[RPG] How to speed up D&D 3.5e combat

To be quite honest, I think this is fairly unavoidable in a group with 6 or 7 people. Just about any RPG with any kind of mechanical depth is going to really slow down when you have that many people; I don't a copy of the Deadlands rulebook handy, but if it has any player number guidelines, that's probably more than the listed reccomendation for group size.

Different encounter design could help - I'm stating the obvious here, but the fewer monsters you're fighting, the fewer actions they take.

There are really only a few ways to speed up combat, and most of them really depend on what is bogging you down. Here is the advice I'd give if you really want to make sure you get through as fast as possible:

• Limit Turn Time. This is the biggie, and you're already doing it with the carrot method (providing a chip worth a +1 to any d20 roll). That's great. I'd introduce a stick too, make them delay if they aren't ready to act. We've done this, and it works pretty well, though it can get a bit stressful if you have a character with a lot of options. This should fix player attentiveness too.

• Create Flow Charts. Ask people to spend some time out of game mapping out their options. Sit down with your players (especially the ones who are regularly victims of analysis paralysis) and map out what powers and abilities they want to use in specific situations. Develop flow charts or rainbow tables if you have to. The should then be able to consult these during other peoples' turns to determine their optimal move and decide whether they want to do that or something else.

• Plan Your Turns. Make sure your players are spending their time between turns planning out what they are planning to do on their turn. They have a good bit of downtime between turns, this should be spent mapping out their next turn (obviously some situations will come up that change this, but for the most part, you should know what you're doing by the time your next turn comes around). If you have your options well mapped out, this should be even easier.

• Identify Party Synergies. Especially in paragon tier where your players are heading, it's fairly easy to develop a party wide strategy (whether that's radiant mafia, murder pinball, frost cheese, or any other common party wide strategies), that will not only make your party more effective, but will lead you to faster combats as you can more easily wipe out enemies.

• Use Essentials Characters. Most essentials characters have fewer powers and options, the majority of them have things that fire when they make a basic attack. This is a great thing for new players, and players who regularly suffer from analysis paralysis. Fewer options means faster play.

• Roll Attack and Damage Dice Together. If the attack hits, great, total the damage, if it doesn't ignore the damage roll. A subset of this is to have your dice read when you take your turn.

• Use Average Damage The next step is to do away with damage dice all together. Use the average of the dice that would be rolled (d6 is 3.5, d8 is 4.5 etc). If it comes out a fraction, round up or down, your choice.

• Use L1 Equivalent Damage. This is something our DM and I are discussing to speed up our Paragon tier combats. They are too slow right now (an average, relatively easy combat takes 2+ hours, and a complicated one can take 4 hours or longer). We would up monster damage and reduce their HP so that the fights are quicker, but deadlier. They would consume about the same amount of party resources (the point of most fights), but they would last less time.

• Speed up DM Time. It sounds like you're not having trouble with monster turns (that's one of the big time wasters in our games), but average damage, or rolling damage with the hit roll can save some time. As can simplifying the monsters down to just a power or two instead of the several that monsters often have at higher levels.

• Simplify Out of Turn Actions. Starting in Paragon and moreso in epic, out of turn actions become a huge time drain. They are great for getting more attacks, dealing more damage etc, but they can be a bear to resolve. Talk to your players about how to resolve this (many characters, like even midlevel battleminds have a lot of them and are reliant on them for effective play). This could include choosing character who don't use as many of them, or some other way of simplifying them (Don't remove them entirely, opportunity and immediate actions are important resource pools, and removing them will make entire roles(Defender) obsolete.

• Rejigger Initiative. Have all the monsters go, then all the PCs go. This is a bit more common for PbP games than live play ones, but it can help speed up play.

Ultimately though, I'd talk to your group, do they enjoy hour long easy combats or are they annoyed by them too? Do they have ideas on how to speed them up?

You've got a great resource at your table for figuring out how to solve this problem. Your players. Talk to them (out of session, or before) as a group, and perhaps as individuals and try to figure out a solution that works for your table. No one thing is right for everyone and it may take some further experimentation to find the right thing. Identify specific things that take time (is there a lot of our of character chatter, does play stall with a couple of players all the time), and try to get to the root of it.

That said, 4e's combat mechanics, while well laid out and very well balanced are not constructed for rapid play. They are designed so that the majority of each session will be consumed by combat and that each combat will take a good amount of time. If I'm remembering right, they expect and average Heroic tier combat to take an hour. I've rarely had a normal heroic tier combat take less than 2. So manage your expectations here, you're probably about where most groups are.