Why is the time taken to narrative a 'fight' of interest to you Jeremy? I'm genuinely curious.
Sounds like he's trying to get a comparison to other games, or checking to see if he's doing it "right" or whatever. Y'know, like in some RPGs you can't have plan than a handful of 'encounters' for a single evening, or you're like "this boss fight is gonna take two hours so I've got to make sure we have enough time."
I've definitely got a sense that I'm "doing it wrong." The two sessions I've run (different characters, some overlap of players) have each involved long, sprawling fights that took over an hour, which doesn't jive with reports on how quickly DW generally moved for folks.
I'm not so worried about it from a planning standpoint, as I feel that the biggest strength of DW is the ability to avoid that kind of "we can get through these two grunt fights and the boss fight tonight" planning and all the baggage that comes with it.
I
would like fights to take less table time. We only get to play every 2-3 weeks for ~3-4 hours. And we've often got different folks able to make it each night, so I'd like to avoid ending sessions in the middle of a dungeon (or whatever). Having half of our table time taken up by fights means less exploration, less discovery, less story, and a greater chance a session ending on a cliffhanger.
I'm with Eon. There is no 'battle', only danger and adventure.
That's a nice sentiment, but doesn't match my experience. I, at least, have a natural tendency to zoom in on the fictional details when violence starts. The scale of what triggers each move and what each move accomplishes becomes tighter, more focused.
I totally get what you're saying, and I know that
can happen, especially when the story is taking place in an environment filled with danger (like a dungeon). But even then, there's a natural zooming in and out that happens when a foe is trying to stab you that isn't there when you're exploring a moldering old cellar.
Here's a cool thing about fights and how long they take: once you get used to the system, I think fights will last exactly as long as your group prefers. If you guys like tactical, blow-by-blow battles with lots of positioning, you'll probably zoom way in and decide movement, distance, all that stuff. If you'd rather gloss over the details and get to the results, you'll kinda zoom out and make less rolls.
I think this is the crux of the problem I'm having. The game rules are intentionally vague in regards to scale and the stakes of any given move. This can lead to
unintentional zooming. In your LavaGator example, how many Defy Danger rolls I called for would depend greatly on what the player said he was doing. If the player says "I put my shield up and run out onto the bridge!" then I'm like to ask for one Defy Danger roll against the arrows and the unstable terrain and the lava below. But if he says "I put my shield up and run to grab Ariedne before the LavaGator gets her," I'm likely to roll it into one Defy Danger roll.
More rolls = more opportunities for complication, so it then becomes a form of system mastery to try and describe as broad of an action as possible. I'm not sure how I feel about that.
The takeaway, I think, is that I generally need to zoom out. In order to do that, I've got to try to establish stakes in advance, especially for Defy Danger rolls.
I'm pretty sure I also need to change my approach to 7-9 results on Defy Danger, and do more hard bargains & ugly choices. My default tends to be "worse outcome," which usually means that the danger is still present and the PC is still reacting to it rather than getting to move on but at a cost.