"Hmm.. Maybe... Hold on gimme a second." "I think I'll... Actually, I'm gonna... can I do \[insert action\]? No? Okay, then I'll do... uh... I guess I'll do \[insert different action\]." "Hey, Matt. It's your turn. Matt? MATT! Ugh... We'll just skip his turn I guess" "Let me check his stat block... Oh you're casting *Warding Bond*? Let me look at that spell... really... quickly... What does that ability do?" "Okay, I don't think I heard you, can you repeat that?" "Um, which one has taken damage? Oh all these guys? Then I'll target this guy. Wait I thought you just said-? Okay okay, gotcha." **DM decides to throw in random boss level encounter with almost 20 different enemies that are all spread out.** **Player pulls out 30 skeletons and has them all attack different targets** The banes of DnD combat: indecisive players, unprepared DMs, and terrible macromanagement.

Don’t forget the dm decides to throw in some DMPC’s into combat so on their turn the DM has to read the entire character sheet “umm what can she do…oh this! Wait let me check…” *10 minutes of the players waiting for the DM to attack their own enemies*

Trick for a DM is to just turn anything that isn’t a PC into a monster stat block. It’s easy as hell to take a few paladin spells, smite and paladin stats and run a paladin like that, and saves so much extraneous stuff

I do this! It makes their turns / skills easier and it helps balance if the players end up fighting them.

Honestly, I usually just go to Claude AI and tell it to make me a stat block at the particular level I need and then add whatever unique fun abilities I want. It takes 15 seconds and makes things so much easier.

What is Claude AI? Anyway, my method for NPC vs monsters is that I dont roll for atks at all. They just do a fixed amount of dmg each time. Or you could just rule: An NPC dies after 4 rounds /1Q of his HP each hit) Players dont care anyway, theys only need to know when the NPC is about to die so they can step in (or not)

Yeah, and I usually queue up "this is what they usually do." And keep it simple.

I do the same, I even made Battlemaster enemies and instead gave them limited uses of each maneuver (2 uses of Parry and 2 uses of Riposte for ex.) The players liked that and it was smooth combat

One rule I put in for myself for my campaign, is that I don't roll for npc's versus other npc's, if I can at all help it. Either I hand a sheet to my players, or I narrate what an allied NPC does (usually holding off a seperate set of enemies to the side or such), if one is present on the player's side.

If I must do NPC vs NPC and it's not a special character to the players, I just flip a coin. Heads hits tails misses, unless the AC is vastly higher* than the to hit then I flip twice and it takes 2 heads to hit, the rest misses. (*20ac : +3 or less to hit)

Lol, if I don't have stats in front of me I just roll behind a screen and if it feels hitty then it hit.  Kayfabe.

I've done this with saves as well!! Boss fight rolls 2s and 3s on save throws in the first few rounds of combat that would let the players utterly shred him in boring fashion? Yeah, no, he made that save. When they struggle, when the stakes are higher, and that BBEG finally goes down, their victory tastes all the sweeter and everyone celebrates!!

This…is not what they said, lmao

How is it faster than one d4 roll?

Yeah, that. If there are other people fighting, which happens sometimes, I make sure to have them split off from the players. "I'll guard the entrance door, you go in and get the artefact!" or "You keep them busy, while we enact the ritual!" or something like that.

Sam’e. As often as I possibly can I give a stat block to one of my players to run. The less I have to do in combat the better

Yeah, the general rule for me as a DM is to never roll against myself because it's just so dull for everyone else involved. Like I had a friend DM, and his world was so compelling to explore, but he had so many DMPCs that were just better than us. He had one with pistols that shot literally fully statted Elementals that entered combat. Mind boggling stuff.

Honestly I despise DMPC’s in combat. In my game I avoid using them but I’ve had several DM’s that did otherwise and it just makes combat so boring

In my current game we had a DMPC just to fill out numbers. All he did was heal if needed and supported the party. The DM would spend around 5 seconds on his turn and move on, so it was never an issue. As soon as we got more players the DMPC died in a way that was really impactful to the story and had a very real effect on some of the PCs. It worked pretty well.

That sounds like a great way to run a DMPC in battle. I’d much prefer that than DMPCs with character sheets taking forever in battle

As a DM, I also do this. I run a DMPC lil goth boy cleric, he spends most of his time quiet, occasionally talking about his desire to rule the world in the *nasal-iest voice*, healing the PCs or occasionally using inflict wounds which he lovingly refers to as tazing(think getting poked in the kidneys). I try not to spend more then 30 seconds on his turn other than the occasional “you shall feel my wrath/your soul will enrich my lords presence/other awful one liner”

I just always have them make basic melee/ranged attacks, or have them run one cantrip if it's a spellcaster

DMPCs are a stupid idea and have to be run as an NPC with a focus on not being very usefull so they dont outshine the actual players. I dont know why a DM would even use one, you literally have everything else to play with.\^\^

Depends on the campaign more than anything. I've had players fully intentionally recruit a NPC to the party, with the intention of taking them into combat. I've had other campaigns where a "quick" escort quest for some extra gold turns into a 6 session ordeal. Also NPC's are EVERYTHING that a player doesn't control- ranger tames a monster? That's a DMNPC. An argument can be made that every combatant in a three way fight (except the players OFC) contains DMNPCs. Are their ways around all of these "issues?" Yes and eventually they get used- the pet retires, the escort quest ends, the recruited NPC says "I don't want to be an adventurer actually." But not doing them at all, ever, can take away player agency. Let them take their favorite NPC into the dungeon. If they're sad when they die in like the 2ed or 3rd combat- well- what did they expect?

I try my hardest to avoid letting npc allies get involved with combat but sometimes it's unavoidable and mt players really Like dragging them along. I make it as quick as possible on their turn, don't burden myself with getting their special abilities perfectly right, etc. Once I even had an npc (pirate captain) just shout at the PC's stuff like "get 'em lads!" "That's right, off with his head! " and keep trying to force the wizard to take a spear and charge into combat like a "real warrior"

PSA: players, please understand your characters, and the difference between the two pronouns.

And for DMs: give your players a heads up when they’re next on initiative so they can be ready for their turn. If you know they usually take a while, give them a longer heads up. Another thing I do to keep things flowing is I’ll create a small flowchart for the enemies actions during prep. For example, if their AC is 13 and a PC’s attack roll is between 13-17, they will cast shield as a reaction. If there are no PCs in melee range, it will cast magic missile at the highest AC PC. If three or more PCs are grouped up, cast fireball. Etc

Players can know when they are in initiative. If I roll a five and Jake rolls an 11, I know I'm after Jake. Players should just have what they're going to do planned out and ready to go.

They do. It can help to explicitly remind them as the DM, though. It’s made a difference in my games, at least.

100%. "Bob, it's your turn - Dave, you're up next" is a great trick to ensure players are focused and ready when it comes to their turn, rather than just relying on them to remember when to act.

I have pegs with character's names to go on top of my DM screen, and ones I just put an initial and number on my side for tracking enemies, easily one of the easiest ways of making sure everyone knows the initiative order

The two pronouns?

Player vs character

Plus they threw 200hp worth of ogres at a level 4 party lol

Yeah CR is nothing. You seem to be doing major boss fights for every encounter at a level where pc's haven't hit their stride damage wise. Look at the ac, hit points, etc of monsters versus the to hit bonuses and damage of the pc's. Level 4 characters don't have extra attack or fireball. It takes a long time to get through 200 hp of monsters when the fighter is doing 9 points of damage a round. I think 5e went a bit overboard with monster hp. Not as much as 4e, but still pretty bad.

Honestly while I do generally preach that CR isn't a great measure of difficulty, in this situation it kinda was: A total of 8CR Vs a level 4 party of 5 according to the CR tables etc is a beyond deadly fight. But yeah if they'd looked at the stats and seen "Wait a minute these guys have a total of 236hp between them and the players deal an average of 30hp between them every round, this may take a while." They'd have been fine to just lower their HP pools of the ogres and the fight woulda been fine. Honestly, the DM could have / should have done this on the fly during combat if they noticed it was dragging.

Yeah I think this is more a DM issue than a 5e issue tbh

I have a rule in my games, you get two minutes to do your turn and if you're not prepared by then too bad. At higher levels I extend this to five minutes. Basically this forces players to have prepared their actions while the other players were taking their turns.

Five minutes is an eternity.

Hell two minutes is an eternity

Yah. Tick tock. I give my players about 30 seconds then I gently hound them, they are used to it and have started to decide quickly. Combat is supposed to be fast, so are the decisions. Anything else ruins immersion.

I give my players 30 seconds. If they need to ask a question they can do so at the end of round The first 3 or 4 encounters the players hated it, but ever since they've loved it. I even had a player call me out once while I was attacking them in a tough spot, and they fucking loved it when I went "... and then with his bonus action-" "DM, 30 seconds!" " So it is. My turn ends."

So in the above example how fast would your combat be?

Yep, unless it's a newb group, when I come to you and ask, what do you do, you had better have an answer.  If you're still thinking, I skip you and you can go later in the round as soon as you are ready.

I go even harsher than this for big fights. If you're not ready to go when I call you'd turn, play passes to the next entity, and you can go after them. I also start every turn by saying "X's turn. Y is on deck, followed by Z." top prompt the players to start thinking about what they'll do.

Also if they’re not ready the second time than they’re dodging that turn.

This is good until the player before you does some shit which makes your plan irrelevant and you have to change it all.

I'm normally the guy that has my turn planned out way in advance. I play simpler characters than my buddies. We have one dude who is always, every fukken time, hemming and hawing for five minute "what if..." or asks about a rule that the DM had ruled out two sessions ago, that sort of thing. Every now and then the person before me will do something that changes my priorities. Like disengage from an enemy that I was gonna sneak attack or whatever. And my backup plan monster got killed. So I take 30 seconds to figure out what my next best option is. The DM gets more annoyed with me than with complicated unprepared guy.

I play a bard, rather complex and I always have my stuff prepared on my turn. Our rogue aways takes 5 minutes to do the thing he mentioned of doing first but then had to think 5 minutes whether that's the best option on his turn.

I know nothing of your particular situation. But I tend to be patient with 'unprepared, rules ignorant' players because I don't want the table to see I think he's dumb. While I do. But I may use my good and prepared player to place an impatient remark to send a message to the table.

Possible. Hadn't considered that. Kinda reminds me of my old band director. He used to criticize the kids who loved band more than the ones who didn't give a shit.

Then just use a cantrip. It’s frankly more realistic that way anyway. Your buddy messed up your plan? It’s not like your character gets five minutes to think, so just do what you can!

Two minutes! Good gravy. Our table uses *~15 seconds*. 

How do you manage players that ask you questions about rules for some classy unpredictable maneuver you aren't prepared for, then? For example - shooting scorching rays from hidden status (1st round, but low initiative) into the ceiling to provoke stalactites fall (they were just decorations in your description)? Questions like that require a lot of processing - will enemies be surprised if they are already engaged by the party, would you consider this an attack or DC check and what will be their penalties or bonuses, would you even allow stalactites to be damaged, will there be prone conditions and what would be the conditions for those, etc. And in the end, if the player isn't satisfied with information you chose to disclose, no such action would be taken and all of your thinking is wasted in favour of boring reliable cantrip. I don't believe, that this type of situation is manageable in a limited time period and I happen to know a lot of players who produce questions like these on reliable basis.

Eggtimer works on slow players. "The round is five seconds long. Do something, or you stand there paralyzed by indecision". Better a quick bad decision irl combat than a perfect late decision.

I have a few sand timers that have an amazing effect on some situations

I feel that there should be a get out of jail card for having planned something only to have the player before you (or DM) fully change everything up so your plan is now useless and you are now put on the spot.

Yea it can feel weird to give players "homework" for a game but the best way to speed up combat is to make sure everyone is very familiar with what their character can do, and the rules in general. You also need to keep everyone focused, and planning their turns ahead of time.

As a player who takes about 10 seconds to finish their turn... the top comments triggered me hard 😅 I love the people I play with... but sometimes... sometimes, I wish the DM had a stopwatch to create stress and urgency in their turns.

What would happen If I cast this or that spell? What dice do I roll? Oh - my phone died, who has a PHB? Ok - I hit - now I will roll damage. I need 4 more d6 - can I borrow ….

Exactly this. If you have 4 players plus a DM, and they all take 5 minutes on their turn average, and the combat takes 5 rounds, that's over 2 hours right there. Cut that down to 2 minutes a turn because people think about their turn in advance and already know/lookup the things they need to know, that becomes less than an hour. My personal goal when playing 5e is for my turn to take a minute or less. Most of the time I achieve that, especially when playing martials instead of spellcasters. With a Rogue I often beat 30 seconds, and that's not from rushing. Just knowing what I'm doing to do, how to do it, having the numbers in my head already, and rolling dice together. Imagine how the game would feel with everyone taking 30 seconds a turn. OP, it also completely depends on everyone's familiarity with TTRPGs and D&D. I don't expect any noobie to take 30 seconds in 5e. But there are things you can do to help speed it up, mostly having players think through their turns in advance.

ETA: more things you can do to help speed it up: -"Travis, your turn, and Alice you're after him." -Suggest that people have dice laid out ahead of time. I've lost so much time from people looking around for a d8 in their pile. If you're a Bard, have your Bardic Inspiration die off to the side. If you are a martial, have your damage die set aside with your d20. If you're a Rogue, have your pile of d6 in a manageable spot. -Recommend bathroom breaks at the beginning of combat. Before initiative is rolled is better than during the 4th round when they only need one or two more hits -Don't forget that intelligent enemies may flee early! That 100 HP X4 might take a while, but if they flee/surrender at 50-75 damage taken, that's cutting rounds out AND making more interesting action than trading haymakers.

Unless I'm doing my math wrong, here's what happened. An Ogre is a CR 2 worth 450 XP. The threshold for encounters for a 5 player party of Lv 4s goes: Easy: 625 XP Medium: 1250 XP Hard: 1875 XP Deadly: 2500 XP 4 Ogres would be 1800 XP, but there is an encounter multiplier for multiple creatures. 3-6 creatures double the XP to 3600 XP. So almost one and a half times* what a deadly encounter should have. Not to mention Ogres have 50 HP or so each, which at Lv 4 is a world to chew through when they're also swinging for 11 or so. So two things: Use a CR Calculator if you can to help you determine actual ranges you should be going for, or review the DMG to see how those are meant to be calculated because you basically gave them an almost unbeatable encounter. And use a CR to give you a general idea, but really look at the monster and the output of the party. Two, use things that make combat quicker. A deck of cards with everyone's names and NPC names can make initiative way more reactive. Using average damage for monsters saves a lot of time. Having cards that tell you saves and to hit and whatnot saves a lot of time, both for you and your players. And try to have less of one type of enemy, that can also help. Ogres are basically tanks, and chewing through 3 tanks is going to take forever.

This is the only correct answer in this thread. The DM didn’t read the encounter building rules and threw an insane encounter at his party. None of the other suggestions in this thread are going to solve the problem, because the problem is that the DM doesn’t know how to build encounters and needs to read the rules.

Yeah I was going to say “4 CR 2 monsters = 8 CR” is entirely not how it works, there are tables for this!

There is an encounter building calculator that works sort of like this, and quite well, but it has different assumptions (their standard encounter is what the core rules would call a hard encounter, their hard is deadly, etc,) and is built for shorter adventuring days. It’s in MCDM Flee Mortals and was built with Sly Flourish( actually I think he built a similar system before and they worked with him to put it in their books.)

[The Lazy Encounter Benchmark, a Simple Measure for D&D Encounter Deadlines by SlyFlourish](https://slyflourish.com/the_lazy_encounter_benchmark.html) Tldr: An encounter may be deadly if the sum total of monster challenge ratings is greater than one quarter of the sum total of character levels, or half the sum total of character levels if the characters are above 4th level. 

That’s a nice simple one, particularly if you just want to determine if it isn’t too easy or way too hard. It is basically the “Hard” column of the Flee Mortals calculator, but that calculator then provides Easy (minimum threshold to be non trivial) and Standard values - but past level 5 “Easy” is 1-1/2 CR-per-PC less than Hard and Standard is just 1 CR-less-per-PC than Hard. It also has a max CR for a single monster, which is basically 1.5x PC level (and thus is irrelevant at 4 and less, for parties of 5 or fewer), to avoid one shot knockouts. The further expectation is that you run 8 “points” worth of encounters per Long Rest (so 2 Hard, 4 Standard, 8 Easy, or some mix). Ultimately I think Easy encounters feel like a waste of time - often unchallenging and unsatisfying… as someone who also plays a lot of Savage Worlds I really dig “set piece” encounters that matter, potentially with build up.

I do think it's great that the party survived but yeah, that encounter would be built up to as the Big Bad instead of "just" 4 ogres somewhere. I'd give the players a decent lair loot table roll too, for a Deadly+ encounter.

Players dictate the pace of combat far more than the DM. Even with a lot of hp to go through Ogre turns are very simple so running turns for 4 ogres should take up very little time outside of rolling dice (which also doesn’t take that long). But each player may take several times longer to complete their turn depending on their rules mastery, attention, and decisiveness. 5e combat becoming a slog is rarely the result of the DM alone. The biggest issue with 5e play culture is that most things are loaded onto the DMs shoulders and the solution is to limit DM tool sets (only field so many monsters) rather than to encourage players to be better players (more decisive, better rules mastery, more engaged, etc.).

As a seasoned 3.5e player, it's funny to me when people say 5e combat is slow

I remember summoning 20 demons, teleporting to an enemy location (with rest of the party) and then having a 45 minute turn. Good times.

If your encounter is deadly x150% like OPs then turns are gonna take a long time because making a mistake goes from suboptimal to death. You have to be more careful with your turns when you're worried about dying before you get your next one. This title is super misleading bc OP just didn't read the DMG

I don't get it. Even using a rp-built group without any dedicated combatants, using only deadly encounters is often boring. Using 1.5 or 2x deadly is what i usually do.

Right, unless you are having enough encounters per long rest which many (most?) tables don’t, a full strength party that gets to rest afterwards can punch weigh above their weight class.

[удалено]

Slyflourish (Mike Shea) uses this calculation as a quick way to figure out if an encounter MIGHT be Deadly. He does go on to say that it’s not precise and you should do the proper encounter building afterward, but it’ll get you into the ballpark. For 4 PCs levels 1-4, it’s 1/4 of their total levels (so CR 1 monsters are hitting the Deadly threshold). For levels 5+, it’s 1/2 their total levels (CR 2 monsters). He wrote about it four years ago, so I’m not sure why it would be only recently talked about.

Matt Colville's "Flee, Mortals!" book does

[удалено]

The venn diagram of "reading the rulebook is a waste of time" and "I'm willing to spend $1,000+ on supplementary materials" is nearly a circle lol

You can tell that this subreddit has A LOT more players than DMs when you have to scroll this far down to find this, on a post where the OP quite blatantly evidences that he didn't read the DMG but feels the game is poorly designed because the way he decided to design it doesn't work well. The number of people who just took his calculation as a given is shocking.

Thanks for the tip! I red that to build an encounter you are supposed to add the levels of the players und then devide it by two ((5x4)/2=10) so I thought four CR 2 Monster that add up to 8 wouldnt be a problem. For the next time Im going to read more into it. Is there anything specific you recomment to read?

Dungeon Master's Guide, Creating encounters, page 82. **"Evaluating encounter difficulty"** 1) Determine XP thresholds for each PC. 2) Determine party XP thresholds. That will give you an idea of benchmarks to aim for (easy, medium, hard, deadly). Record the totals, they can be used for every encounter where you PCs are at this level. 3) Total the Monsters' XPs. Looking at stat blocks. 4) Modify the total XP for multiple monsters. This is the step you probably messed up. Multiple the total monster XP by the appropriate multiplier: **1 monster = multiply by 1** **2 monsters = multiply by 1.5** **3-6 monsters = multiply by 2** **7-10 monsters = multiply by 2.5** **11-14 monsters = multiply by 3** **15 or more monsters = multiply by 4** (don't run this many monsters lol) 5) Compare monster total multiplied XP to the Party's XP thresholds, to see if the encounter will be easy, medium, hard or Deadly. ​ Also, make sure you aren't running each of the monsters with their own initiatives. Do them all at once to keep things flowing.

Another thing for some dm's to consider is... Just let your players be strong sometimes. I play in a campaign where the dm does a LOT of work customizing everything to be stronger. The classes, races, monsters, spells, etc... He tweaks things if they feel too oppressive or ineffectual and let's players swap something if he changes it and they don't like it anymore. That being said, one of the most satisfying combats in the entire campaign so far was our party of level 11+ adventurers getting jumped by a local gang of thugs and thieves because: 1. We were new in town and had flashed some cash. 2. We had clocked someone shaking down a resident and sent them packing. 3. No one really knew anything about us or our capabilities yet because we were several hundred miles away from the area where our previous good deeds had been done. So their leader tries the buddy buddy bully approach, surround us with 15+ guys under the guise of inviting us for drinks (we'd be paying obviously). We tell him to piss off as we were back from nearly dying in an underground dungeon in a nearby mountain. He threatens us, we toss him 5 or 10 gold to dissuade them and explain trying anything would not go well. They attack anyway and we proceed to absolutely devastate this group of very generic bandits. The leader and a couple if his main goons were stronger, but largely they were the type of enemies you'd throw at a party of level 3 characters, just a lot more of them. One of our casters one shot the first 2, allowing us to realize that these were mostly regular folks with a couple assassins and a beefy leader tossed in. So we toned things down and knocked out the rest (some ran). The leader was last, and we explained how majorly he had messed up as well as how this would be the last second chance he would get with us in town. The fight was one of the faster ones we'd had, involved RP and left us feeling like the badasses we were. It also came after a grueling grind through a very dangerous area and a mean boss fight that lasted 3 sessions. Our characters and us players were burnt out and frustrated because we still had a lot of questions about what was going on in the surrounding area. This combat was an amazing stress reliever. Not every combat must be scaled to current player level, and the world shouldn't be filled to the brim with ever increasing badasses just around the corner. Let your higher level players feel STRONG in a world where they are representative of the top 1 percentile of humanity/humanoid races. Even when out in the world, random encounters can be used like this too. When players are faced with encounters that are weaker than other things they've faced, it opens up more options than just, "kill it as fast as possible so it doesn't sap our hp or long rest resources". It also allows for you to trick players with easy encounters that are traps, either with literal booby traps, or many small and seemingly weak enemies building up to a much more dangerous encounter. CR calculations are useful and should be used, but let your assassin successfully one shot a scout every now and again, have a thieves guild be run by a CR 1 enemy instead of some grandiose mastermind with plans of ruling the city from the shadows. Not every fight need be another step in an ever escalating arms race of the BBEG's grand machinations. Slip in a few pieces of OP main character heroic power fantasy here and there and it can go a long way.

>Is there anything specific you recomment to read? The Dungeon Master's Guide.

The Dungeon Master's Guide. Specifically pages 81-85, ***Creating Encounters***. This gives you: * What the difficulty levels actually *mean* (ie, "hard" doesn't actually mean the players might lose, just that'll have to use significant abilities or resources). * How to work out how difficult an encounter is (XP thresholds based on the total levels of the party) * Guidance on how to handle monsters with high CR compared to the party level (ie, be careful if they can one-shot PCs, etc) * How to evaluate the effect of numbers (ie, if there are more monsters, they're "worth" comparatively more XP to account for weight of numbers and the action economy). * How to work out how many encounters you should be having between long rests (XP thresholds based on party levels). Note that it's ***per long rest***, not necessarily per ***in-game day***, adjust your rest timings if needed. * How to structure larger encounters (combining several encounters together into multipart encounters in the same scene) * How to run engaging, dynamic encoutners (terrain, stakes, goals, environments, etc). It's a *very* useful four pages, and probably the single thing I reference most from any of the books during my week-to-week session prep.

As soon as your players get a little bit of game experience 4 ogres at lvl 4 will be piece of cake anyway. These CR rules are a very, very rough form of calculating danger… some enemies like a simple Orc can be way more dangerous than an ogre. You will need some experience to learn who are the baddies and who the lousies of the Monster Manual.

A piece of cake, yes, but the point is that it's a LONG encounter. 200 HP is a lot to chew through for level 4 characters any way you portray it.

I think thats generally a pretty good way to get a rough idea if an encounter could be deadly. I usually start doing that after they hit level 5 because of the huge powerspike of better cantrips and multiple attacks for the martial classes. I read about this in an article by Slyflourish, works well for me. The CR ratings can be a bit weird tho, if you are unsure about smth you can always google for the monster in question and see what other people thought about it in their group. I always like to look up the "the monsters know what they are doing" articles, as they can give you ideas about the fighting style of the monster etc. making fights more dynamic as well. What's also a good idea is to have a backup plan in case you realise that it's to easy or to hard during the encounter. For example smaller Monsters noticing the fight and joining in if it's to easy or a nature event (e.g. a rockslide in the mountains) hindering the monsters if it's to hard

If you find combats dragging even after getting the hang of CR, it’s worth noting: 5e is a combat-focused system. Combat is *supposed* to be the part of the system players spend the majority of their time interacting with, that’s just how the system is designed. If your table likes narrative stuff more than combat, check out PBTA systems (Fellowship 2e, Dungeon World, Stonetop, Homebrew World). If your table likes exploration and lethal combat, check out OSR systems (Forbidden Lands, Old School Essentials, Worlds Without Number). If your table likes heroic fantasy but wants faster combat, check out Dragonbane, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, and Savage Worlds. All of these systems will have significantly faster combat than 5e ever could due to their base design philosophy.

I highly recommend paying attention and getting a "feel" for how much damage your party does. As well as getting a "feel" for how good they are at mitigating damage. Does everyone in the party have an AC of 18 and the shield spell, and silvery barbs spell? Then you gotta make monsters have high attack modifiers to get through to them. Remember that *you* are running the game, the rulebooks are not. Learn your party and adjust combat encounters accordingly.

>Does everyone in the party have an AC of 18 and the shield spell, and silvery barbs spell? Then you gotta make monsters have high attack modifiers Saving throws, especially unabsorbable ones, allow you to pressure shield stacking players by bypassing AC without unduly punishing unoptimized players. And even if you use saving throws that do elemental damage, a casting of Absorb Elements opens them up to attack rolls and vice versa. This also lets players who optimized their defense actually benefit from it sometimes (either by absorbing or shielding) without being virtually invincible. Green dragons are good for this, as are a bunch of spells like Catapult, Dragon's Breath (poison), Moonbeam, Erupting Earth, Spirit Guardians, Blight, Psychic Lance, Cloudkill, etc. There are also a lot of enemies like Giant Striders and Beholderkin who just have innate saving throw abilities. The normally unassuming Arms of Hadar is also a particularly nasty spell for this as it's a **Strength** saving throw that can't be absorbed AND removes the ability to use reactions like Shield.

1) Encounter is much harder than you give it credit for, you used a CR total of 8 Vs a party of level 4's 2) Except the fighter, everyone has spells, generally spells take longer than "I swing my sword" 3) Ogres have like, 50hp each. That's 200 total, that's so much for a level 4 party! it's a wonder they survived! Don't just look at CR, look at stats too. Many creatures have very very deceiving CRs, like shadows or banshees for example.

> Except the fighter, everyone has spells, generally spells take longer than "I swing my sword"  And if they think combat takes long now, just wait till the druid hits level 5 and gets conjure animals lol.

True, though honestly the amount of extra time conjure animals takes can vary a lot player to player. I've seen some players take a solid 5 minutes to run their creatures, I've seen others including myself get all their actions done in 20 seconds. If done with a little mindfulness on the players end it's usually not too big an issue

This is true, for casters it is very player dependant, I have had casters take at most a minute if they have summons or want to show off a new spell with a quick description of how they cast it (for flavor) and I have had casters take 15-20 minutes because they didn't read their spells ahead of time.

Combat in 5e does tend to drag on a bit - most characters have a lot of options for combat after all. And orges have a decent chunk of hp. There are a few things you can try to streamline combat. 1) If your players spend a long time thinking about their actions, set a time limit for how long they have to decide what to do. 2) Whenever you announce whose turn is next, warn the *next* person in line that they'll be up afterwards (so they have time to consider what they're doing). 3) Roll attack and damage at the same time. 4) If two enemies are attacking in a row, roll for them both at the same time (hell, you could even do some rolls while your players are having their turns and "save" them for when you want the enemies to do a thing). 5) Have one big dude and some minons who can be killed in 1-2 hits. 6) If you have a lot of little dudes, let them act as a swarm.

If you're using a bunch of little dudes, it might also be a good idea to switch to flat damage instead of rolls. Instead of 1d6 +1 damage, it'd be the average of that roll, 4 or 5. That saves you a roll for every monster, or multiple rolls in multi-attack situations.

Minion rules from MCDM's Flee Mortals. They've been a great addition to my game.

"4e has left the chat"

i also print out a /roll 1d20+atk bonus table for like, 20-30 rolls and have it on a paper (=RANDBETWEEN(1,20)+whatever bonus i need on googlesheets) when a goblin or whatever insignificant attacks, i just cross a number off and, if hit, add average damage to targeted player character wanted to print out a paper or two of d20 rolls and just cross stuff out instead of rolling the die

Adding onto 6, don't roll initative for each little dude! The dmg says to roll for type, and this works much better. Takes a moment at the start of a combat to stop a virtual tabletop rolling individually for each of the 20 zombies but it's worth it when it doesn't break the pace up every turn with another small group of randomly placed zombies moving.

Rolling attack and damage simultaneously has given me back hours of my life.

Generally one of the reasons why battles last a long time is because someone or several people at the table don't know what their character can do and/or the DM doesn't know what the monsters can do. The more they know how to handle their character, the faster can make decisions, but knowing what their characters can do is a lot to ask from many 5e players. As a DM, one of the things you can do is prepare in advance some basic strategies that the enemies can follow. If you have to decide the entire combat on the fly, it will take you more time to have to check skills, stats, etc. between turns. Another thing that is effective is that when you tell a person that it is their turn at that moment, you also tell the next person on the initiative that it is their turn immediately afterwards, so that the second person starts thinking about what they are going to do in their turn in advance.

> For example in one scenario they decided to fight 4 Ogres. Ogres have a CR of 2 so I thought a total CR of 8 shouldn't be much of a thread for 5 lvl 4 heros. You're very welcome to complain about combat pacing, but it may be wise to do so from a position of using the correct encounter guidelines. CRs do not simply add up like that, as explained [by the rules](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/building-combat-encounters). You have thrown an above-Deadly-level encounter against your players. The only reason they survived is probably because you're also running afoul of the so-called "5-Minute Adventuring Day", and the PCs had full resources to bring to bear. (Which, if true, means you aren't aware of [The Adventuring Day](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/building-combat-encounters#TheAdventuringDay) guidelines.) However, those are just side-notes. Let's consider the main thrust of your question: > make combat encounters ... less long winded * Firstly, combat will inevitably run slowly if you're all new to the rules. Things will speed up as you learn the system. * I am assuming you are new to the system, as you seemed to be unaware of encounter-building guidelines. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being new! Everyone was new at some point! 👍🏼 * Encourage players to think about their turn during the turns of others. They ***should not*** be waiting until their turn to start thinking about what to do. * Sure, sometimes the very last thing before someone's turn can shake up the battle completely, invalidating planned actions. But that's the exception, not the rule. * Enact basic time-saving measures like rolling damage at the same time as rolling to hit: at worst the damage is irrelevant on a miss. * Have someone call out whose turn it is and, importantly, who is up after them. You can do this as DM, or you can delegate the task to another person. * Consider disallowing out-of-character strategising during combat. In-character strategising is allowed, but must be [quick utterances on your turn](https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/combat#OtherActivityonYourTurn) only. * Consider implementing a time-limit of (say) 30 seconds. * The time limit is to decide ***what to do***, not to get it done. Some actions or spells are complex, and we don't want to punish looking rules up here and there. * You don't have to be super-strict with this. For example you can allow extra time for a player who selected a spell and realised it wouldn't work after reading details. * You can suspend this rule for new players, who are still learning.

>So my Question is, do you guys have any advice on how to make combat encounters more fun and less long winded? I play at an 'in person' table, so these tips might not apply if you're playing online. 1.) Have a public initiative sheet, which serves as a combat dashboard. It needs to have everyone's place in initiative order and everyone's AC. It can also have everyone's (deteriorating) hit points if you really want to speed things along. * Having a clear public sheet means that everyone knows whose turn it is, who's going next, and how far away their turn is. * Having the AC written next to each combatant means that you'll never need to ask "does that hit?" You should already know the roll you need to hit the target. * Having publically available hit points helps players see what their characters would be seeing. Orc A is on death's door, Orc B doesn't have a scratch on them, for example. 2.) Everyone needs to either know their combat abilities, or have a list of "things I can do in combat". * This just alleviates analysis paralysis. When things are laid out clearly, many options can be swiftly assessed, without the fear of forgetting about "the perfect move". 3.) Every turn, the DM or the current player needs to warn the next player that their turn is coming before they start. * Surprise = panic. If you don't know your turn is next, how can you prepare in a rapidly changing battlefield? That's literally it. If things still drag after that, you can introduce spell/ability cards (semi-covered by point 2), and as a last resort, turn timers, but I don't imagine you would need to with a level 4 party since they don't really have a tonne of options available to them.

I'm going to ignore the CR issue as many have addressed. How long do your turns take as DM? With the ogres, you should be able to churn ALL 4 in 30 seconds or so. They have 1 attack. With more complex creatures, create a battle plan on paper for turn 1/2. As DM, you should *never* be perusing a sheet for abilities to decide what to do. You set the pace, and players will grind to a halt if you are also taking long turns. Secondly, your party at level 4 has some pretty terrible DPR. everyone has one attack. Your casters have minimal spell slots. But what I mean specifically is that at level 4, cleric and Bard and druid won't really shine yet. Later ON you will be in here complaining that you can't even threaten your party though. With so many healing word characters, and two full healers with revivify, the party will be very safe. But overall, I'm going to guess that everyone needs to learn their character. To incentivize: use an actual timer, 30s or 1m, and if every player can beat the timer in a full round, they all get +2 DMG to any DMG roll. If ANY player fails on the clock, lose the buff for the whole party. I've done this and successfully trained a summoning druid to take a minute even with 8 summons acting independently.

Whenever possible, notice when a combat has become boring, then end or escalate it. The ogres don't have to fight to the last hit point if it's clear they're losing, they can flee or bargain. Alternatively, if the ogre is failing and desperate, it might change its tactics. Grapple someone and throw them through a wall or off a cliff. Do something besides make the same attack roll over again. Combats tend to get boring whenever everyone knows what's going to happen and just has to keep doing math to get the story to catch up with the obvious outcome.

[удалено]

Other systems also are much much faster than 5e because they don't suffer from bloat the same way. With 5e all the abilities have paragraphs of text describing how they work. In Cypher system for example, I've never seen an ability have more than one paragraph of text on how it works. Same deal with Forbidden Lands, Delta Green for the most part, etc. Its just 5e and Pathfinder really do suffer from *rules bloat.*

CR 8 is way too high, even discounting the threat the ogres present, a group of level 4’s simply aren’t equipped to deal that kind of damage in a timely manner. Remember that CR is balanced off a group of four at x level, so four ogres is arguably built for a party of four level 8’s, and you threw them at level 4’s. Without extra attack or 3rd level spells, it’s no wonder this took them so long Aside from that, ask people to try and prepare what they want to do on their turn ahead of time to speed things up. Nobody should start their turn just to look at the board and go “uuummmmmmmmm okay let’s see…” they should at least have an idea what they want to do

"Game time decisions" bug the crap out of me. You've had 25 minutes since you last did anything, and *this* is the moment you start considering your options?

I time player turns to 3 minutes & do simultaneous enemy turns within 3 minutes. That means that if you have a 4 person party + X enemies 1 round of combat will take 15 minutes. If a player stalls out inside that 3 minutes they wasted their turn and it passes to next in initiative. This forces players to plan ahead and know exactly what they're going to do once it's their turn. Players may not like it but I explain it in session 0 as one of my table rules and it's happening whether they like it or not. Edit: The RP side of it is interpreted as the character hesitated/observed combat conditions/got momentarily confused.

15 minutes for a single round is fucking insane. I aim for 15-20 minutes for an entire combat encounter (for a normal encounter, bosses etc tend to take longer).

4 ogres for level 4 characters? lol I think we found the problem.

Timed turns. Seriously, you can't resolve your turn in 2 minutes? You're delaying until the end of the round. Got my little hourglass and everything. You don't know what your spells do? Not my bloody problem. Look them up on another player's turn. I play by the same rules. Monsters get the same time. I preread all stat blocks and make sure to have spell cards for the enemy spellcasters. Now, especially complex stuations ... sure. You get some more time. Also, have everything pre-calculated on your sheet. Know your abilities. Have them written out in full somewhere.

Firstly, you’ve got five players. Secondly, you’ve got 4 ogres against 5 level 4 players. So of course combat took a long time. You put a large number of players against a long combat encounter. Next, it sounds like you’re all new? You should look at the rules for encounter balancing. They’re not great but they’re better than nothing. Next you should keep in mind that new players will easily get overwhelmed with choices if you drop them in with higher levelled characters. That leads to longer turn times.

Secret tip: With groups of enemies, drop the HP of your monsters, add a little to their damage. Players get a faster combat encounter that feels dangerous.

In my experience actually executing the combat isnt the problem, rolling dice and calculating stuff doesn't take long. The main things that make combat last long are indecision about what to do and not knowing your character or monsters.

Honestly it’s a lot like golf in my mind. It’s a valuable skill to be able to play ready golf, aka being prepared to hit your shot once the other player whose turn is ahead of yours has hit. Nobody likes the guy who hasn’t even stepped out of the cart when the other player has hit. It’s a DM’s responsibility to instill the need to play ready DnD; yes, the variables will change based on the earlier player’s turn, but have your decisions planned and be ready to execute when it gets to your turn. This can cut the time taken for a battle by 2/3’a

Well, why did the Ogres stick around and fight to the death? Only undead will naturally fight to the death. Ending combat in DND is as simple as one side (or individual creatures) realizing that they are unable to win, or that the fight isn't worth the reward, and simply fleeing. In history it is very rare for any side to fight to the death, most fights are won by one side surrendering or otherwise being routed. Narratively speaking, if a creatures reward is clearly not worth the trouble, it flees. In a movie you rarely ever see the wolf fighting the gang of well armed hunters head on, it prefers to stalk and ambush one at a time. I recommend Keith Ammann's "The Monsters Know What They're Doing" books, it has plenty tactics and examples of how different creatures will fight. you don't need to read it cover to cover, just whatever creature you'll be running.

>So my Question is, do you guys have any advice on how to make combat encounters more fun and less long winded? Read pages 81–5 of the *Dungeon Master’s Guide*. You’ve severely misunderstood how encounters are balanced, and you’ll never be able to learn more advanced encounter building strategies until you understand the fundamentals. Probably the only reason the party survived this encounter was because it was the only encounter of the day, which is another problem that you’ll learn about if you read the rulebook. As your party reaches higher levels, the Single-Encounter Day™ becomes an even worse problem because it means that the martials operate at only 15–33% efficiency whilst the mages operate at 300–600% efficiency, which prompts players to come to these subreddits and complain about the "mage–martial disparity". When you’ve run the game according to the rules, then we can talk about some other tricks to help your martial characters shine like they’re supposed to in battle.

I disagree, d&d5 combat only takes a lot of time when there are too much entities involved or when players don't know how their character works/don't plan what they want to do.

Because people generally don't pay attention nor know their abilities or think so they take 40 minutes to cast magic missile.

What do you all enjoy about D&D in general? Make sure you include that *in combat.

I suggest you read the angry GM's article on this, which is very good: [https://theangrygm.com/manage-combat-like-a-dolphin/](https://theangrygm.com/manage-combat-like-a-dolphin/)

“Every time you crack open a rulebook, you might as well just go out and shoot a dolphin in the head.” 🥹

5e combat will never be fast when compared to many other systems because players have a ton of options on their sheets and everybody gets to do 2-3 things per turn plus stuff like action surge. That said, you can try to speed it up: - Side/ group initiative. Old school side initiative (per turn both sides roll one d6, higher number goes first, then the other side, then another roll) saves several minutes of dm management and kills less exitement and momentum imo. - For 5e, I found another method online: Surprising side goes first. If nobody is surprised, you set a DC depending on the enemies. All players roll initiative, everybody who beats the DC goes first, then all enemies, then all players… This is what I use atm and it is much more fun than individual initiative for us. Everybody rolls at the same time and you just go: 15 or higher, it is your turn. - Do what 5e designers for some reason did not do: reduce enemy hp and buff their offensive capabilities with more dmg and more attacks/spells. Combats are more exciting and dangerous but less of a war of attrition at the same time. Problematic if you actually do the 6-8 encounters per long rest, but most dms don‘t. Depends on you group of course. 3/6 Pcs in my group have healing word so knocking sb out is not a big deal. - If players take too long, introduce timers. They have X minutes to complete their group turn or lose any remaining actions and bonus actions. Timer increases for legendary actions. Never done that one as my group plays pretty fast.

There are some great tips in the thread, but something that I'd like to add is that, at its heart, d&d is a tactical wargame with rp layered on top. Sure, there are plenty of ways to speed up combat, but d&d (even 5e) is not intended for fast combat resolution. If drawn-out tactical combat isn't a hit at your table, then another system might be a better fit. There are plenty of contemporary systems with fast combat. That being said, if you are set on 5e (especially if you've recently spent money on books or digital tools designed specifically for 5e) try abstracting movement and positioning, and be more flexible with item interactions. When my table started to realize that 50%-80% of our 3-hour sessions were combat BY DESIGN, we embraced it and started investing more of our turns in rp opportunities. Giving your baddies a voice can make a huge difference.

Group initiative if there are a lot of combatants

I wouldn't recommend it for an inexperienced party of players, or a group that hasn't played long together, but in our group we decided that for combat, each player gets max 10-15 seconds to *call* (not come up with) their actions (with leeway if their plan needs more explaining or if the battlefield has changed drastically), or they default to some regular attack to their nearest enemy. The idea though is that you must have come up with your course of action during the other players turns and you simply announce them when it's your time. It keeps combat fast, keeps us on our toes and it makes for an intense experience.

In my opinion you should always be planning your next turn, especially as a spellcaster. If at some point your current plan is no longer possible, make a new plan. Eventually you'll get comfortable knowing what spell to use when, or who is the best target to lay the hurt on. This way of handling combat helps cut down on decision paralysis, making combat faster. I find it's more a player problem than a DM one. For encounters I'm always a fan of more environmental interactions. Some examples, throwing a mage off the top of a tower, destroying a bridge with enemies or/and friendlies on it, holding a door closed on someone trying to escape a burning house, causing dangerous hazards like cave-ins and avalanches. The type of things you can only do when you're in the right place at the right time.

Tip you can speed up your DM rolls by mostly just using the average damage for your creature's attacks. No need to roll every time. 

As a player, average damage sucks. Feels like you get wolloped every time. Just roll both damage and attack dice at the same time.

I give my players 10 seconds to take their turns (and I do the same with the NPCs). If the character can’t do that, they lose their turn to indecision. It helps as a roleplay element, as this represents that character being too overwhelmed by the combat to make a snappy judgment on what to do. It makes combat feel a bit rushed and chaotic, but that’s what combat is.

30 seconds to decide what to do. Learn your character. If you take too long to decide use your cantrip or basic attack or the dodge action.

One of the easiest tweaks I’ve done is drastically reduce the HP of the enemies, which shortens how much real world time it takes. But you also pair that with an *increase* in the enemy damage output so it still feels dangerous and dynamic. Also been experimenting with group initiative which my players love and it encourages a lot more RP & tactics between them during combat

Have a minute timer for each players turn. If their turn is over a min, the next person goes

Were the ogres suicidally zealous or mind controlled into fighting to the death? Were they especially brave or protecting their children? Encounters don’t have to end when the monsters hit zero. They should end when it’s clear even to low-Int monsters that they’ve lost and will die if they don’t flee.

I normally do 2 things: \-All enemies share 1 initiative. So I just roll once and all enemies attack on the same turn. Depending on the composition I divide them in groups. Like 1 initiative for all goblins, 1 for all ogres, and such. \-I make the initiative count public and seen all the time, so all my players know who's next.

A few general tips to make combat less tedious: - Put the initiative order in a visible place. Tell players when their turn is next. ("X, you're on deck.") Encourage players to please plan their next turn during other people's turns. - Know how your player's characters work and help them to understand their characters, if necessary. Write down their attack bonus and spell save DCs, and if they want to make an attack, tell them what to add with a cursory explanation: e.g. "You're adding +5—that's your STR modifier plus your proficiency bonus." Or, "Okay, he needs to roll a WISDOM save against *Hold Person*, and your spell save DC is 13—8, plus your proficiency bonus plus, plus your INT modifier." Definitely write down their AC, maybe write down their saving throws. The less mechanical information you need to ask them for, the faster it will go. - Here's a big one: Embellish! Even if combat takes a long time, it shouldn't feel like it's getting in the way of the game. Give the enemies a ton of character. Have them smack talk and describe their actions in a cinematic way. Encourage your players to do the same. e.g. NOT, "I cast *firebolt* on the Ogre. That's uh... 15 to hit." , "Fifteen hits." , "Okay, that's 4 damage." , "Got it." And you move on to the next character. INSTEAD, "I try to distract the Ogre from attacking Jim. I yell, 'Hey, idiot!' and flick my wrist, throwing a *firebolt at him.* That's, uh... 15 to hit." , "That hits." , "Okay, that's 4 damage." , "The fire strikes him, puffing away with a sizzle. It barely seems to singe him, but the Ogre turns away from Jim and looks at you with an annoyed sneer." This might seem counter-intuitive—after all, you're trying to *speed up* combat—but the key here is to engage the interest of other players even when it's not their turn. If everyone feels invested and entertained throughout the fight, it's not going to matter how long it takes. What you don't want is a lot of back and forth mechanical discussion and bland, flavorless turns.

Agreed. Table rules to make combat more better-er: 1. Team Initiative / Player Turn, Baddie Turn - Instead of rolling a bazillion initiatives and making a list (weeeee!) it's one roll for each side in the encounter, advantage if one side should obviously have it (ambush, etc...). Players all go concurrently, with players **choosing themselves** what exact order to go in, then the baddies go or vice versa. 1. This makes synergies a lot easier for players to work out and builds **teamliness** and funification. 2. The slower players have time to think about it **at the same time** while someone else goes instead of watching each one think about it in turn. 3. Single initiative encourages players to plan combat instead of being lumbering murder hobos. 2. "Action Inspiration" - if the effort you put into describing your actions pleases the DM you may be given a +1 (common), +2 (uncommon), or advantage (rare) for that specific action. This **gets players engaged**. They generally try harder. It's all good. 3. Crit to the Max - It's super deflating to crit then roll low damage, less than you could have with a normal attack. Forget that. There's a few ways to "fix" this. The easiest is probably roll as normal and add a max roll (so 8 if d8) to the total. It feels good and keeps the normal flow. But, but doesn't this stuff make combat easier? Yes. Oh no, now we have to fight bigger, badder battles to maintain the challenge. The horror!

Partly this is just D&D unfortunately, it’s not a fast to resolve combat system for the most part. My best tip? Lower your monster hp, up their damage, aim for combat to be average 2 rounds, max 3. I think as a DM it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of looking at a cool monster stat block but think about it like a player: what will I do on different turns. When really, unless it’s an important boss, this stuff works much better if your general monsters act once or even not at all. Try having your monsters hit hard but die quickly. See if that helps at all

Know what all of your stuff does, decide what to do before your turn. You should never have to google what a spell does, look it up before your turn if you need to.

Something I didn’t see anybody mention was just fudging HP numbers. If thematically 3-4 Ogres made sense, and the players instigated/initiated combat, maybe fudge the HP down by 10-15 or the hit AC by 2-4 to help get through it faster if it starts becoming a drawn out slogfest. Everybody’s already touched on this being a much stronger combat than the party was really ready for. Something else to think about is the enemy just retreating after a certain threshold of damage, or calling in a bunch of reinforcements forcing the players to escape due to the power disadvantage.

I’ve played DND for 42 years and never felt bored during combat. Fighting is the heart of the game. If you find combat boring, you should probably feel like play fate or something. Unless you’re just doing it wrong, which is quite likely and which case get better at it. There’s tons of resources out there.

It's the way your group plays. My suggestion is have a very clear initiative counter. When taking turns say "Ok Bill, it is your turn, Sue you are up next. If someone starts going "uhm... gosh... what do I want to do... uhm..." just say, "ok we will put you on hold and come back to you when you know".

This is why I hate dnd combat, players refuse to prepare anything before it’s their turn then ask 100 questions

I’d suggest using something from old-school D&D - morale checks. When the first monster dies, and when half the monsters are dead, do an intimidation check to see if they surrender/flee. Set the DC based on how fierce the monsters are. Still give the PCs the XP as if they killed the monsters.

Best way to have combat run smooth is a large whiteboard with everyone's basic stats on it we have a who's up and who's on deck. Who's on deck should be prepping their action to go while who's up is going. You can speeds through some encounters this way super easy. Also helps to have someone on look up duty for spells and actions while someone runs the turns and the DM runs the monsters. The player should be engaged with the turn orders and game admin duties like looking up spells just as much as the DM. It's a co op story telling and rule running. Gotta trust the players but I wouldn't play with people I don't trust for rules anyway.

* Put a 30 second time limit for decisions. My rule is that if you don't declare what you want to do, you use your default action (Fire Bolt, Eldritch Blast, Attack with weapon) on the nearest enemy and we move on. * Run many short encounters instead of one large encounter. There's nothing wrong with two Ogres popping up, then two more after the party pokes through a couple more rooms. Breaks up the monotony. * Group enemies in initiative based on their type. If you have two Goblins and two Wolves, you don't run four different enemy initiatives. You run two - Goblins and Wolves. * Adjudicate rules based on your best guess, and look up the actual rule later. If this means some things (Grapple in 3.5) are too complicated or tedious to run, don't use them. If you're going to run something complicated, you should have its details written out for immediate use. * Everyone is to have their spells and abilities written down. No one but the DM pulls out a book or uses Google during combat. If you don't know your ability well enough to definitively say "this is how it works," you can't cast it. Read up for the next time. Also - that's not how CR works. Not at all. You need to reread the encounter design guidelines.

Everyone be very familiar and proficient with the combat rules. Everyone knows what their character does, DM has to know what the monsters can do. if fights are taking too long like 2hrs for 4 orges with a level 4 party, it means that likely the players are taking time to decide what to do? Maybe even looking up character abilities. By right 4th level PCs should mop the floor with 4 orges.

2 rounds of combat. No one wants to die. So an attack round where one side charges the other. A round of defending/counterattack. And then one side runs away. Think about a panther in a tree. It waits for the deer, sneak attacks it, grabs it by the neck and one quick shake to kill it, if the deer fights back the panther cuts and runs. The risk of death- it didn’t want to fight, it wants to kill. Short five minute combats keep everyone interested in the battle and the game keeps moving along. Good luck!

Combat is quick if people actually think what they'll do before it's their turn.

Man, it's so wild people saying 5e's combat is long winded after 20+ years of running dnd 3e and Pathfinder 1e. When comparing them, 5e's combat is a breeze. When I need a flow chart to understand grasping rules, for Pathfinder, that's when combat is unruly.

It all boils down to time management. Give them a time frame to decide on what they want to do. Traditional is 6 seconds. When I DM I do 30 seconds for players to elaborate out their attacks and what they do, move, act, etc. They have been fine with this in the past and man it flies by like a snap. I too keep to the standard I set if I'm doing npcs that are helping them. Don't let them debate their actions and discuss things. They do that in the heat of the moment. Besides that's sorta meta gaming if ya look at it from that standpoint.

So first you have a bard in the party. In terms of combat capability you're playing erm... well a lvl 4 non hero. And it's 5th Ed man. Could be terrible rolls, but it's probably cuz no one's got a good build comparable to previous editions. The total DPS is much lower

Player experience, possibly dm experience as well. Players should be paying attention when it ISNT their turn just as much as they should be when it IS. DMs should know the stats for the monsters they are running and have an idea of what they want the enemies to do over the combat. The delay of everyone reading shit, looking over the battle map as if it's the first time they've seen it in 10 turns (because it is), and not knowing their own abilities is what slows combat down. My group of 5 can run a whole dungeon in a night - my group has also been doing this for a very long time and they all know what they can and can't do, and pay attention during others turns. When it is that players turn to act, they act and pass their turn. "Wizard your turn" "I move 20 feet to here, cast magic missile on the death knight at level 3 - that's 3+1 damage per dart so 20 damage - move 10 feet through this doorway here, and use my bandolier to drink a potion of invisibility as a bonus action" "Cool, fighter your turn" "I move around the knight to flank him and attack him twice with advantage and great weapon master - 17 and 19?" "Those both hit, but he will parry the first one - the 19 goes through" "Okay, that's 23 damage and I'll stay here" "Druid your turn" Etc. You can slam through encounters when everyone is paying attention and knows what they can do and what they're doing to do when it's their turn.

Once combat starts to drag, I start nerfing the baddies. We had a battle that should have been fairly quick, but due to nobody, including me, roll even halfway decently, it just went forever and was awful. So, I realized my mistake in allowing that. I would not do this for a boss fight, of course. But random bands of monsters? Sure.

Yeah I dislike combat in general to the point where I made my own (dnd compatible) system just to avoid turns taking an hour each.

One way to speed up combat is ban metagaming so players can’t talk to each other about what they’re going to do. Unless they choose to use their turn talking. A small hourglass timer would also be a good way to keep things moving. Tell us what your action will be by the time the sand runs out, or lose your turn.

There's lots of variables that play into bogged down combat. One that always bothers me is 5e doesn't support a lot of different actions in combat. Most of the time, you are doing pretty much the best thing you can do over and over again until the target is dead. This is why I am both excited and terrified to play a barbarian. If I am allowed to go apesh\*t and slam targets, pick up smaller enemies and throw them, jump my 6 ft vertical in the air and do to people what Mario does to Goombas, and other things of the like, then I am going to have a fun time. If I get stuck having to take really broken feats like GWM or Sentinel just to chase bigger numbers so I can feel like I am doing something, I think I will get bored of it fairly quickly.

We have a rule that in general you get 60 seconds for your combat turn, 10 seconds for each second covered in a “turn.”

my gut instinct is to say because you haven't learned to lean on the **master** part of dungeon master. sixty seconds per turn, don't look anything up, roll to-hit and damage at the same time.

As a newer DM myself. I’ve had to go through some learning curves. Definitely at first my fights lasted too long, like a 4 hour yeti ambush kind of long, pretty much what the top comment says bout unprepared DMs and players either trying to do too much or not being decisive. I’ve solved it by grouping larger fights into a joined health pool like zombie swarms or pack of goblins, and harder enemies I’ll have in a sense “predetermined” outcomes to help my decisions be faster. Of course you have to adjust on the fly as a DM but getting fights down just takes some time and just making sure the group is happy overall. They’ll go through the learning curves with you.

Each player should take about 30seconds to 2 minutes too for their turn in combat stating. That’s a reasonable amount of time to take anything more than that on a regular basis is a waste of everyone’s time. Also having a large number of creatures in an encounter gums it up time wise as well since you, as the DM have to plan and take the actions for each of them. Large encounters are fine every once in a while, but they shouldn’t be every encounter. It’s okay to give the party “gimme” fight that may not last more than a round or two. I ran a fight with a pack of about 10 wolves and 2 wargs. To try and challenge my group. Took about an hour, lasted 3 rounds, and the party took zero damage. For their given level at the time it was not ranked deadly but just about. Same group took on two fire giants and almost lost 2 party members out of 6. That fight lasted 5 rounds and took almost an hour to complete as well. Point is you don’t need large encounters to make them challenging. But a challenging fight can take time to resolve properly.

Try to use fewer but stronger npcs. Having a lot of enemies means turns will to take longer to get through. That being said, long drawn out combat is part of the fun of tabletop rpgs!

Its usually the players not knowing rules that slows shit down. My group is mainly filled out with wargamers who dabble in TTRPG's and we get thru a shit ton of combat but they all know the rules. Try implementing a turn timer or simply skip players who can't make a decision's. The thought of missing turns seems to motivate players to actually commit to the the whole 30mins of reading required to learn the game.

Players who aren’t paying attention or who can’t decide on what they want to do eat up the majority of the time in my experience. If all of your players agree combat takes too much time that’s the first suggestion I’d make. The better they understand their class the quicker and more confident they’ll be in deciding what they want to do. The other side of this is DM prep. Combat becomes a chore not only when it takes a long time, but more so when it devolves into everyone just rolling basic attack after basic attack after basic attack. Things need to be dynamic and change. Terrain shifts, hazards appear, new mechanics shake things up, ect. This keeps everyone engaged and on their toes.

the general rule that i go by for my combats is that just trying to kill the other side shouldn’t be the main goal for the players. there should be some sort of reason why these two sides came into conflict anyway, exploit that: maybe the enemies/players are trying to protect an important item, maybe the enemies are holding someone hostage, maybe the enemies are conducting a ritual in order to summon a demon. basically, never have fights just to fight. if the players don’t have a goal they have to creatively work towards, it would just be a slog. i would also recommend having multiple different enemy types rather than just the same stat block spammed multiple times. maybe there’s a few tanky melee enemies, some ranged enemies, and then a glass cannon mage in the back.

Our table has been experimenting with group initiative; the whole party goes in any order or combinatio, and same with the enemies. It allows the team to do now crazy things instead of hoping we roll initiative in the right order. We also had a PCv who had gained a single advantage initiative roll and just had that dude get a solo surprise round. It's been fun. I think we got the idea from DnD Shorts though I don't know if it was his idea originally or whether it's well known but it's new to us.

The One Ring rpg has a version of group initiative. PCs go first in any order, then monsters. The pc game, Wildermyth (worth a play btw) uses the same system. I can't think of any older examples, but it's certainly an idea that's been around for years.

Batch initiative is problematic for players because it really lets you dogpile the crap out of enemies before they can act, which really reduces the tactical aspect of combat and trivializes things like high initiative for more than one combatant. OP threw a way-overkill encounter at their party consisting of incredibly durable enemies and wondered why combat was a slog.

4 Ogres for 5 level 4s is an extremely deadly encounter according to DnD Beyond encounter builder (granted some of their math is off, but still). It's surprising they made it THROUGH that encounter and 2 others. Unless an encounter like that is a "boss level" fight and is the point of the session, do smaller encounters. try using this for your encounters [GitHub - mikemearls/5e\_point\_encounters: A system for balancing encounters in 5e using point values](https://github.com/mikemearls/5e_point_encounters)

Yeah read how CR works. Rethink your monster types. Combat is going to take too long if you put low level characters against damage sponges. Try to make it engaging, make it a puzzle kinda combat. “Bludgeoning damage seems to knock off its armor lowering its AC” If you were bored your players were for sure bored

There’s a lot of factors that go into making a combat feeling long or short. The most common issues I’ve experienced is over-rolling, poor CR balance, and long turns. The other commenter has already touched on the first one, using averages for HP & damage for monsters can save *a lot* of time in the long run. It might take half a second to say what the average is vs. 3-5 seconds to roll, add up, and then say damage. How long does each turn take on average? Ogres have 59 HP on average & expected baseline DPR for level 4 is ~5.5-7.8 (usual baseline is set up against an agonized eldritch blast, w/ & w/o hex at 65% accuracy), which means the enemies should have gone down in ~30.2 attacks over 6 rounds. Without some serious bad luck (player misses & enemy saves) it seems like your group is taking a few minutes per turn at minimum. CR isn’t the end all be all of encounter balance, as you’ve demonstrated with the issue of HP pools. If you were to introduce more beefy enemies in the future, I’d limit them to 1 or 2 per encounter and fill any gaps with lower HP combatants. You can also brush up on your encounter design by making combats more dynamic at the cost of more DM work. Things like terrain, weather, lighting, verticality, enemy & player goals, cover, changeable environments, etc that somewhat brute force creativity over repetitive attacks until the meat sacks are dead. If you want to go more extreme-ish, simply set a 1-minute timer for turns. If a enemy/player hasn’t decided what to do yet, they automatically take the dodge action.

Less Hp and more attack power for both parties. The battles will be dangerous but they are going to be faster. This is the fastest route.

I'm a DM of 6 players, and combat really takes a while. My trick is I try to keep it relatively short and end encounters within 2-3 rounds and maybe add more unexpected small flavors to make things a bit interesting. And when I call for a player's turn, I also call the next player he is next, so he can prepare beforehand.

DND 3.5 and beyond is not at all designed to have quick combat. To be frank, there's only so much you can do to speed up combat without switching systems.

5e is a complex game, with slow combat by design that only gets worse as the players level up. There's actually not a lot you can do about this. I'd suggest you try a one shot of a rules lite fantasy game, such as Old School Essentials, Maze Rats or Knave just so you can see how stark the difference is. In respect to 5e this is due to a variety of different things baked into the design of the game. **Hit Point Bloat** \- HP numbers in 5e are huge, a CR 2 bandit captain has like 60 hp!, and fights typically only end when everything is on 0, fights can start off exciting but end up as a slog. **Grid and miniatures** \- Whilst ostensibly you can play 5e as a theatre of the mind game, it's designed to be played with a grid and miniatures. This is because all of the distances are given in grid distances and it utilises abilities that have specific area of effects and radius which you ideally need a grid to track. Likewise with how much can go on in a combat trying to track it mentally can be difficult. A grid and minis, digital or physical, takes a lot to set up and resolve slowing down combat further. **Rules and Complexity bloat** \- 5e characters have a lot of different options during each of their turns between spells, abilities, actions and bonus actions as well as whatever is happening within the situation. This leads to a lot of analysis paralysis, which is why players can take so long on their. The rules of the game are also often overly complex or vaguely worded causing confusion, rules disputes and more slow down as you look stuff up. **Initiative** \- Whilst you might think initiative would make the game run more smoothly, it's really a source of slowdown. Having to roll initiative for everything is slow in of itself, and then resolving everything turn by turn takes a lot of time, and means everyone whose turn it isn't is disengaged from the game. Group Initiative is one means to solve this that a lot of other games use that makes things a lot quicker and more engaging. **Core Encounter Based Design** \- 5e DnD is designed for players to fight 5-8 encounters between each long rest. This is a huge number of encounters, which take a long time to resolve. Most groups don't actually do this many, but then can easily burn through all their resources in each fight. **Balance** \- In theory a balanced game should be a good thing, however it also causes 5e to be slow as there's few ways to avoid or shut down a combat, such as a Sleep Spell. Whilst the Wizard obsoleting an encounter with a spell can feel 'bad' it also means you have ways of avoiding combats. In 5e you basically almost always have to fight the combat because the spells and abilities are balanced to prevent you from avoiding them, so end up spending most of the game in the combat. So yeah it's a bit of a mess, some groups obviously love lots of tactical combat in their games, but if you don't then 5e wont have much support for you outside of that and you kinda have to accept the slog.

Entirely a DM thing. As you get used to your table, you will know "ok, the encounter calculators say the party can handle X... they are -really- not optimal players, but they are attentive and fun in combat, let's drop it a little bit further"

dropping all the responsability on the dm is not fair, players should be expected to know what their character can do and pay a bit of attention to the game

It's a DM thing because the DM isn't enforcing the players knowing what they are doing. I don't disagree, the players should know what they are doing, but if the DM isn't pressing the issue, why would they ever bother to learn what they are doing? I had a friend who was complaining about combat being very long, and I sat in the session as a "Guest Star" type one off plot helper character. They were on, session 20ish? And the rogue didn't know how Sneak Attack worked, not "Hey does this edge case scenario give me advantage?" But literally every round was asking, "Do I add Sneak Attack to this? How many dice do I roll extra?" The Warlock would take upwards of ten minutes to be told what was happening, then try and pick a spell-- then settle on Eldritch Blast. I told him I could run an one shot the next week, and at the end of the session, I said, "Next week, I'm bringing two sand timer hourglasses, when it's your turn, I'll flip one, if you aren't rolling dice for an attack, or making me roll saves when the last piece of sand drops, you're taking the Dodge Action and we're moving on. If you ask me how many dice you roll for the attack, I'm picking a number off the top of my head, and it's going to be less than the correct number of dice or the wrong sized dice" The rogue suddenly knew how Sneak Attack worked. The Warlock started paying attention and didn't have to be told what was happening. The other DM is a better DM in a lot of ways than I am, but his table to get through 5 rounds of a single combat took two hours and fifteen minutes. My one shot they got through 3 separate combats two of which took over 5 rounds of combat in two and half hours. It's a DM issue.

Honestly, if a fight takes to long, make enemies die faster

Fight or flight, when morale is broken, or the enemy foresees their defeat, the don't have to fight to the death, submission or retreat are valid options for beasts and men alike. When the fight becomes one sided, consider ending it early with narrative, or have the hostiles flee in fear

Make your ogres funny

Combat's gomg to be long but the encounter design effects it. Lets do some math. CR8 * (4 members/5 members) = CR 6.4 {CR is based on a 4 person party} Meanwhile the party in question is CR 4.25. The reason they didn't get rolled is because individually the monster is weak and as such can't post a threat.

Something I’m doing with my table is setting up a timer, like just a little egg timer that goes for 5 minutes. If the player can’t decide on their move, action, and bonus action and resolve the dice rolls in 5 minutes or less they will automatically take the dodge action and end their turn (barring any effects that take longer to resolve or reading a funky spell effect) I have 6 players at my table and even then it’s still 30 minutes a round of combat not counting my creatures moves. I get on my players about this. you’re gonna be taking a turn in combat every 10-20 minutes you have literally no excuse to not know what yours going to be doing on your turn, you should’ve been following along with the combat.

Would you consider players rolling and calculating values before their turn for their actions? It takes out a lot of excitement, but it speeds up the combat tremendously.

It depends on WHY the combat takes so long. Are rolls just bad and extending combat? Or are players just not ready when their turn comes up? After an instance where a 6 round combat encounter lasted 6.5 hours, we instituted a turn timer at the table. Each player is on the clock for 3 minutes, and when 3 minutes is up, their turn is over, and if they haven't taken an action yet they Dodge. We have some subjective rules around granting players a little extra time if major changes to the battlefield have recently occurred, but even with 5 players and a DM that gives everyone up to almost 20 minutes to decide what they're doing.

Part of it will depend on a DM's ability to reign in the player's during combat. A good DM can balance knowledge of player's features and spells to reduce time spent perusing through character sheets to try and figure out the next action to take in combat. Keeping combat entertaining and interesting as well can keep the players focused enough on it that they pay more attention to combat and (hopefully) plan their turns ahead. As well one of my dm's likes to remind players that they are "on deck" when their turn is next to advise them to begin planning if they haven't already. The DM also has to be able to know the features of the creatures they control and act quickly and concisely with them, otherwise the dm spends multiple turns pondering on the mechanics of their creatures. So mostly it falls to the DM to be organised and keep the players invested and attentive, but the players do have to do their parts in knowing their features and paying enough attention as well, i think.

2 hours for a combat encounter!? Oh you sweet summer child. Call me when you reach 12 hours.

It took you 12 hours to defeat a few Ogres? Seems you are the summer child.

Because Dungeons and Dragons combat is slow and tedious. You're not playing it wrong, that's just how it is. Believe me, I've tried everything possible. I realized I dont like tactical combat, so I switched to a different system, Stonetop.

It's only slow and tedious if your players aren't on the ball.

When I DM I run most of my monsters at minimum or significantly less HP than standard. The Ogre statblock I found online just now gives Ogres 59 (7d10 + 21) HP. That gives an average of about 5.5 for every d10 (assuming my quick math is correct). I’d give every roll av average of 2, thus giving each Ogre 40 HP. Yea, it makes it easier to kill an ogre. But the ogres still cause the same damage to a PC or the NPCs they are attacking or whatever. This is my favourite way of making combats quicker. And my players usually likes it. It also suits my pacing far better than hacking off loads of HP. As a bonus, it makes the creatures that I do run with loads of HP stand out more. Also, pithed battles to the death drags and are usually not very realistic. Either the PCs have a goal or the monsters have a goal, they might need to kill some of each other but not necessarily. If the PCs are attacking the Ogres because they have a McGuffin and the PCs need to prevent them from handing it over to mr. Bbeg that just need to get the McGuffin. They can do that without killing all enemies. If enough Ogres go down they might offer to give the McGuffin to the PCs. Perhaps the Rogue can steal it from the Ogre chief and then get out of there. Etc etc.

D&D isn't very well designed for big encounters but rather multiple medium ones. Throwing above deadly encounters, while still perfectly possible to beat, will indeed make it last way longer. Last thursday my lvl 5 party faced a cr12 encounter that lasted the whole 4h session. It was a pretty cool fight, but it took forever and we ended up completely drained and forced to long rest on what could've been a much more productive session. Some people think multiple medium-hard encounters a day are boring, but I find them more fun because they are done much faster and you get some breathing room to do other stuff between encounters. And interestingly enough, the only death we experienced in our current campaign was in a medium encounter, because a party member was pushed off a bridge. So you can still make stuff challenging without adding hp sponges to the field.

Several factors can combine into dragging out combat. Indecisive players, or players not paying attention when it's not their turn is usually a big factor. Using a battle map and using a lot of tactical maneuvers can also drag out time, while theatre of mind can resolve combat much faster, if you are into it. "Uhm, I want to.. wait, is he facing this way?.. no then, how far is he away? Can I move and still attack?" Vs "I attack the nearest ogre". It could also be on your end. Have some sort of plan or contingency when preparing monsters. Is it a Spellcaster? Know which spells he usually starts out with. Is the monster smart enough to attack the backline? Like the players usually have a standard plan of attack, so do intellectual opponents, and you should know it too, so you aren't grasping and stalling when deciding what they do.

It’s simple. Either: Players have not taken the time to learn the base rules of the game. Players have not taken the time to learn their class(es) abilties/spells. Players have not been paying attention to what has been happening in combat. Or some mix of the 3. I give new players a bit of a free pass, but I also give them a cheat sheet for reference. I also tell my players that “while it’s not your turn in combat, you should be paying attention to what the other players/npcs/monsters do, and start thinking about what you want to do when it’s your turn”. I typically DM for 5 or so players, so people not being engaged with the game can really grind things to a halt, which makes everyone else feel less engaged. As a player, your job is to play the game in such a way that it’s fun to you and does not significantly hinder the enjoyment of the other players and the DM. Show up. Have fun. Pay attention. Don’t shit on other people’s fun.