Nire Bryce

accurately describing D&D combat dominating entire sessions too

the few times i played dnd with friends i desperately wished there was some kind of stat sheet/rules app that we could load up on our phones to make it as simple as a final fantasy menu based fight because it should not take 2.5 hours to kill an owlbear and 3 goblins.

There's 100% a place for strategic tactical combat in an rpg, but dnd is a bad system for this.

D&D is one of the few games where an ebook/website with wiki links and hover previews would actually help but instead of learning that lesson from video games, they made D&D4e into the world's slowest Dragon Age 2

i attempted to read this aloud like a script, even rolling dice for timing; i assume that all their rolls are a straight 1d20 for convenience sake. anyways it took me 1 minute to get to the first instance of someone taking damage and then i decided i have better things to do with my time. i estimate this would be 5-6 minutes of reading if i continued. if only D&D could be so fast!

where's this from? i know they've been releasing previews recently but i can't seem to actually locate this one

I feel like a lot of the reasons that D&D combat seems normal to me is that I've been doing it for 41 years. I constantly yearn to go back to tweaked-BECMI (max HP each level, thieves get decent weapon/armor, poison does damage on failed save, otherwise RAW) but 5th is ubiquitous. And once you've learned the complex rules, it's harder to get used to the easier ones because so much of the terminology is re-used with slightly different meanings.

the worst part is this is still much smoother than actual d&d combat is because they aren't taking time to look up character sheets or roll the dice

I love that the one character drops the sword instead of putting it away because then they'd have to try to engage with/sidestep talking about how weirdly expensive -in terms of types of actions per turn- it is to switch from one weapon to another weapon in 5e.

I DO remember seeing something like that, maybe it was in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. Or perhaps one of the boxed sets with the minifigs.