On my last session of d&d combat took too long and I had to apologize for it to my players. One player, who is a Pathfinder 2e player, said it’s nothing compared to long fights he had in that system, where between party of high level casters, boss, minions and enemy spellcasters, he would be waiting a whole hour for his next turn. I certainly want to at least have one Pathfinder 2e campaign among options to present to this group after we finish current one, so how much is this a general problem and not his group’s problem and are there some ways to avoid this long combat?
I’ve been trying it out because I kind of skipped that edition, and tbh combat has been pretty amazing. Every battle is fun and tactically interesting. It’s really been scratching that itch I had for dynamic, teamwork set piece combat that I was afraid I was going to lose when some people wanted to play “DnD” and I really didn’t want to play 5e lol. It can take awhile because health is too big but once we instituted a common house rule and reduced enemy HP by 25-30%, it’s been perfect. We’ve just been doing a one-shots and tiny modules while the players humor me trying out this edition, though, so no idea how it will scale.
But now I do wish I had given it more of a chance before. Admittedly, now we have the benefit of hindsight, and some 10 years of common house rules recommended by the internet that didn’t exist when it first came out. I might even switch between it and PF2E from now on depending on how much I miss the cool critical rules and 3 action economy of PF2E vs dynamic forced movement rules and simple but abstract AEDU actions of D&D 4e. Although we’ll see if the sheen of newness fades at some point.