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?
It can entirely depend on who’s at the table and what you’re fighting. If you’re prepared, and things have played out as you’ve expected, your turn can last as little as 5 seconds, and if everyone else is equally prepared, you could be looking at 2 - 3 minutes per round. But if things get messy, if there are a lot of mobs on the table, if people haven’t thought about their next course of action, etc., it can bog down.
My table usually takes around 30-45 minutes per combat, but most of that is me as the GM fumbling the transition between different NPCs.
An hour between turns sounds like there’s just something totally broken at that table, though.
I’ve DMd for both and I can’t say I’ve noticed a big difference in terms of the amount of time combat takes. It sounds like your player was speaking more to the way combat duration scales up with high level play, not the average experience of playing at normal levels. FWIW, 5e famously turns into a slog at high levels too, so I don’t think it’s a PF2e thing specifically.
My last big boss fight in PF2 lasted about 3 hours and there were 10 rounds in that time - so about 1 round every 18 minutes. The party consisted of six level 12 characters - counting the GM, that means the average turn was about 2.5 minutes long.
(That includes some RP as well, villainous monologues, rescuing the hostage, etc)
Granted, I use the Foundry VTT, which speeds things up quite a bit. (And is also how I was able to review this data). And most of us are experienced with the PF2 system at lower levels and had jumped up to level 12 for a oneshot.
PF2E has a lot of crunch, so combat slows down dramatically as character level increases.
I’m only talking from watching PF2e actual plays and playing a lot of 5e but I’d say PF2e combats would run 1.2x longer under the same conditions as a 5e game.
I’d say DM style is easily the biggest influence, I’ve played in games where a one hour combat is the significant boss battle of a campaign, but rules for 6 rounds, and I’ve played in games where a 6 hour battle may be normal, potentially with as few as 4 rounds passing (the latter one absolutely does kill me though, I think my character in that game has actually developed to avoid a fight because I dont want the faff). I’d say DM style can influence a combat length by 3x or more.
Similarly an understanding of general efficiency in combat from the players too can half a combat length pretty easily.
I wouldn’t worry about it extending the game length, any extra time is pretty negligible compared to steps you can take to stop the time of combat unraveling.
