How to do "and they fought for an entire day" in D&D

[OgreBattle]

This is also about the nature of abstracting the length of rounds.

So in D&D a round is 6 seconds, and most fights end in 1 to 6 rounds. It works fine for a gameplay perspective, but in fiction fights often last quite a while with people stopping and circling and so on. Real world accounts of fights can also take quite a while.

Then you have heroic combats of legendary warriors slugging it out for hours, even days. You also have sniper duels too with careful stalking and counterstalking.

What's the best way to add this kind of scale to D&D? Where some fights are going to be under a minute but the duel between demigods can take hours. The simplest fix I can think of is just stick with the current system but handwave that that every round is now an hour of godly brawling, but then there should be some consistency to how you trigger an epic combat like that vs regular 6 second rounds.

[angelfromanotherpin]

This has come up before. The basic idea that was come up with was that as you leveled up your defenses scaled until regular attacks were shut out entirely, and only 'epic attacks' with really long execution times and bonuses that countered the defenses could penetrate them. This also scaled up the squares to include 'epic movement scales' and 'epic ranges.' So at a certain point the badasses agree that they're going to epic scale and start taking turns that are an hour (or even a day) long instead of spending 600 turns each saying 'I charge my attack.'

[ACOS]

What - you mean that noone wants to actually play out scenes like from The Quiet Man or Any Which Way But Loose?
(though, truth be told, I wouldn't mind playing out that scene from They Live; albeit with a narrative rules-lite game)

I think that afap has the right idea with the whole "scaled-up defenses" idea; but I think the particular implementation he suggests is a little contrived (it's giving me flashbacks of DBZ).
Everybody at the table needs to be on the same page with this, but it would not be hard to narrate this kind of thing.
Just assume that the play time is the actual fight time; and the "rounds" are just the highlight reel. Narrate as needed.

It's not perfect - some might not even find it particularly satisfying - ; but it is what it is. The nature of the game necessitates that anything that requires extended time frames also requires a certain level of straight-up narration.

[Lago PARANOIA]

@angelfromanotherpin:
Well, yes, you could do that, but why would you do that? That doesn't reflect any source material. Badasses do have mook deflection shields that shut out an arbitrary number of non-super attacks, but mook deflection shields by and large don't shut out everything but special attacks from a character of their power level. I mean, vampires and stone golems and black oozes and whatever can just say 'fuck you' to a large subsection of attacks but that doesn't imply that they shut out all attacks of a similar power level; a character being immune to a lightning bolt does not mean that they're also immune to run-of-the-mill swings of a level 6 +2 broadsword. Or vice versa. And even in the fictional occasions where this is the case, it generally doesn't take a character all that long to use an attack that could penetrate a defense.

Sure, stories where two adversaries engage in a padded sumo fight where little nothing changes from minute to minute aren't nonexistent, but they're rare for a reason. And most of those occasions tend to be of the 'it just happens, OKAY?' type anyway, because these same characters have a tendency of dispatching more powerful opposition in a short timeframe. That is, Shonen Hero #3 is shown taking an hour to fight baddie of the weak, but during the season finale he takes out the BBEG (whom has better attacks and defenses) in a few minutes. You can't really reflect these sorts of narrative cheats without leaning on dissociated mechanics -- at which case I recommend just rolling on an escalating time scale chart which has a bonus depending on how much the combatants' attack/defense defense to see how much time passes between rounds.

[Dogbert]

Short version: You can't.

Long version: Logistics and dragons is a game about resource management, not cinematic narrative or genre emulation, so if you want your "battle of Helm's Deep" you'll have to MTP it.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

I think you could make it a spell. "Clash of Fates" or something. When a caster casts it on a caster who also knows the spell, they get transported to an abstract pocket realm where they can engage in a 24 hour session of Wizard Danmaku without 24 hours passing in real time, or them running out of spells, or being bothered by bodily exhaustion. Mundanes who's class makes them out to be a noteworthy duelist can get it as an (Ex) that transforms the local space into an arena. From there, you can MTP whatever the heck you like, since no two fight realms are alike.

[OgreBattle]

Conan d20 had a "clash of fates" or something named like that mechanic to represent this kind of thing but it was a strange "make strength or constitution" checks thing. I think part of it was a narrative bubble that prevents interference for the duelists.

[tussock]

This is also about the nature of abstracting the length of rounds.

That's basically where your answer lies. You want longer game-time fights, use longer rounds.

In AD&D it was 1 minute, and people complained, but you know, dramatic timing. In mass combat games they're often 10 minutes per round. A 6-round battle encompasses all that hiding, manoeuvre, scouting, charges, retreats, feints, grandstand speeches, and spells timing out while nothing much happens.

In very large scale battle games each round represents a day. In space travel combat games the round is a month or a year depending on what they're going for. Some games shift the round length depending on technology, like Civ games, where the early times are a decade or more per turn and the later tech brings turns of just a month.

If your system kills half the primitive combatants each round, and that should take a month in the real world, then just make your combat round a month long. Reach 30 km, charge range 500 km, only the biggest 1-round spell combo (nova strike) counts.

[Josh_Kablack]

This is not something you want to do in D&D. But to have game mechanics that give longer fights, some directions you could go are:

• Lengthen the amount of in-game-time a round represents. This is the only simple option, but it still can run into problems with movement on a map and other scaling issues
• Reduce the chance of a typical attack hitting. This turns fights into flail-fests where players spend a lot of time rolling dice and then cursing and a few lucky early rolls can swing a combat. It also makes hit-bonus effects and any sort of auto-hit or area of effect attack super-effective in the system.
• Reduce the damage from a typical attack (or increase everyone's HP) This turns fights into padded sumo and makes them take longer to resolve, even in cases where a tipping point has already been passed. It also makes any sort of non-damage causing status ailment/ save-or-suck ability super effective
• Give characters some type of in-combat recovery mechanic, thus reducing the relative damage of the typical attack and giving characters an incentive to disengage for brief periods. This runs into bookkeeping complexity and if not handled carefully can result in fights which do not resolve as combatants may be able outheal each other's damage-dealing capacity.
• Staple an exhaustion system to attacks. Thereby characters a penalty for making any attacks, which means that making attacks below a certain probability of success is a losing tactic and characters should spend time maneuvering for positional advantage instead. This requires a lot of bookkeeping complexity, as to achieve the desired result you need not only the exhaustion system, but you need multiple types of positional advantage that are accessible to all characters.