For a while now, my primary group has been playing other rpgs more often.

Also, for a while now, I have had the feeling that D&D combat seems to take a long time to work through one encounter. However, it really hit me how slow it was (or at least seems to be to me) after the group recently played a mini-campaign of 5E to cover a few sessions that a regular couldn't attend.

Thinking about it more, I started to ponder if D&D combat has always been this way. I'm most familiar with 3rd, 4th, and 5th. All three are relatively quick for the first few levels. As options (and monster HP) start to pile up, encounters slow. What highlights is more is that it becomes slow for reasons which aren't (imo) compelling. If an encounter is a dramatic fight with a tough opponent, involves and epic chase, or something else, it's not quite as noticeable. But taking (sometimes) an hour to beat on some basic critters as part of an opening encounter gets old quickly. When I played primarily D&D, I didn't notice it as much. As myself (and the group) have spent more time with other games, coming back to the D&D combat system feels more and more like a slog beyond around 5th level (and sometimes before that).

In comparison, our primary campaign is currently a FFG Star Wars game. Even with high-point-value characters and some ridiculous dice pools, we were still able to play through several encounters (and still have time to wrap up some RP stuff) in one session. Also, because of how the game functions, there were rarely turns during which nothing happened.

Likewise, for those of you who may be familiar with my posts elsewhere, you may know I play GURPS. Somehow, a game which has a reputation for being "overly complex" still manages to play through combat encounters faster than D&D.

So, my question is three parts:

1) Do you feel D&D combat is slow (or "drags")?

2) If yes, how do you address this in 5E?

3) Has it always been that way? I'm not familiar with very much of 1E or 2E.

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