why I encourage my players to purchase things like Spellbook Cards (well that and part of my job as the FLGS in house DM is to push merchandise sales) as it will put that info right in front of them. For a couple of my players I even gone as far as creating Class Feature Cards for the classes on my comp and printing them up for the aforementioned players. Yes; that means their character sheet can practically be contained in its entirety in a card binder at this point; which given their level of forgetfulness I am regularly shocked that they manage to bring that with them to the sessions.
I can attest to the fact that 1e fights can indeed drag with the right players. In a game I played just a couple years ago, we had a few players that suffered from indecision even when severely limited in options. So even relatively simple fights would take 30 min. Players are certainly a factor.
But more than that, I think that combat just plays a different role in contemporary D&D. In my 1e experience, survival and obtaining loot were the primary goals. Combat was just one of many obstacles to this alongside traps and environmental hazards. Enemies were simple and didn't provide a lot of engagement - you just needed to kill them before they killed you.
Now combat is much more dynamic and engaging. There is a puzzle element to many enemies, and the rules encourage tactical puzzles on the encounter scale. There are many more hooks for roleplaying and cinematic scenes. It's just much more fertile ground than it used to be.
Blockbuster-style movies were born around the same time as D&D. I think the shift we see is in line with a larger shift in what we expect from entertainment. Big, cinematic set pieces that tie in to major plot points or character decisions.
Like a lot of people maybe, the Covid lockdown brought me back to the hobby after a long hiatus. (I stopped playing shortly after starting college, so it's been about 25 years for me.) I was delighted to find all the great online tools for supporting game play, like DnD Beyond and roll20, a lot of which I can remember imagining we'd have in the future. I also really liked the 5th Edition rules, as the last I'd played was 2nd. I've had an awesome 18 months reconnecting with my old gaming buddies, and reconnecting with the hobby I used to love so much. In fact, I now both play in one game and DM another.
One big difference for me though, is we always accomplish much less than I'd prepared for as a DM. I easily expect 3 (if not 4 or 5) times more progress than actually occurs in a session. It's en extreme rarity, for example, to have more than one combat encounter in a session. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it, we have a blast, it's just odd. Why are my expectations so off? The DM of the game I play in has the same issue. I'm curious if other folks experience this. Is it just a result of interacting through Zoom instead of face to face? Do the 5th Edition rules just run slower relative to 2nd? Are we just old guys who are easily distracted?
Combat resolution is dependent (largely) on player system mastery. Players who know their PCs make decisions quickly, even in 5e. My players have gotten pretty good at it and we run through combats nearly as quickly as we can talk about it.
No, I think you're right, but it's a matter of perception.
Although 5e is simpler in design as something like 3e-4e, it's more "robust" than 2e, for sure. My combat sessions generally take ~1-2 hours, depending on how deadly it is, and that generally amounts to 3-5 rounds of combat.
For guys that are rooted on 3e (like me), 5e seems faster in combat, tbh. But I, also, feel a huge difference on how the game plays, as RP now is such a big thing due to cultural phenomenons (like D&D streaming and the general change on perception of fantasy as a whole), the game seems, at least to me, less straight forward. - than the previous go to the dungeon, slay bad guys, collect rewards...repeat.
Now players can spend two sessions carousing through a city with no combat encounter what so ever.
Also, the mechanics are designed to be more open, which incetivizes creative play on several occasions, which might slow the game in terms of progression.
I personally enjoy games more recently tbh. I really think that, in terms of TTRPG, 5e is a very well designed game.
A lot depends on how the players approach combat and other challenges. If they resolve things mostly from a mechanical focus (these are my actions, which I can typically do this with, roll dice as needed, done) it's still pretty fast. If they resolve things more from an immersive focus (this would be a cool/interesting/dramatic/narratively satisfying thing to do, DM needs to tell me how that will be resolved mechanically, roll dice as needed, done) the pace goes down, possibly by a lot; on the plus side, if you enjoy this sort of thing the game will be much more fun and engaging than "I attack the monster with my weapon/cantrip/occasional leveled spell" (similarly out of combat too, you can explain what you do and roll for it or you can play it out and roll for it), rinse and repeat as needed. Nothing wrong with either approach, just saying it depends and can vary a lot.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I want to just expand on some of what pangurjan said in my own, specific words. If you are going from a random encounter, hack and slash game theme to a deeply plot driven, character action dependant campaign, there is going to be a huge time difference in the resolution of pretty much...anything.
Combat has gotten more nuanced since the early days but I have not experienced that significant of a slow down since my Holmes Basic days...
Story progression? Now that has changed. as others have said up thread the focus of the game has changed. In the games I have run there are still Four to Six encounters a 4hr session; only one of which is definitely combat oriented and perhaps two others with the potential to go that route based on PC actions. Role-Play is heavier in my games than it used to be.
My experiences (and I can only relate these from my perspective) are that this is what the players desire. My players seem to talk more animatedly about the sessions that had only "talking heads" RP moments that lead up to my BBEG "epic" combat encounters that are the capstones to a plotline than the fight itself.
BigLizard is ultimately right - AD&D monsters had way fewer hit points and this did speed things up, given that "attack" was basically the option for all non-casters. Even though character damage was also massively lower (I think a fighter could start making 3 attacks over every 2 turns (great design lol) around level 7.
However, single monster fights are way too fast in modern D&D if you use regular hit points given in the source books, and without home brewing, boss encounters are over in seconds as the players blow their cooldowns on the big target straight away. It's generally fine at lower levels, and then things get to be a joke against any party that has magic items and feats. I double the hit points of most monsters.
Last week I played out a boss fight that featured:
The total fight time was just shy of 3 hours. That was to be expected for a major boss encounter. Halving the hit points of the monsters would have brought it down to something like 45 minutes, since as things go down, they then miss multiple turns, players are more defensive, and the increase in game speed is exponential.
In my experience (from playing 1e back in the 70s and lots of different non-D&D games through the years) the single biggest slowdown has always been player (in)decision, or conversations between players outside of the mechanics. That isn't to say mechanics themselves don't have an impact, and sometimes the conversations are about the mechanics. I found 3e was very hard for newer players to internalize. There was a lot of squinting at the character sheet, trying to work out what you can and can't do, before even deciding what you should do. A lot of that disappeared when we switched to 5e. But even then, newbie players would spend forever reading through their features and options before Doing A Thing.
I don't buy that older AD&D combat was intrinsically faster than 5e, with experienced players. I've played a lot of 1e and 2e back in the day. The pacing of my current 5e games feels about the same, especially if you account for player experience. The actual mechanics of 5e aren't particularly slow. The d20 system as a whole is as (or arguably more) streamlined than the older THAC0 stuff, and it only gets more so when you take saves and checks into account. Yes, 5e PCs have a lot more options, but navigating those again comes down again to system mastery.
To repeat my point -- players who know their PCs well will make decisions as fast in 5e as they would in any previous edition, and player decision-making is the main slowdown of combat in any edition. Yes, some editions take longer than others for the players to reach that level of mastery, but once they're there, the newer editions are just as fast as the older ones in almost all cases.
This is a big factor, and it's also affected by the often more story/narrative focused style of general play that's become more popular since "the old days."
"Back then" your typical D&D game had a group of often stereotypical bookish nerds who all had every rule of the game committed to memory as well as every detail of their character sheet with full understanding of the mechanics involved. They played to slice, dice, and scorch monsters and they all knew how that worked. Books rarely needed to be consulted mid-action because everybody either knew the relevant text by heart or had notes for the specific mechanics on their character sheet. You would never hear a wizard player ask what one of their spells does in the middle of combat because they already knew.
Nowadays a lot of players get into D&D because they're attracted more to the roleplaying aspect and fantasy storytelling. Combat encounters are cool punctuation and are seen largely like the action scenes in a movie; awesome, but if you have nothing but action scenes you get something like an Expendables movie that nobody remembers anything about the plot other than there were some bad guys and Chuck Norris told a Chuck Norris joke (this also describes a typical "old school" game). I recently came back to the hobby after being away since 3.5 and I've noticed that a lot of players consider combat as the part of the game with all the fiddly bits that, rather than spend an hour or two reading about, they can just ask the DM how it works when they get to it. So you hear things like "My character sheet says Spirit Guardians, how many of those can I summon?" or "How much do I heal with Second Wind, again? And if I do that, can I still move or make an attack?" Then the action gets paused while schoolteacher DM explains how said player's character works (often having to explain the same mechanics to the same players every time those players remember/notice they have those abilities) instead of just "As a bonus action I Second Wind for *rolls the d10 they already had in their hand* fourteen HP, then I move over here and attack this guy with my magic longsword, *moves mini/vtt token without asking how far they can move and rolls a d20 without needing to be told what to add* does a seventeen hit? No? Okay, second attack *roll* how about a twenty three? Cool, that's *roll* eleven slashing plus three fire. And that's my turn." Full action economy, twenty seconds tops (in that example, they could action surge to do more attacks, add in a triggered ability of some sort, and it still would only add another ten seconds).
To be clear I'm not complaining about games that feature and even focus on RP elements. I love doing that stuff. But it does irritate me when players don't know what their own character's abilities even are, let alone how they actually work. And that can come into play even in non-combat situations plenty of times, like a cleric player not knowing that they have a spell called speak with dead and start investigating the murder scene like they're in an episode of CSI (with an Int of 11 and no proficiency in investigation) instead of just asking the victim who killed them and getting on with chasing down the villain.
Maybe that's why I don't see much difference. We never played TTRPGs as simple hack/slash kick-in-the-door games. We always felt like we were running a kind of interactive action movie, using characters with goals and (alleged) personality.
Still, I'm mostly talking about combat resolution speed, where a lot of this starts to take a backseat. And even in the Good Old Days, a good GM would try to make fights tactical and interesting, which can slow things down simply because it's not whack-a-mole. Edition has little to do with that.
Agreed, and I'm on board with the kind of game style you're describing. I'm just saying that when combat does happen, I find it annoying when players simply do not know the rules because they never took the time to learn them. That slows things down more than the DM explaining how the supervillain mechanism of doom works and players figuring out how to stop it from activating while still managing to save the hostage dangling over the acid pit. The DM shouldn't have to read aloud every ability and spell description for a player's character once per session because that player is too lazy to spend an hour of non-game time learning those things and making notes so they don't have to request an explanation every session.
I often think our memory plays game. 5E vs AD&D for exemple, initiative is much faster in 5E as you don't have to declare action and roll initiative every round. No speed factor calculation etc... Back in 1E/2E that part was complex.
Both had 1 action and movement. Martial characters for the most part still basically do basic attacks, and spellcasters looking through spell list and casting spells in similar way. One thing that previous editions was faster with is off-turn effects though. Both had opportunity attacks but older editions had much fewer off-turn actions where 5E has more reactions and multiple characters also have bonus actions too that prolong their turn.
Another thing is Damage vs HP, are PCs and monsters nowadays dealing more damage and having more hit points than back then?
A lot also depend on the player's preparedness, some are not planning turn in advance and analyse a lot on their turn. It was true before and it's still today. Some player's turn go fast, others drags. Some DM handle multiple monsters with more rapidity than others etc...
Another thing 5E is slower for is dying PCs still get a turn where before they were either dead or at Death's Door.
5e monsters have more HP but also tend toward lower AC than in previous editions. You hit more often in 5e but it takes more hits, compared to requiring fewer hits but hitting less often.
I forgot about per-round initiative. That's a huge time-saver for games where you roll init once at the start of the fight. In fact I let my players use their initiative score (10 + dex, AKA passive initiative) if they want, and if I can prepare an encounter ahead of time I'll pre-roll monster initiative. It allows us to get right into the fight without that big prep time. I realize you can do this with older editions, but only kind of. Re-rolling initiative every round doesn't really mesh with pre-rolling or using passive init.
If you want to go by strict RAW, 1e had round phases, per-class attack modifiers instead of a standard, and I think different weapon speeds? Most people didn't do a lot of that, though. And most of 1e was technically pre-THAC0, which made to-hit calculations a bit heavier to work out. Love or hate it, the d20 system is easier to use. Almost every different thing you do in 1e/2e is like its own minigame.
The actual mechanical crunching of 5e is pretty fast. Almost everything is just d20 + mod vs DC, and the mod is almost always the same number or one of a small set of numbers, and in combat the DC is just the target's AC. I think the "slowest" mechanical process is when someone casts a spell that calls for a saving throw, and the appropriate save has to be referenced. Even then, though, it's not too bad.
So basically slowness is part player part edition problem and thus highly influenced by each respective table based on the ability of each participant to resolve turn quicker or slower and on the edition mechanics to run down everything smoothier or bumpier. So it depend on many factors i shall say ☺
Another thing in all era that has impact on play is focus, things like distractions, out of game talk or rules argument etc
And I think you are looking at previous editions with rose tinted glasses.
Yes creatures had lower hp and died to one or two solid hits; but those same creatures were harder to hit as well. Older editions had more swing and miss, it saves, its magic resistance shrugs it off, than not.
and unless you were handing out +7 vorpal holy avengers (and other nonsense items or levels for that matter) like they were candy on beggars night in those older editions your bonuses were just not all that impressive to begin with.
This is my take as well, for the most part. I do think some editions have more streamlined underlying mechanics than others, but player experience overshadows that. Once players get proficient with their current edition and don't burn a lot of mental processing time, the purely mechanical differences start to dominate.
Having said that, per-round initiative is pretty expensive, time-wise.
This is why I encourage my players to purchase things like Spellbook Cards (well that and part of my job as the FLGS in house DM is to push merchandise sales) as it will put that info right in front of them. For a couple of my players I even gone as far as creating Class Feature Cards for the classes on my comp and printing them up for the aforementioned players. Yes; that means their character sheet can practically be contained in its entirety in a card binder at this point; which given their level of forgetfulness I am regularly shocked that they manage to bring that with them to the sessions.
I can attest to the fact that 1e fights can indeed drag with the right players. In a game I played just a couple years ago, we had a few players that suffered from indecision even when severely limited in options. So even relatively simple fights would take 30 min. Players are certainly a factor.
But more than that, I think that combat just plays a different role in contemporary D&D. In my 1e experience, survival and obtaining loot were the primary goals. Combat was just one of many obstacles to this alongside traps and environmental hazards. Enemies were simple and didn't provide a lot of engagement - you just needed to kill them before they killed you.
Now combat is much more dynamic and engaging. There is a puzzle element to many enemies, and the rules encourage tactical puzzles on the encounter scale. There are many more hooks for roleplaying and cinematic scenes. It's just much more fertile ground than it used to be.
Blockbuster-style movies were born around the same time as D&D. I think the shift we see is in line with a larger shift in what we expect from entertainment. Big, cinematic set pieces that tie in to major plot points or character decisions.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm