Do your 5e combats take a long time? I can't tell if this is an issue with my group being slow or with the system itself. Whenever our DM has a pivotal story combat prepped, it can take 1-2 hours.
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Do your 5e combats take a long time?
I try to generally be a good example about having my turn actions prepped and my rolls grouped before my initiative comes up but it still does take a long time. Ten minutes per full round is optimistic.
I expect a bunch if 5e hating trolls to show up. I love 5e and don’t care what they say. It is a very fun system and there is a reason it’s so popular. It’s very accessible and easy to run. There is a huge amount of community made support and campaigns for the system as well.
Is this a bot post? Weird.
>Only a bot would love 5
No I’m a real person. Frick you.
No you are not
Prove it cuck
No, bot posts these days are actually on topic.
Yeah, it's a bot.
it shows all the signs.
That guy has been around for years and he's just unironically like that. Totally out of his fricking mind.
>Stop liking what I don’t like
Are you 12?
Stop trolling, liar.
What am I lying about exactly? What systems I personally enjoy? You don’t tell me what I like c**t.
The thing that really fricking baffles me about DnD-drones is that for all their "massive community support" there still isn't anything more than the blurry mess of a book scan that anyone has bothered to make. The game is supposedly wildly popular, yet there's not a single fan-made rulebook with basic digital publishing features like hyperlinks and logically sorted bookmarks? That shit exists for open source weekend projects for obscure bullshit no one even plays. The Eclipse Phase general has put together multiple whole adventures, including my favorite AP of any game I've ever played, and it's a dead game for nobody. Why are 5e fans so fricking lazy and unproductive?
And while Pathfinder isn't much better than DnD, it's leagues better at digital publishing, it's fricking, in this century of technology at least, and it is very prolific. WotC has put out in a decade what Paizo published for 2e in five years, and WotC has a bigger games department, how the hell is this even possible? Not only that but PF fans have made a fricking Google earth map of both 1e and now 2e as well, and what have 5e fans made other than half-baked stock adventure schlock?
5e.tools
They don’t actually know about 5e and his post shows his extreme ignorance. They’re just trolling because they like being edgy.
>No bro just use this website lmao
You're an idiot. PDFs for free indie games and fan projects have been made with at least hyperlinks and bookmarks, and 5e is ten times or even larger than their communities and it doesn't have ONE? That speaks to the quality of the "5e fan". That says all that needs to be said about their value as players and as humans.
Most of them have hyperlinks and bookmarks. You’re a moron.
Can I just use this site instead of buying the books? Like is it missing info or...?
Just go to the PDF share thread like the rest of us and grab the books there. 90% of the rules are free anyways with the SRD anyways, so use that if you're a stickler about piracy
https://www.5esrd.com/
>hello fellow ARR PEE GEE players
You sound like a underpaid shill my man hope you fricking know that
Literally try anything else
5e is a mess mechanically
Older editions of dnd, pathfinder, other systems entirely so you would have SOME point of reference to understand just how bad 5e is
5e is great. Less bloat than 3.5 and more of a classic feel than 4e. Hating something popular doesn’t make you cool or interesting.
5e is shit and ignoring that not gonna help anyone
>let's make short rest so players can cast spell more often like in those Chinese porn cartoons
>we also make enemies spongier then oblivion bandits
>also let's make martial classes absolutely useless
>let's add advantage system because our players afraid of math
>of what's that? Adding random elements instead of solid numbers make our shit combat even longer? Oh well
Martials are fine, advantage is an elegant and useful mechanic, HP bloat isn’t as much of an issue as you think, short rests don’t restore all spells wtf are you smoking. Whenever I speak to you anti 5e tards you have a very poor knowledge of all ttrpgs including the game you claim to hate so much.
Yeah just ignore the problems
And all people who complain about them and that combat takes ages are just wrong
Keep the blinders on, big world is scary
I’ve been playing the game for years and have played a lot of other systems. It is well supported and easy to run. My current campaign has been going for over a year and I’m going to run my next game in 5e most likely. Seethe, cope, and dilate.
Just like that
You are the only one who knows the truth
Everybody who thinks combat takes too long
Martials are complete dogshit
Characters are immortal
Hp bloat is insane
Adding randomness on top randomness instead of solid numbers is a bad idea
These are all made up
These problems don't exist
And DND 5E IS NOT MCDONALD'S OF TTRPG GAMES
Yes
I use my own CR calculator and adjust a lot of the pre-made monsters. Maybe that's why I never noticed HP bloat too much. Most of my PCs will die in like 2-3 rounds if they get hit.
ehh, hp bloat is kind of a thing in 5e. but it's for PCs, not for monsters.
i did some math on this a while ago. IIRC the inputs I used were average stats by CR in the monster manual, vs a Warlock who maxes CHA and then CON.
the PC only starts increasing CON at 12th level but you can see that even before then there's been some serious fall-off in the ability of the average monster to kill a PC with damage: monsters in tier 2 kill PCs about 2/3s as fast as monsters in tier 3.
so if you want to jack up the threat, you'll have to use higher CR monsters -- but oh wait! that means they'll have more HP, too. so "HP bloat" kind of cuts both ways and forces you to pick your poison, in that sense.
and yeah, that's before factoring in any offensive magic items -- but it's also before factoring in any defensive magic items, too. so I think it's a fair baseline to draw assumptions from.
of course there's an obvious solution if it bothers you -- manually jack up the monster's offense without jacking up their HP -- but that's getting into homebrew territory which is kind of like admitting the game has a problem.
also as to whether martials are "fine" I think that depends on what you mean.
I like 5e btw
Ohgod those graphs are gonna make me cum. How'd you gather/setup the data? I wanna make some more graphs like that with some other queries
I'm a blindgay that can't read. Was drooling too much over the graphs to even think twice before posting lmao
It may seem unfair but using a timer limit for each player turn decision greatly speeds up any game. Another thing is for the dm to remember: enemies that actually fight to the death are more unique than rare.
What a thin skinned homosexual you are.
>enemies that actually fight to the death are more unique than rare
How so unique? Most 5e DM's and, admittedly, myself for a long time ran all encounters as a death match. Considering a form of morale where the enemies run off if the losses are too great not only speeds up combat but can create more interesting interactions in dungeon scenarios.
>How so unique?
Every time there's an actual reason to overule the preservation instinct. Mindless enemies in general will fight to the death unless there's an actual reason for not to, zealot fanatics may fight to the death if makes sense with their cult credo, desperate enemies may fight to the death if they can't see any other way out, aberrations/demons/outerworldly beings may fight to the death more often than normal because unknown reasons (alien mindset that doesn't take into account "death" or some other shit). You got the idea.
Aaaaaaah I see. In the end I feel like you put in more thought into why the enemies would fight to the death than your standard DM. These things can be pretty easily quantified with a morale score that's rolled against at key moments.
The fricking worst thing about 5e isn't that "it's shit" or "corpo bad", it's that 5e has created complacency with what is provided to you with no incentive to do-it-yourself.
Every single fix I've ever seen thrown around the net or what I have used myself comes from either optional rules in older versions of dnd or just from the "for the GM" section of other rpgs.
Thank you all for reading my blogpost about why 5e bad.
It like I'm reading the back of the box or something
I see the 5e loving trolls showed up before the hating on ones. How original.
I love 5e as well, but I also hate it enough to avoid it whenever I can. It's got flaws but most players/DM's notice em after they've played for a long time. Or if they browse Ganker and believe everything they read. Either or.
cute image op but i don't play 5e. It could be worse, I once saw a necromancer unleash 20 skeletons from a bag of holding and take like 30-45 minutes to finish his turn
ty, I like the image too :3
I’m DMing our next campaign and so I’m swapping to an OSR system. Probably b/x with ad&d race/class options using ALL or OSE.
This is an issue with system, and why group initiative is superior. It doesn't sound like you're running the game but it couldn't hurt to suggest it.
I never got why 5e ditched turn delaying.
Yeah, they take way too long and they're severely unsatisfactory. There's too much of a divide between the power of magic and the power of weapons, there's very little room for tactics as everything relies on either daddy DM's whims or a die roll, and getting proper equipment also relies on daddy DM's whims, while there are dead levels as you wait for your next feat or stat increase.
So, rather than sit at a table to satisfy a control freak with a bunch of cucks who think they're playing a game, I'm working on my own game to satisfy my thirst for tactical combat and providence through advancement.
Cry about me moving away from D&D, homosexuals, because you lack the resolve to do the same.
You won’t be missed.
Yours a sad story of shitty DM
or perhaps you, a shitty player who couldnt deal with DMs decision of not making the girl about your epic paladin
5e combat is half the speed of something like 3.X because there's less options to think about doing each turn. Once players know what they are doing, combat goes really fast in either system for most of the low levels, which are the only levels anyone is playing.
>Once players know what they are doing, combat goes really fast in either system for most of the low levels
It really doesn't though
You're out of your mind if you think it's a system issue first. Most of the other, big systems I've played are even bigger slogs in combat than D&D because they rely on opposed rolls or soak mechanics.
>5e combat is half the speed of something like 3.X because there's less options to think about doing each turn.
Doesn't make any sense. 3.x has much more situational modifiers that slow down combat if you intend to run it RAW. 5e combat rarely uses anything else than the cover modifiers and advantage/disadvantage. 3.x also has more different types of actions too, especially if you include later books.
The situational modifiers aren't what slows 3.5 down, it's the extra steps of resolution with mechanics like miss chance and iteratives that barely exist early on. And even then the game is so much more lethal that 3.X combat ended before 5E combat most of the time.
>my group being slow or with the system itself.
Both. A combat turn is 6 seconds. Players shouldn't be allowed to go over their options for 10 minutes to decide what their player is going to do. If your players have analysis paralysis, the DM should institute a chess clock. If the player goes over their time, they lose the turn.
Nah combat in my games always took hours for even a small encounter.
And it’s the main reason I dislike the game. The pace just instantly hits a fricking crawl as soon as combat starts.
Specially if everyone has a miniature, theatre of mind runs quicker and you can fudge things like range and distance and you don’t have the players autisticly counting squares for range, you don’t need battle maps and setup and tear down, you’re just in. But still, it crawls.
And then you have someone who’s playing barbarian with stone skin who starts raging and instantly every encounter has to be tailored to combat them, otherwise they will blow through every enemy and someone who just picked a fighter or rogue won’t get a chance, so those guys just tune out, and start looking at their phone and then there’s a delay where they look up and go “what was going on?” And the mage or Druid start umming and ahhing about what they’ll do and what spells they had ready, and “oh yeah I readied that last time we rested… totally bro” then the “lol so random” player will want to do something dumb to breath some life and fun back into the game, but it’s not possible, it’s not in the rules so they spend ages negotiating with the DM what they could do instead.
Not to mention “everyone roll initiative” and then there’s the slow scramble for dice rolls, and the dm rolls each monster.
I can’t stand it. Specially if the scene before was a frantic chase, or daring plan has gone wrong. Just to suddenly grind to a hazily. Sucks.
The way initiative and sequence of actions works in B/X DnD is superior, once I and my buddies started to play this way we can never go back, its so fast. Also everything in 5e has twice as much HP as it should. And modern DnD has too many counters and expendable abilities so every class feels like magic caster with those limited superpowers.
What does B/X do that makes it so much faster? I will do what it takes to bring excitement back to combat
Each side rolls 1d6 every round, winning side acts first (you could add the initiative bonus of a leader). Spells are declared before initiative so other side has the chance to avoid powerful instakill spells.
Sequence of combat round is:
1.Movement
2.Missile attacks
3.Spell casting
4.Melee
If both sides have same initiative then they act simultaneously, meaning that if creature is killed in the that round its still has the chance to make an attack, which leads to cool "eye for an eye" moments.
This type of combat made our fights more strategic and less "individualistic" because all players constantly make plans and engaged in the combat instead of waiting for their turn.
We effortlessly run battles where each player handles their character and 1-3 hirelings, and I as a GM have easier time using large groups of enemies because of set sequence.
Blessed Dubs, mind providing an example of play with these methods?
Here's one right from the Basic 1981 version of the game.
It's also important to have some sort of morale system for enemies and allies, so battles sometimes lead to a chase or capture and don't necessarily drag on until the last goblin is killed, in B/X morale checks are usually done once when one person is in the group dies and once when half of them is defeated, if they succeed both times, they fight to the last.
Fantastic advice, will give these tactics a try for my next game
For how oversimplified and dumbed down the game is from previous editions, it's never as fast as it seems like it should be. The sort of bug, elaborate fights to actually ensure that a high CR monster poses a threat can eat up massive chunks of a session even when there isn't that much that's actually happening.
>5e combats take a long time
That's normal.
DnD players will tell you that is good. Other people will tell you it is not.
It is neither. It is what it is and you'll just have to decide if that is what you want or not.
One of the most universal complaints I've seen for it is that combat takes a very long time, yes. Bounded accuracy and massive piles of hit points make either side take a long time to kill, especially because HP scales much faster than damage output. So fights get longer and longer as you level up. It doesn't help that there's a lot of slow mechanics to fights on top of that (individual initiative, precise aiming on spells, design that encourages each side to have as many people as they can, yoyo healing). And, for the final nail, it attracts a lot of inexperienced players that are really slow at determining their move and will often wait until their turn to decide what to do, instead of planning while other people are going.
5E rounds take time mostly because there is a lot of homework and variable actions to choose from. Most players and game masters simply do not learn them until they are at the table,
Then they forget them again until next time.
This is why the game will thrive as a virtual tabletop.
My games sped up when I threw out the battlemap and minis,
Even faster with OSR and I'll never play 5E again.
>my group being slow or with the system itself
At least do the double rolls (hit and damage roll done together, only use damage roll if the hit hit) to speed this shit up
Bandaid on a cancer patient.
Double rolls are standard behaviour in any fricking game that has separate hit and damage rolls. It has nothing to do with how terminally brain-dead DnD and its crunch are.
Missed the point of my post entirely.
The only time I ever had a combat take an hour was when I made a bullshit, overtuned multi-stage boss fight.
I ran it with Roll20 and a lot of macros that I set up for everyone which sped up combat a lot.
From half an hour if it's a low-rolled random encounter to one and a half if it's a climatic battle. There's too many rolls, both in the sense that single actions require too many rolls and in the sense that what you want to do takes too many in-game actions to complete. Also, making decisions takes long because there's a ton of little superpowers to use, and they trigger other little superpowers or checks. Then individual initiative and the flood of powers and other powers they trigger make it so that you often can't get your turn ready beforehand because there's a reaction, a check, and a legendary action between your friend's initiative and yours that you have to react to. These can all be mitigated for sure. But goddamn. Sometimes combat feels like a fail state (for the game) but then again there's little else to do unless the DM brings it from outside of the books.
In a game about combat, it's expected for combat to take awhile.
The issue becomes 'is the combat actually engaging/impactful in and of itself?'
From my admittedly brief time with 5e, I never found it so. And out of curiosity, I keep asking around in threads (and shall again) for 5e fans to potentially provide me with an LP or something of '5e combat being done correctly,' something to illustrate it at its most fun. I'd genuinely like to understand.
My experience was much of what this guy said: slower players bogged down by decision paralysis, while faster players scribbled quick notes on their turn in advance then were done in ten seconds and went back to staring into space for ten minutes.
In any case, I play mostly for the combats. (Which is to say, if I played mostly for the roleplaying, I'd just roleplay without the rules.) So I expect them to take an hour to as many as four. more on rare occasions. The question then becomes, 'what value am i getting for my time?' and I never managed to squeeze any out of 5e. As above though, I'd still welcome examples of people doing so.
>In a game about combat, it's expected for combat to take awhile.
You've got that a little fricking wrong though. In a game about doing LOTS OF COMBAT, the combat should be expected to be quick, smooth, and intuitive. WotC themselves believe you should be doing anything from 4 to 10 encounters in a single adventuring day, and even if that's split up over multiple sessions, there's no fricking way to fit all of those in if each encounter is supposed to be a laborious slog.
I'll agree with that, yeah. I keep forgetting the official assumptions about that are so moronic.
And that when people say 'combats take like 2-3 hours,' they're still talking about 'we fought like eight guys,' when I'm thinking more 'we brought mercenaries/retainers and fought an entire gnoll tribe,' for that matter.
MMO mindset applied to tabletop rules. doomed from the start
5e keeps the hp scaling of 3.x but greatly reduces offensive ability, so yeah combat is a slog where you're just mashing bags of hit points together.
Yup. It's fricking miserable.
Last time I played we had a dm that would throw things at us that were 3+ CRs ahead of us and the combats would take for-fricking-ever and he would also do the video game bullshit of having the villain we spent 4 hours fighting teleport away at the last moment and be surprised that we took it poorly that we couldn't have prevented that outside of all of us scoring crits the last round of combat and nuking that fricker.
5e is probably a decent game but no one I've even played with could run it "right"
It's the main reason I stopped playing 5e and explored alternative systems. What makes it a killer in my enjoyment of the system is that most if not all character progression is oriented towards combat and as such makes the mere experience of leveling up an existential pain
Cut everyone's HP in half. Monsters in 5e are designed to be punching bags. The devs figured that players would rather have a drawn out slugging match than the rocket tag of 3.5 et al.
How easily do you think players would figure out an enemy with a high DR but very low HP?
I'm thinking of making ceramic golems animated by a magical fluid. They die as soon as they get a significant crack but their shell is very hard.
5E is bad but slow combat is absolutely the fault of the players regardless of whatever system you use. /thread
It's true, if players know what they're doing a standard turn can be about a minute long
when I play (which is rare! lol) my turns are twenty seconds unless my DM is hitting me with some "um ackhually". or if I'm casting an AoE and the DM has to roll a bunch of saves separately
>How so unique? Most 5e DM's and, admittedly, myself for a long time ran all encounters as a death match
i gotta stop fricking doing that.
I didn't gather the data from the MM myself and I can't remember who did. but if it's any help, this is the spreadsheet I started with
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZNDHfsOOfx6n12YqCccHWlbfET22ByIfYPtsHkfXLCo/edit?usp=sharing
An angel is still divine even if it has faults, carry on doing your god-given my holy knight
>/threading your own post
moron.
>thinking there's literally any other valid response to OP's question
moron.