A few weeks ago I was in a Dungeons and Dragons 4E combat that lasted an epicly long time. The sad part, in retrospect, is that it will not be remembered by anyone who fought in it. The reason being is that nothing substantial happened. Let me repeat this, after an 8 hour fight nothing of value happened, no useful loot was to be had, we didn’t go up a level, no characters came close to being killed (one did get reduced to below zero health one slot in the turn order before being healed).
The part I feel good about was that I wasn’t GMing and I have a good idea why this was an excruciating thing, the bad part is I stayed and contributed to this.
When a session has virtually all of its time given over to one of the extremes there is an expectation that a reward beyond just the experience of the fight will be waiting. A campaign brings the expectation that the characters are growing and what turns into a major milestone is treated like that from all participants.
In this specific example the DM followed the tactics as written, but not in the spirit of the encounter. The reason why things went so haywire is because our group entered through a secret entrance that put half the group on a pit trap in the first round of combat. The tactics laid out for the leader in this room was to activate the traps when a party member was standing on it. On that NPCs turn the DM activated the trap and took two of the characters from the encounter. Instead of keeping the fight going on two levels the DM decided to deal with each level separately.
This is a very bad idea.
Reasons for this being a bad idea start with the party being involuntarily split causing two players to now have time to become bored with the day. Much like takeout board and card games where it’s easy to takeout someone too quickly at the start through luck, it creates a very bad experience for the players that it happens to if the game doesn’t end quickly. An hour of sitting around doing nothing with the faint hope of doing something cool later is a fairly fetid carrot to hang in front of players.
It gets worse.
The top fight is actually pretty quick, the heavy damage dealers are still there and make pretty short work of the monsters up top and most DMs would have them quickly find the switch and they can all jump down to follow the separated players. Not this one, he had the players who were up top search for it because their passive perception wasn’t high enough to naturally spot it.
The DM had the characters roll, and keep rolling search checks to find the hidden button. While it does keep with the rule that things shouldn’t just be hand waved when there are dire consequences it also penalizes all the players by making a boring set of inevitable skill checks. A player will eventually roll high enough to find the button.
The reason why this was such a bad decision was that each time the upper group rolled a die another round was passed in which they couldn’t help in the fight below. Instead of just having two people sit out for an hour, now it’s two groups that have to sit out for an hour or so each. Or at least it would have been if the bottom fight wasn’t more complex and the bottom fighters weren’t more ruthless fighters.
The bottom fight had 4 rounds to wait before reinforcements could start to help. This took two hours once the pair on the bottom started to fight. With half the people at the table not involved in the fight it led to distractions because the upper group wanted to see if it was worth their while to stage a rescue attempt. The one thing I’m kicking myself over was we didn’t send the top group for supper when it looked like it would take a longer amount of time.
Once the trap was reopened it became a normal fight with the two ranged fighters being at range and the two on the bottom keeping the monsters in the kill zone. By this point the bottom group had enough resistance that the ranged group was able to lob area spells on top of them. It still took four hours to down the monsters once the parties regrouped but it did get finished with no one really that close to being dropped.
The letdown.
If this were over a couple of sessions, especially if the sessions were closer than monthly, it wouldn’t have been near as bad. My major issue is that it did take a very precious resource, the last session before things get weird before summer to do a single fight where I sat for an hour or so waiting to find out how long the inevitable was. My minor issue was that there was no loot, not a fricken thing beyond a trove of unmagical great-axes.
My major take away from this is, if the party is supposed to be split then make sure you can run both halves at the same time to keep people more engaged.
