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.
For some of us that dungeon, reward, shop repeat is the reason we never touched previous editions of DnD, I very much got into TTRPGs in the early 90’s playing games like Legend of the 5 rings, doomtown and call of Cthulhu and so for myself and all my friends DnD seemed like the Jock of roleplay games, go hit stuff then hit more stuff and then spend cash before hitting something else.
I can’t compare 5th edition to other DnD editions but I have played pathfinder and it flows much quicker then that. But I would also say, having run both online and in person campaigns when you make things remote it does slow gameplay down by roughly 1/3 I think. I have been running dragon of icespire peak remotely, same number of players, roughly the same classes, same experience level and compared to the first time I ran it in person it seems to be running slower.
Another thing 5E is slower for is dying PCs still get a turn where before they were either dead or at Death's Door.
That, sir or madam, is a load of crap. It takes maybe five seconds to roll a d20 and figure out if the number is ten/lower or eleven/higher. If it takes longer than that it's because the player isn't paying attention.
It's a rather odd sentiment that D&D is no longer about going into dungeons and fighting monsters, I mean if you look at the published adventures coming from Wizards of the coast, predominantly that is what all of these adventures are about. If the game is not about that, why are there not more published adventures that have a different focus?
Simply put, because the game's become more about what the players put in than it used to be and that's not something published adventures can provide. Not saying there wasn't any of that in the olden days, I was there too and I know better, but still. Also, published adventures have definitely evolved. Some are downright sandboxy now, not really something you saw way back when.
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It's a rather odd sentiment that D&D is no longer about going into dungeons and fighting monsters, I mean if you look at the published adventures coming from Wizards of the coast, predominantly that is what all of these adventures are about. If the game is not about that, why are there not more published adventures that have a different focus?
Simply put, because the game's become more about what the players put in than it used to be and that's not something published adventures can provide. Not saying there wasn't any of that in the olden days, I was there too and I know better, but still. Also, published adventures have definitely evolved. Some are downright sandboxy now, not really something you saw way back when.
You had both kinds back in the day, I might argue far more sandoxy types back then. I mean of course, there was a fair share of standard Dungeon Crawls, but even as far back as 1e basic box you had adventures like Isle of Dread.The Veiled Society and Test of the Warlords just off the top of my head.
I'm not disagreeing about the culture becoming more narratively oriented, but as far as what D&D is designed to be about conceptually, what the published material says about what the publisher thinks the game is about.. it all points to the same old classic formula of monsters and dungeons. Players have changed, but the game really hasn't beyond the brevity of detail in the mechanical design.
Out of the Abyss is one of my favorite campaigns to run and even though it is set in the underdark it is in no way dungeon crawley, at least how I run it, the Underdark itself is a large sandbox with each location the players can visit being smaller independent sandboxes. Yes ultimately you get to a situation where the players are moving room to room fighting monsters but it doesn’t feel like a dungeon crawl.
Published adventures will always feel a little more crawly then homebrew because dungeons are easier to map out and produce, a dungeon is also easier to play test consistently, you can get different groups going through the rooms and then work out is this too easy, too hard or just right.
A sandbox is harder to accurately play test because the more choice you give the harder it is to work out the balance and tel if the story is good enough.
It's a rather odd sentiment that D&D is no longer about going into dungeons and fighting monsters, I mean if you look at the published adventures coming from Wizards of the coast, predominantly that is what all of these adventures are about. If the game is not about that, why are there not more published adventures that have a different focus?
I agree that 5e is mechanically slower than 1/2e - although being faster than 3/4e. But I feel like the way players approach the game is different- at least in comparison with my 3e days.
We can see that by the (arguably) most popular 5e adventure - Curse of Strahd - it's not only the most sandboxy one, but it offers many ways to deal with problems with RP, rather than violence, and most players that I've ran through the module take this approach. Heck, I had once 6 back-to-back RP sessions running Strahd - and even when I tried to force my hand into combat, the players were so adamant in resolving through RP that I had to back off as to not remove player agency.
Even more dungeon heavy published modules are sometimes approached with an RP focus. On ToA I had a player casting speak with animals to calm down an angry dinosaur (an expected combat encounter) and all players engaged that way by holding the creature down and avoiding violence.
I feel like this come straight from how players approach the game (and is for sure empowered by the more narrative approach that 5e takes mechanically than older editions).
Once again, my experience starts with 3e, but it feels a lot different nowadays (not in bad way, it's just different).
It's a rather odd sentiment that D&D is no longer about going into dungeons and fighting monsters, I mean if you look at the published adventures coming from Wizards of the coast, predominantly that is what all of these adventures are about. If the game is not about that, why are there not more published adventures that have a different focus?
I agree that 5e is mechanically slower than 1/2e - although being faster than 3/4e. But I feel like the way players approach the game is different- at least in comparison with my 3e days.
We can see that by the (arguably) most popular 5e adventure - Curse of Strahd - it's not only the most sandboxy one, but it offers many ways to deal with problems with RP, rather than violence, and most players that I've ran through the module take this approach. Heck, I had once 6 back-to-back RP sessions running Strahd - and even when I tried to force my hand into combat, the players were so adamant in resolving through RP that I had to back off as to not remove player agency.
Even more dungeon heavy published modules are sometimes approached with an RP focus. On ToA I had a player casting speak with animals to calm down an angry dinosaur (an expected combat encounter) and all players engaged that way by holding the creature down and avoiding violence.
I feel like this come straight from how players approach the game (and is for sure empowered by the more narrative approach that 5e takes mechanically than older editions).
Once again, my experience starts with 3e, but it feels a lot different nowadays (not in bad way, it's just different).
Of that I have no doubt, but as you point out, this is a player-driven approach, not so much a game design approach. Fundementally the game really hasn't changed, the people who play it have.
The people who play it have changed, which means the way it's played has changed, which means the game has changed. That's what it comes down to. The game design can (try to) facilitate the players' chosen approach, but it's next to impossible to anticipate all the ways a group might choose to tackle a challenge. Combat encounters and dungeons are relatively straightforward, but most other things tend to be too open-ended to design an expected adventure flow around.
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Combat's a bit "slower" in 5e than 2e and 2e's predecessors because there's more for a player to consider with the character's actions, like bonus actions and reactions. Actions in 5e require more literal deliberation, 3-4e's even moreso. It takes longer to resolve but I think it's a lot more engaging because players have more to think through including how to leverage each other than 0e-2e. The best turns are taken by players who've paid attention to the entire round up to their turn. 2e and prior that level of team play work wasn't as mechanically encouraged.
As for the modules still being old school dungeon crawls, I'd pull away from that assertion. Yes, usually there's some sort of delving/raiding/exploring some sort of structure (which may even be subterranean) as key conflict encounters in published adventures, but almost all but the anthologies (Candlekeep, Saltmarsh, and Yawning Portal) spend a lot more time on the broader ecology and politics of the setting outside the proper "dungeons." I mean sure you could treat securing alliances or at least pledges of nonaggression in Avernus and the Underdark or Icewind Dale as the "macguffins" that need to be gathered in your tradition chain of dungeon quests, and they're obtained by an analogous dungeon crawl; and playing that way can be fun for those who to their D&D to be go into a dungeon, slay the monsters, come out with the loot. Still, there's a lot more content put into these adventures that offer a more immersive social role playing angle to the game. According to the press releases Wild Beyond the Witchlight is the first D&D Adventure explicitly written to allow a party to work through it with getting into combat. I think some parties may be able to do so with a lot of the latter, or at least through application of non lethal force when they have to, or I feel the DM is given much more to work with if their party wants to go on a less combative route. I'm mean sure, Odysseus slew some monsters, but also talked his way out of a lot of situations too; if anything the present edition allows players greater access and mechanical support to the full range of heroic narrative floating around within the game's DNA.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Combat really isn't slower in 5E than it was in 2E. Combat rounds are faster, maybe, but it used to take a lot more to get through a fight, even at low level when only one or two hits would drop someone.
Damage tended to be pretty limited for non-mages: it was not really that unusual to have a fighter who hit for 1d8+3 damage at 5th level. That was pretty decent damage output. You only got +2 to damage with melee attacks for having 18 strength unless you lucked out in character creation and got Exceptional Strength (which ranged from 18/01 to 18/00) or found Gauntlets of Ogre Power or a good magic sword that you were proficient with: sucked to be you if you decided to take proficiency with the longsword and found a magic broadsword.
Then there was the rogue, who was probably stuck dealing 1d6+0 damage with a short sword until they managed to find a magic one.
On top of that, you had the optional rule (which I'm sure somebody actually used) where different armor types got different modifiers based on the damage type of your weapon: chainmail was more effective against slashing weapons than against piercing or crushing weapons. And there were damage resistances- you might have a target who resisted anywhere from 5% to 95% damage of a given type- there's some extra calculations slowing the game down.
And spellcasters would, unless given prep time, often need to spend the first few rounds of combat casting defensive or buff spells. Which had all kinds of different durations- if you were a third level wizard, there was a very good chance that your Protection From Evil or Shield spell would run out before a major fight finished.
And on top of that, there were all sorts of weirdly specialized spells and magic items with effects that had percent chances of causing different effects: potentially even varying based on what the target was.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I think I'm agreeing on slower being not the right word to describe the differences, but I think a round is more "involved" along those deliberative lines I've laid out. There's just more to declare in "regular" combat, whereas sure there were factors that could compound circumstances in the earlier editions, but those circumstances were exceptional (magic items, odd spells, or optional rules). A lot of it could just be feel, but I do remember the first time I played 5e and the first combatant did their attacks and bonus actions, I thought he was walking over the DM ... until the next player did the exact same thing ... and so I figured I should read my character sheet at that point and saw I had more to do than "I attack with my sword." :D
Yeah, I don't know anything about B/X, so I can't compare those. A typical combat at my 5e game runs us about a half hour in real time (some longer, some shorter). That's four PCs in a medium-ish fight, typically against about 4 monsters. At least 1/3 of that time is player discussion, not mechanical resolution. If there was no player hesitation at all -- everyone had their actions ready to go and knew which dice to roll and all that -- I don't think it's impossible to get 5 combats done in an hour, although it would feel rushed.
Granted, big fights with lots of enemies can scale up quite a lot in time. Or complex fights where there's a lot of player-to-player chatter over tactics and stuff. My experience is that that was mostly the same back in the Good Old Days as well.
A while back I ran my group through a homebrewed variation on the Xanathar base from Dragon Heist. They were mostly newbie players with lv2 (transitioning to lv3) PCs. They did five encounters in about five hours of gaming, but that's combined with exploration and investigation, so it's not like each fight took an hour. And that was them still unfamiliar with the nuances of the game.
Looking back at my notes, yeah, I'd say a half hour per combat is about average, but again a lot of that stuff outside the mechanics themselves. I don't know how B/X works that you can routinely complete fights in seven or eight minutes. I mean I've had 5e fights run that quickly, usually when the party gets to gang up on a single creature, but that's not too common. But I certainly didn't have fights that fast back in my 1e/2e days, or in other games I played a lot like the White Wolf games or Call of Cthulhu. The 20-30 minute time seems pretty typical.
wow, thanks for all the great thoughtful responses to this. Really, just about all the points brought up in this thread resonate on some level, so I guess the answer for me really is - it's complicated. we sure do care more about story now, not that we didn't back then, but now there's just a lot more emoting of all the subtle things that don't necessarily add to plot, but do add to character. I guess that may be the being older part. but yeah, the action economy sure complicates things. I do love it, but I guess it does mean each player is doing two to three times as much in a round, and sometimes doing things even after they are "done" for the round, thanks to reaction. and I guess because of those options, we actually seem to role-play in combat more. like I think it used to be more that once initiative was rolled, the characters' voices kinda went away and they transformed into a bag of stats.
to the point of morale - i do use it informally, at least for NPCs and monsters. I definitely run enemies at the intelligence and wisdom they actually have, instead of all being mindless bloodthirsty fodder. so when the combat begins to go bad for them and they have some path to retreat, they tend to take it. I also enjoy the morality that morale brings into the game - are you really going to shoot those retreating guys in the back? does it make a difference to that decision what you perceive their alignment to be? but anyway, intelligently retreating makes the enemies more interesting and cuts down on combat time without being unsatisfying.
I think one of the bigger changes is using minis. In 1e it was pretty much all theater of the mind. You’d get a situation like, player casts fireball. DM says, ok, you can catch four goblins in it, or five if you get the fighter, too. Then we moved on. Now it’s more like, I’m going to cast fireball, then spend five minutes debating exactly which point I should target, then remember the rogue has evasion, so you actually could include her pretty safely, then the monk explains their next turn was going to be stunning that one particular goblin, so try not to bother with that one, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d never go back to 1e, and I prefer minis. Doing things a little slower is just the cost of doing business.
A great deal relies upon how the players approach battle and different difficulties. On the off chance that they settle things generally from a mechanical center (these are my activities, which I can normally do this with, roll dice depending on the situation, done) it's still lovely quick. In the event that they settle things more from a vivid center (this would be a cool/fascinating/emotional/narratively fulfilling thing to do, DM needs to disclose to me how that will be settled precisely, roll dice on a case by case basis, done) the speed goes down, potentially by a great deal; on the in addition to side, on the off chance that you partake in something like this the game will be considerably more fun and drawing in than "I assault the beast with my weapon/cantrip/intermittent evened out spell" (comparatively out of battle as well, you can clarify what you do and roll for it or you can play it out and roll for it), do this process again depending on the situation. Nothing amiss with one or the other methodology, trying to say it depends and can fluctuate a ton.
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. If players are on the ball with their characters their turns in combat go by pretty quick. If there's a lot of hem hawing about 'idk what spell to use' or 'hmmm which goblin do I attack' then it can start to drag, but if people are on the ball, and thinking about what they want to do BEFORE their turn comes up, I find combat generally goes by pretty quick.
It also helps that i play online so things like doing math to figure out how much damage that fireball did are greatly sped up. Playing in person it'd take a bit longer for humans to do the math.
Purely personal experience, here but I'll just toss out some info from my session yesterday. We started the session in mid-combat, with a battle that had begun at the tail end of the previous session. The combat ended and the DM declared we were out of initiative order after about 90-95 minutes. During that time we went through six rounds of combat, which I know because I was keeping a tally for how long my spiritual weapon had been up (the count was 2 rounds at the beginning of the session, the couple surviving foes fled right before I came up in the initiative order for what would have been tick number nine, and I was at the top of the order). That's about fifteen minutes per turn which even when I think about it now seems rather long. It sure didn't feel like fifteen minutes per turn (and it's possible I may have forgotten to tick up my counters once in there someplace). But when I think on it a bit more, I can see why it took that long.
1: It was a big fight with a lot of characters involved. Our DM frequently makes jokes about how it feels like we're playing Warhammer during the big battles he gets us into. In this case we had three active players plus three NPCs attached to our party and a fourth PC we were running as an NPC because the player was unable to make the session, so right there's a seven member party. We were interrupting a dark sacrifice ritual and fighting against about ten or twelve individual enemies, each of which acted independently; the DM is generally pretty quick about handling those turns but it's still quite a bit of die rolls to work through everything, plus notation of HP, spell slots, etc. On top of that there were also another half dozen NPCs who started out as prisoners intended to be sacrificial victims and several of them managed to break free and join the fray at some point as well. To maintain player engagement the DM alternated having us roll for our allied NPCs, and we were also giving input on their actions when appropriate. We do generally know our own abilities and spells and such, we only had to look up specifics during the action a couple times (or we would look up something while waiting for our turns so we have it ready in a timely manner), but it's still a bunch of little things that have to be addressed on each turn. I would estimate each player turn took about a minute on average to resolve; counting the "party NPCs" that's seven characters totalling 42 individual turns over six rounds for about as many minutes, which would be right about half of that hour and a half time spent on the battle. By that math it also jives that the DM was handling the more numerous enemy/NPC turns at least a little bit quicker than we were handling our own.
2: We weren't always purely focused on quickly resolving the action. Somebody would make a joke about something that was said, or comment about patterns of lucky/unlucky rolls. Cross-cultural and/or linguistic trivia would come up (the DM is Mexican and all the players are in the US); at one point we spent about two minutes talking about Looney Tunes because Speedy Gonzalez came up in an offhand comment. Another time I spent a minute summarizing the premise of the movie The Abyss to explain a reference I made to it because my nineteen year old fellow player had never heard of it (shameful, I know). We were never off topic for more than a minute or so, and the jovial nature of most of this running color commentary and tangential notes is part of the atmosphere we enjoy as the experience of playing D&D, but thirty seconds here and a minute there do add up over the course of an hour or two. Now that I think about that, it's possible my estimate of about a minute spent per character turn might be a bit loose and we actually had more time spent on these little side bits.
So there you go. We spent an hour and a half (or slightly more) resolving a battle sequence that, theoretically, took less than forty-five seconds of in-game "real" time to actually happen. And a lot of stuff happened, enemies were smote, allies were injured, healed, knocked out again (our wizard is super squishy, even by the standards of most wizards) and healed/revived, weapons swung and spells slung all over the place with dozens of attack rolls and saving throws made every turn. A fast paced and action filled story was told, one little piece at a time, and once it was all over we all felt like we'd been in an epic fight for over an hour, not like we'd been doing math homework or somesuch with our character sheets in place of algebra textbooks. If we'd had just a three member party fighting a single big monster it probably would have only lasted a small fraction of that time at our same pace of play; like I said, there was a lot going on but we've come to enjoy that style of play.
Our previous session did include an encounter against a single up-level moon druid that burned through two powerful wildshapes (so we basically fought three opponents in sequence) and that went for about as many rounds but was over in about twenty minutes instead of an hour and a half. Aside from about twenty less participants being involved, that was a random encounter and didn't have any significant roleplay or narrative value to prompt extra thought and discussion so we breezed through the nuts and bolts combat rather quickly without pausing to contemplate strategic priorities (protect that hostage, heal that ally, smack that bad guy, cast a spell at that other bad guy, cast a different spell at that other bad guy, etc) or roleplay out how our characters did what they did. My longest turn was declaring my character to be shouting "Bad turtle!" and rolling/adding all the dice for a critical hit on an inflict wounds spell (50 damage even, I rolled high) because Roll 20 didn't want to autocalculate the extra damage dice for upcasting it to second level.
So there are a lot of variables involved, even if you do keep turns quick and it depends on both the players' attentiveness and the style/feel you're going for. And hopefully I didn't ramble excessively too much because I am very tired and probably should have gone to bed before I even started typing this. Yay, me. Hopefully it's mostly coherent and not fraught with typos.
It's one of the reasons why i don't run large group anymore, keeping it max to 4 player characters. Less PCs usually means less enemies to match them, which usually cut down combat duration as well.
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For some of us that dungeon, reward, shop repeat is the reason we never touched previous editions of DnD, I very much got into TTRPGs in the early 90’s playing games like Legend of the 5 rings, doomtown and call of Cthulhu and so for myself and all my friends DnD seemed like the Jock of roleplay games, go hit stuff then hit more stuff and then spend cash before hitting something else.
I can’t compare 5th edition to other DnD editions but I have played pathfinder and it flows much quicker then that. But I would also say, having run both online and in person campaigns when you make things remote it does slow gameplay down by roughly 1/3 I think. I have been running dragon of icespire peak remotely, same number of players, roughly the same classes, same experience level and compared to the first time I ran it in person it seems to be running slower.
That, sir or madam, is a load of crap. It takes maybe five seconds to roll a d20 and figure out if the number is ten/lower or eleven/higher. If it takes longer than that it's because the player isn't paying attention.
Simply put, because the game's become more about what the players put in than it used to be and that's not something published adventures can provide. Not saying there wasn't any of that in the olden days, I was there too and I know better, but still. Also, published adventures have definitely evolved. Some are downright sandboxy now, not really something you saw way back when.
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Out of the Abyss is one of my favorite campaigns to run and even though it is set in the underdark it is in no way dungeon crawley, at least how I run it, the Underdark itself is a large sandbox with each location the players can visit being smaller independent sandboxes. Yes ultimately you get to a situation where the players are moving room to room fighting monsters but it doesn’t feel like a dungeon crawl.
Published adventures will always feel a little more crawly then homebrew because dungeons are easier to map out and produce, a dungeon is also easier to play test consistently, you can get different groups going through the rooms and then work out is this too easy, too hard or just right.
A sandbox is harder to accurately play test because the more choice you give the harder it is to work out the balance and tel if the story is good enough.
I agree that 5e is mechanically slower than 1/2e - although being faster than 3/4e. But I feel like the way players approach the game is different- at least in comparison with my 3e days.
We can see that by the (arguably) most popular 5e adventure - Curse of Strahd - it's not only the most sandboxy one, but it offers many ways to deal with problems with RP, rather than violence, and most players that I've ran through the module take this approach. Heck, I had once 6 back-to-back RP sessions running Strahd - and even when I tried to force my hand into combat, the players were so adamant in resolving through RP that I had to back off as to not remove player agency.
Even more dungeon heavy published modules are sometimes approached with an RP focus. On ToA I had a player casting speak with animals to calm down an angry dinosaur (an expected combat encounter) and all players engaged that way by holding the creature down and avoiding violence.
I feel like this come straight from how players approach the game (and is for sure empowered by the more narrative approach that 5e takes mechanically than older editions).
Once again, my experience starts with 3e, but it feels a lot different nowadays (not in bad way, it's just different).
The people who play it have changed, which means the way it's played has changed, which means the game has changed. That's what it comes down to. The game design can (try to) facilitate the players' chosen approach, but it's next to impossible to anticipate all the ways a group might choose to tackle a challenge. Combat encounters and dungeons are relatively straightforward, but most other things tend to be too open-ended to design an expected adventure flow around.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Combat's a bit "slower" in 5e than 2e and 2e's predecessors because there's more for a player to consider with the character's actions, like bonus actions and reactions. Actions in 5e require more literal deliberation, 3-4e's even moreso. It takes longer to resolve but I think it's a lot more engaging because players have more to think through including how to leverage each other than 0e-2e. The best turns are taken by players who've paid attention to the entire round up to their turn. 2e and prior that level of team play work wasn't as mechanically encouraged.
As for the modules still being old school dungeon crawls, I'd pull away from that assertion. Yes, usually there's some sort of delving/raiding/exploring some sort of structure (which may even be subterranean) as key conflict encounters in published adventures, but almost all but the anthologies (Candlekeep, Saltmarsh, and Yawning Portal) spend a lot more time on the broader ecology and politics of the setting outside the proper "dungeons." I mean sure you could treat securing alliances or at least pledges of nonaggression in Avernus and the Underdark or Icewind Dale as the "macguffins" that need to be gathered in your tradition chain of dungeon quests, and they're obtained by an analogous dungeon crawl; and playing that way can be fun for those who to their D&D to be go into a dungeon, slay the monsters, come out with the loot. Still, there's a lot more content put into these adventures that offer a more immersive social role playing angle to the game. According to the press releases Wild Beyond the Witchlight is the first D&D Adventure explicitly written to allow a party to work through it with getting into combat. I think some parties may be able to do so with a lot of the latter, or at least through application of non lethal force when they have to, or I feel the DM is given much more to work with if their party wants to go on a less combative route. I'm mean sure, Odysseus slew some monsters, but also talked his way out of a lot of situations too; if anything the present edition allows players greater access and mechanical support to the full range of heroic narrative floating around within the game's DNA.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Combat really isn't slower in 5E than it was in 2E. Combat rounds are faster, maybe, but it used to take a lot more to get through a fight, even at low level when only one or two hits would drop someone.
Damage tended to be pretty limited for non-mages: it was not really that unusual to have a fighter who hit for 1d8+3 damage at 5th level. That was pretty decent damage output. You only got +2 to damage with melee attacks for having 18 strength unless you lucked out in character creation and got Exceptional Strength (which ranged from 18/01 to 18/00) or found Gauntlets of Ogre Power or a good magic sword that you were proficient with: sucked to be you if you decided to take proficiency with the longsword and found a magic broadsword.
Then there was the rogue, who was probably stuck dealing 1d6+0 damage with a short sword until they managed to find a magic one.
On top of that, you had the optional rule (which I'm sure somebody actually used) where different armor types got different modifiers based on the damage type of your weapon: chainmail was more effective against slashing weapons than against piercing or crushing weapons. And there were damage resistances- you might have a target who resisted anywhere from 5% to 95% damage of a given type- there's some extra calculations slowing the game down.
And spellcasters would, unless given prep time, often need to spend the first few rounds of combat casting defensive or buff spells. Which had all kinds of different durations- if you were a third level wizard, there was a very good chance that your Protection From Evil or Shield spell would run out before a major fight finished.
And on top of that, there were all sorts of weirdly specialized spells and magic items with effects that had percent chances of causing different effects: potentially even varying based on what the target was.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I think I'm agreeing on slower being not the right word to describe the differences, but I think a round is more "involved" along those deliberative lines I've laid out. There's just more to declare in "regular" combat, whereas sure there were factors that could compound circumstances in the earlier editions, but those circumstances were exceptional (magic items, odd spells, or optional rules). A lot of it could just be feel, but I do remember the first time I played 5e and the first combatant did their attacks and bonus actions, I thought he was walking over the DM ... until the next player did the exact same thing ... and so I figured I should read my character sheet at that point and saw I had more to do than "I attack with my sword." :D
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Yeah, I don't know anything about B/X, so I can't compare those. A typical combat at my 5e game runs us about a half hour in real time (some longer, some shorter). That's four PCs in a medium-ish fight, typically against about 4 monsters. At least 1/3 of that time is player discussion, not mechanical resolution. If there was no player hesitation at all -- everyone had their actions ready to go and knew which dice to roll and all that -- I don't think it's impossible to get 5 combats done in an hour, although it would feel rushed.
Granted, big fights with lots of enemies can scale up quite a lot in time. Or complex fights where there's a lot of player-to-player chatter over tactics and stuff. My experience is that that was mostly the same back in the Good Old Days as well.
A while back I ran my group through a homebrewed variation on the Xanathar base from Dragon Heist. They were mostly newbie players with lv2 (transitioning to lv3) PCs. They did five encounters in about five hours of gaming, but that's combined with exploration and investigation, so it's not like each fight took an hour. And that was them still unfamiliar with the nuances of the game.
Looking back at my notes, yeah, I'd say a half hour per combat is about average, but again a lot of that stuff outside the mechanics themselves. I don't know how B/X works that you can routinely complete fights in seven or eight minutes. I mean I've had 5e fights run that quickly, usually when the party gets to gang up on a single creature, but that's not too common. But I certainly didn't have fights that fast back in my 1e/2e days, or in other games I played a lot like the White Wolf games or Call of Cthulhu. The 20-30 minute time seems pretty typical.
wow, thanks for all the great thoughtful responses to this. Really, just about all the points brought up in this thread resonate on some level, so I guess the answer for me really is - it's complicated. we sure do care more about story now, not that we didn't back then, but now there's just a lot more emoting of all the subtle things that don't necessarily add to plot, but do add to character. I guess that may be the being older part. but yeah, the action economy sure complicates things. I do love it, but I guess it does mean each player is doing two to three times as much in a round, and sometimes doing things even after they are "done" for the round, thanks to reaction. and I guess because of those options, we actually seem to role-play in combat more. like I think it used to be more that once initiative was rolled, the characters' voices kinda went away and they transformed into a bag of stats.
to the point of morale - i do use it informally, at least for NPCs and monsters. I definitely run enemies at the intelligence and wisdom they actually have, instead of all being mindless bloodthirsty fodder. so when the combat begins to go bad for them and they have some path to retreat, they tend to take it. I also enjoy the morality that morale brings into the game - are you really going to shoot those retreating guys in the back? does it make a difference to that decision what you perceive their alignment to be? but anyway, intelligently retreating makes the enemies more interesting and cuts down on combat time without being unsatisfying.
It doesn't hurt that trying to balance a 5e encounter is all over the place... :-D
I think one of the bigger changes is using minis. In 1e it was pretty much all theater of the mind. You’d get a situation like, player casts fireball. DM says, ok, you can catch four goblins in it, or five if you get the fighter, too. Then we moved on. Now it’s more like, I’m going to cast fireball, then spend five minutes debating exactly which point I should target, then remember the rogue has evasion, so you actually could include her pretty safely, then the monk explains their next turn was going to be stunning that one particular goblin, so try not to bother with that one, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d never go back to 1e, and I prefer minis. Doing things a little slower is just the cost of doing business.
A great deal relies upon how the players approach battle and different difficulties. On the off chance that they settle things generally from a mechanical center (these are my activities, which I can normally do this with, roll dice depending on the situation, done) it's still lovely quick. In the event that they settle things more from a vivid center (this would be a cool/fascinating/emotional/narratively fulfilling thing to do, DM needs to disclose to me how that will be settled precisely, roll dice on a case by case basis, done) the speed goes down, potentially by a great deal; on the in addition to side, on the off chance that you partake in something like this the game will be considerably more fun and drawing in than "I assault the beast with my weapon/cantrip/intermittent evened out spell" (comparatively out of battle as well, you can clarify what you do and roll for it or you can play it out and roll for it), do this process again depending on the situation. Nothing amiss with one or the other methodology, trying to say it depends and can fluctuate a ton.
This. If players are on the ball with their characters their turns in combat go by pretty quick. If there's a lot of hem hawing about 'idk what spell to use' or 'hmmm which goblin do I attack' then it can start to drag, but if people are on the ball, and thinking about what they want to do BEFORE their turn comes up, I find combat generally goes by pretty quick.
It also helps that i play online so things like doing math to figure out how much damage that fireball did are greatly sped up. Playing in person it'd take a bit longer for humans to do the math.
Purely personal experience, here but I'll just toss out some info from my session yesterday. We started the session in mid-combat, with a battle that had begun at the tail end of the previous session. The combat ended and the DM declared we were out of initiative order after about 90-95 minutes. During that time we went through six rounds of combat, which I know because I was keeping a tally for how long my spiritual weapon had been up (the count was 2 rounds at the beginning of the session, the couple surviving foes fled right before I came up in the initiative order for what would have been tick number nine, and I was at the top of the order). That's about fifteen minutes per turn which even when I think about it now seems rather long. It sure didn't feel like fifteen minutes per turn (and it's possible I may have forgotten to tick up my counters once in there someplace). But when I think on it a bit more, I can see why it took that long.
1: It was a big fight with a lot of characters involved. Our DM frequently makes jokes about how it feels like we're playing Warhammer during the big battles he gets us into. In this case we had three active players plus three NPCs attached to our party and a fourth PC we were running as an NPC because the player was unable to make the session, so right there's a seven member party. We were interrupting a dark sacrifice ritual and fighting against about ten or twelve individual enemies, each of which acted independently; the DM is generally pretty quick about handling those turns but it's still quite a bit of die rolls to work through everything, plus notation of HP, spell slots, etc. On top of that there were also another half dozen NPCs who started out as prisoners intended to be sacrificial victims and several of them managed to break free and join the fray at some point as well. To maintain player engagement the DM alternated having us roll for our allied NPCs, and we were also giving input on their actions when appropriate. We do generally know our own abilities and spells and such, we only had to look up specifics during the action a couple times (or we would look up something while waiting for our turns so we have it ready in a timely manner), but it's still a bunch of little things that have to be addressed on each turn. I would estimate each player turn took about a minute on average to resolve; counting the "party NPCs" that's seven characters totalling 42 individual turns over six rounds for about as many minutes, which would be right about half of that hour and a half time spent on the battle. By that math it also jives that the DM was handling the more numerous enemy/NPC turns at least a little bit quicker than we were handling our own.
2: We weren't always purely focused on quickly resolving the action. Somebody would make a joke about something that was said, or comment about patterns of lucky/unlucky rolls. Cross-cultural and/or linguistic trivia would come up (the DM is Mexican and all the players are in the US); at one point we spent about two minutes talking about Looney Tunes because Speedy Gonzalez came up in an offhand comment. Another time I spent a minute summarizing the premise of the movie The Abyss to explain a reference I made to it because my nineteen year old fellow player had never heard of it (shameful, I know). We were never off topic for more than a minute or so, and the jovial nature of most of this running color commentary and tangential notes is part of the atmosphere we enjoy as the experience of playing D&D, but thirty seconds here and a minute there do add up over the course of an hour or two. Now that I think about that, it's possible my estimate of about a minute spent per character turn might be a bit loose and we actually had more time spent on these little side bits.
So there you go. We spent an hour and a half (or slightly more) resolving a battle sequence that, theoretically, took less than forty-five seconds of in-game "real" time to actually happen. And a lot of stuff happened, enemies were smote, allies were injured, healed, knocked out again (our wizard is super squishy, even by the standards of most wizards) and healed/revived, weapons swung and spells slung all over the place with dozens of attack rolls and saving throws made every turn. A fast paced and action filled story was told, one little piece at a time, and once it was all over we all felt like we'd been in an epic fight for over an hour, not like we'd been doing math homework or somesuch with our character sheets in place of algebra textbooks. If we'd had just a three member party fighting a single big monster it probably would have only lasted a small fraction of that time at our same pace of play; like I said, there was a lot going on but we've come to enjoy that style of play.
Our previous session did include an encounter against a single up-level moon druid that burned through two powerful wildshapes (so we basically fought three opponents in sequence) and that went for about as many rounds but was over in about twenty minutes instead of an hour and a half. Aside from about twenty less participants being involved, that was a random encounter and didn't have any significant roleplay or narrative value to prompt extra thought and discussion so we breezed through the nuts and bolts combat rather quickly without pausing to contemplate strategic priorities (protect that hostage, heal that ally, smack that bad guy, cast a spell at that other bad guy, cast a different spell at that other bad guy, etc) or roleplay out how our characters did what they did. My longest turn was declaring my character to be shouting "Bad turtle!" and rolling/adding all the dice for a critical hit on an inflict wounds spell (50 damage even, I rolled high) because Roll 20 didn't want to autocalculate the extra damage dice for upcasting it to second level.
So there are a lot of variables involved, even if you do keep turns quick and it depends on both the players' attentiveness and the style/feel you're going for. And hopefully I didn't ramble excessively too much because I am very tired and probably should have gone to bed before I even started typing this. Yay, me. Hopefully it's mostly coherent and not fraught with typos.
It's one of the reasons why i don't run large group anymore, keeping it max to 4 player characters. Less PCs usually means less enemies to match them, which usually cut down combat duration as well.