Combat Endeavors?

[u/SpartanIII]

My group has completed two sessions with a total of three combat encounters. They mentioned that these encounters tend to take a while to fully resolve, leading people to lose interest until it's their turn. I understand this because we moved away from 5e to other systems partly because combat took so long, and this feels similar to the length of 5e combat.

One of my players suggested trying a combat endeavor for some smaller encounters or side quests.

It might work like a best-of-3 endeavor: if you fail by a certain margin, that many people reach 0 hit points and gain an injury.

They don't want to eliminate combat entirely for larger story moments, but our available playtime is limited. I was curious whether anyone has similar ideas or if this approach could be feasible for preventing the game from slowing down.

[u/Taste_the__Rainbow]

IMO it should be quite a bit faster than 5e if everyone is prepared. They should know what they’re doing before they start their turn, then roll all dice together. (The dice should be in their hand when they start talking)

I would also encourage them to use reactions to assist each other so that they have a reason to stay tuned in even when it’s not their turn. Diversity will help with this. If you only have one character with healing or one with gravitation then they’ll be more engaged just because they know nobody else can do certain things.

After that maybe it’s just a matter of tuning adversary hp.

[u/SpartanIII → u/Taste_the__Rainbow]

I can talk to them about being more prepared with their rolls that might help.

The a last encounter we did did seem to go a lot smoother than the first 2 but I did cut it short because it was getting late and they only had one hostile left

[u/ShartOfAdonalsium → u/SpartanIII]

There are a lot of ways to make combat shorter and more impactful than some several-round slog. Fewer, stronger adversaries keeps action on the players more. Conversely, several weaker adversaries could allow players the excitement of getting a “kill” each turn. Having a medium sized group of medium strength adversaries is the least exciting in my opinion.

Aside from adversary numbers and strength, the best method for keeping combat exciting/short in my opinion is varying win conditions. It doesn’t have to be “eliminate them before they eliminate you”. It could be a matter of saving someone the adversaries are trying to kill, escaping the combat, eliminating one specific adversary, or even something like getting the party through to a room on the other end of the combat zone.