Fights take too long.
There’s no roleplaying.
It’s a videogame on paper.
Blah blahblah blah blah blahblah.
I had a wonderful time on Sunday night with 4e, and I feel like blogging about it. Why? Because that session reinforced the true strength and selling point of 4e: simplicity to run. I was asked to run a game for my friends on Sunday night, they were hanging out and felt like playing some D&D, so they asked me and I agreed. They decided they’d make 7th level characters, so I went into the Wiki page for Dungeon adventures per level, and selected “Danger at the White Lotus Academy” as the adventure I’d run for them. It was a 7th level one and it looked simple enough. I didn’t get a chance to read it because I was stepping out with my family all afternoon.
Why is that important? Because I was able to sit in front of the adventure for 10 minutes, get all the important stuff, make some quick notes and run it. The 4e stat blocks, a battlemat, & the tactics for the encounter are all that you need, quick thinking and a good imagination will provide the rest.
Not only that, but there were only 4 pc’s, as opposed to my regular 7. Guess what? We went through 4 encounters and a skill challenge in three and a half hours. We were breezing through the encounters. I didn’t even have maps ready! I had to draw them then and there… Were we playing the same game? What the hell was going on? I believe we found the sweet spot.
"Madam, this man swears they did 4 fights in a little over 3 hours." "What? Destroy this liar!"
4 PC’s was such a joy to run, that I encourage those of you with big parties to try it. It’s going to feel like a different game. As another experiment, try picking an adventure from Dungeon and running it off the cuff, with little or no prep. You’ll see it’s not that difficult to do.
www. Newbie DM .com 
Jeff Carlsen
January 5, 2010
It’s hard to deny that 4e has made great strides and has had many wonderful ideas for making the game easier to run and faster to play. I was completely into it for that reason.
Then I played Savage Worlds. Now 4e feels like a burdensome beast at the table. Though I’ll admit to having stolen some 4e concepts in my SW work.
Jonathan Drain | D20 Source
January 5, 2010
Our group is on IRC sometimes takes twenty minutes a full combat round. What are we missing?
Totte Alm
January 5, 2010
Group size is one thing that really matters in most RPGs, and in 4E it is very important to game speed. Running a 3-4 PC party comparedto a 6-7 PC party is easy 1/2 time, and I have tried to figure out why.
With 3-4 players, all players are focused on the game all time. First, because you do not have a 5 minute round to sleep through while the others do their stuff, and secondly, with 3-4 PCs, you need to stay focused to survive, you need to cooperate even better to succeed.
I’ve seen this for the past 30+ years, 5 players is the break point, where the game starts to slow down really bad, any RPG does that. With 3 players, each option is limited to what 2 other PCs does. With 5 PCs, each player needs to sync his actions with 4 other PCs, which by itself take twice the time.
But I agree to the fullest with your notion that 4E is fun to play, and the statblocks is the best thing since miniatures was brought to the game (I remember using coins and lego blocks many years ago)
Anarkeith
January 5, 2010
My Friday night game is an 8 player (or more) event, so we run my simplified homebrew rules. I’ve got a 4e game starting on Sunday with 4 players. I hope it goes as well as yours!
praxedes
January 5, 2010
I totally am on board with this! I maintain that 4 (or 5 well-organised) players is the DM sweet spot and that’s the number I’ve gone for for years. And 4e really does make effective DMing like falling off a log…and that’s a source of criticism for some (a friend this weekend claimed that being able to quickly build xp scaled encounters on the fly using rules took away from some “mystic art” of Games Mastering !).
~P~
kaeosdad
January 5, 2010
That’s felt about the optimum to me. Six players was a nightmare until I set up a momentum timer.
The Recursion King
January 5, 2010
DMing a solo session is definitely the quickest turn around in combat. I don’t play 4E, I play Labyrinth Lord which has very simple combat rules and plays extremely quickly, but the point about player sizes is definitely true. My group is five players and when everyone is there, combats do take longer. My players get more tactical the more of them there are ‘you do this, I’ll flank, you cast support’ etc.
newbiedm
January 5, 2010
@Jeff: that game is on my list of games to try… but my players are creatures of habit… @Jonathan: I think players knowing how to play their character, and deciding what they are going to do before their turn arrives is crucial. @totte: i agree with your comments here, and as much as I love the 4e stat blocks there are thinks I’d change about it as it exists right now. @Anarkeith: good luck. the first few 4e games I ran when I started were 8 players. I hated it. 🙂 @praxedes: tell your friend to get with the times. 🙂 @kaeosdad: I tried the timer, but I stopped. I think by now my players have been conditioned to speed up on their own. We’ve been at it for 1.5 years. @kingius: IS LL a 1st ed clone?
Mark/Anlath
January 5, 2010
Like many others have said, 4/5 players is the sweet spot for me. I’ve run a couple of 6+ games now and they just wear me out as the DM. 4/5 players (or 4 and a DM “Guest” character in my case) is great.
Although, I have had to include “Tweet Breaks” in their Short Rests… Attention spams of six year olds when the iPhones are on the table I swear.
Glad you had a great game dude. 🙂
Argent
January 5, 2010
My group of 5 has just expanded to 6 and we’ve progressed from 1st up to 7th level now and battles are becoming a bit cumbersome. I’ve just run a series of battles and skill challenges that put the PCs on the clock and they managed to complete 4 encounters – one of which was very complex involving a roof top ambush – a skill challenge and escape a trap and arrive with literally seconds to go in 6 hours to prevent the BBEG doing something nasty. They enjoyed the additional pressure and it concentrated minds and speeded up play! Something I’m definitely going to look at how I can fit into the campaign again.
jonathan
January 5, 2010
@jeff carlsen : I agree – I’m still a big fan of D&D; but since playing Savage Worlds I can’t help but thinking that that it will be hard for me to go back to 4E anytime soon. Even with a party of 5 or 6 players, we regularly run several combat encounters and roleplaying sessions each time we get together to play. With 4E — our experiences were much more like what Jonathan Drain mentioned… 20 minutes per turn… argh…
j_king
January 5, 2010
We play about 5 or so… and the battles often take forever. I don’t think it’s the fault of the game so much as people staring at the table when their turn comes up; tapping their foot and humming and hawing. The rounds are so long though that it’s really hard for people to focus which is a shame.
I’ve also tried getting people off the, “call out the name of a power and roll it” kind of battle; but that’s all it ever dilutes into. The longer the battle, the more likely it is to start happening. There’s a sweet spot we all hit where an encounter starts taking too long and most people start walking away from the table when their turn is over or they start conversations with others and distract other players.
None of this is directly the fault of the rules, but I do find that the increase in tactical decisions in combat does influence the length of those encounters. Fewer players means fewer decisions to be made which seems to decrease encounter duration. Seems to be a logarithmic effect. Add on more player and that exponent jumps.
There’s a lot of balancing involved in 4e, but if you can get it right you can have a great game.
Tyson J. Hayes
January 5, 2010
@newbiedm – If you ever find yourself in Seattle Apathy Games will host a game for you so you can get a taste for it. As for being a creature of habit, I am to, I’m still playing a 3.0/3.5 campaign.
by_the_sword
January 5, 2010
In the one session of 4th Ed that I DM’ed for, we had five players and combat was somewhat slowed down by the fact that Koboklds…freaking Kobolds, had 20+ hit points and usually took two or three rounds to kill one of them. I switched out some of the later encounters with minions just to speed things along.
Another problem was that the players were new to the game (as was I) and didn’t really have a good grasp on what they could do. The Rageblood Barbarian kept missing her chances to attack again or charge once she dropped her opponent. The Warlock didn’t start using her curse ability until the third encounter and the rogue just stood back and threw daggers instead of trying to flank the enemy.
I probably could have run the kobolds beter too. But if I did it might have been a TPK.
Swordgleam
January 5, 2010
How long things take and how frustrating they are increase exponentially as you add players. I used to play with a 10 player group, and the mage and the fighter could sometimes get through several games of chess in the time one combat took (not that them going off to play chess wasn’t a factor in combat slowing down).
Bercilac
January 8, 2010
Worst combats I ever ran were in a piracy campaign with a party of 9.
“Your initiative.”
“I shoot.”
(dice roll)
“Okay, good shot. Now, your initiative.”
“I shoot.”
(dice roll)
“Tough luck. Now,”
(time passes)
“Orcs fire. Sorry Harry. Okay now, Oliver, your initiative…”
I should have stage managed the fights a bit better. I’ve thought of thirty ways I could have avoided that situation since running the campaign. Hindsight is 20/20…
Kindelias Shadowoul
January 9, 2010
One thing you failed to mention was that we were all playing character classes new to each of us, which you would figure that that in and of itself would have slowed down the gameplay, yet the encounters ran pretty smoothly because we actually had a better feel for the action. For example, I was playing a melee ranger…playing a defender role because we all played strikers for some reason; I knew who the weakest person in our party was in terms of AC and HPs, and it was easier for me to track who was taking damage, so I knew when to use my interrupts and immediate reaction powers when that particular ally was targeted; if the group had been bigger I would have had more information to digest and more stuff to figure out and my effectiveness would be hindered by trying to do too much. We played with 4 and I loved it….I think 5 is probably ideal and would be just as fun….problem is how do we go back to playing with 7-8 after tasting the sweet nectar of 4???
Brian
January 13, 2010
Back when I was DMing 3.5, 3 players was my sweet spot. I’m currently running a 4e campaign which usually has 3-4 players at the table, and (currently) 2 companion characters (from the DMG2). I let players run the companion characters to give them more to do, and the stat blocks (I write them out on a 4×6 index card) are simple enough that a player can just pick up any companion character and play their turn quickly and (relatively) effectively.
The biggest factor in bogging combat down, IME, is definitely a given player’s familiarity (or lack thereof) with his or her character. I’d be hesitant to run a game starting at a high level if the players were using a class for the first time, unless the players were very experienced (mine aren’t, at least not with 4e).
Power cards also help, especially if they’re organized in a good way. In our first session, the Barbarian player had to constantly keep flipping through the book to look up his powers, so unless he defaulted to charging with Howling Strike his turn took long. The Bard was the only player to bring power cards to the first session, and his turns usually went by the fastest (though after a while the archer started to catch on that most rounds he should just use twin strike). A new player (Paladin) joined the party in the third session, and he had obviously spent some time familiarizing himself with his powers (he was brand new to 4e) and organizing the cards, because he always new exactly what he would do on his turns, which took only a few seconds. Even the Bard would occasionally rifle through his power cards for about minute trying to decide what the best course of action would be.
VVolf
January 13, 2010
I play a lot of RPGA Living Forgotten Realms, the modules are written for parties of 5 with scaling for parties of 4 or 6. RPGA doesn’t allow tables of less than 4 or more than 6. While 4 player tables usually go quicker it more important that people can stay focused on combat during a fight… No offense to Mr. Improvisational Theatre, but we don’t need to hear the 4-part soliloquy you berate your opponents with when we’re fighting 5 minions and soldier.
Simon Newman
January 16, 2010
I cap my Meetup group at 6 players. With 5-6 players we get through around 4 significant fights in a about 4-4.5 hours of play time. That’s allowing for a reasonable amount of roleplaying, exploration etc too.
Simon Newman
January 16, 2010
One thing I do to speed up play is round-table initiative. After the first round of combat we switch to doing init round the table, starting on my right. Everyone can see when their turn’s coming up and be ready. Also I allow ad hoc simultaneity where several PCs (eg) move together to set up flanks.
Mosuke
January 17, 2010
Well its true. 4 is the number. We play 5 or 6 and the game really slow down a lot, but its good ^^ Remember like… 4 years ago trying with 8 players, I go mad and end the session xD but well, I learn and now I don’t try that kind of things.
4E helps in combat a lot, playing 2 or 3.5 with 6 players in combat is hell, i think.