The Five Shapes of Combat in D&D

Trace the fighting across a session and it takes one of five shapes.

Last week’s clock was an average. Underneath it, sessions apparently come in shapes.

Trace how much of each twenty minute stretch is combat, from the start of the night to the end, and five recurring shapes cover almost every TTRPG session (or at least more than nine sessions in ten..).

The Simmer (28% of sessions) Combat never really arrives. The night is talk, plans, and a persuasion check that turns into forty minutes of scheming. This is the single most common session in the data.. and “never really arrives” is generous (in more than half of them, nobody rolls initiative all night).

The Slow Burn (21%) Story for most of the night, then a fight late, once everything has been set up.

The Two-Peak (18%) A fight in the middle, a breather, a bigger fight near the end. The adventuring day as the books imagine it.

The Centerpiece (16%) One big set piece in the middle of the night, and a long wind-down after it.

The Cold Open (10%) The night that starts hot, the ambush already rolling. Rare and the fightiest of the five (with nearly half the night spent in combat). It’s mostly a short night’s shape (one session in five under ninety minutes starts hot).

The remaining sliver splits between the Steady Mix, the even blend from a few weeks ago, and the Late Peak, which is a Slow Burn that waited even longer.

The shape correlates to session duration. Two hour sessions are the Simmer 39% of the time. Five hour sessions are the Two-Peak two times in five. Short nights and long nights reliably take different shapes, which is most of why last week’s average curve looks the way it does.. it’s these five blended, and the most common one has no real fight in it.

It follows the system too, at least a bit. Pathfinder sessions run longer than D&D sessions, which pushes them toward the Two-Peak on its own. Hold the length fixed and the gap is still there: among sessions of three and a half to five hours, two in five Pathfinder sessions are Two-Peaks, against three in ten for D&D.

So which shape is your campaign? Probably several. Among campaigns at least five sessions in, the median campaign has already used four of the five. Nine in ten have used at least three. A table’s most common shape accounts for about 42% of its nights, and campaigns whose nights all come out the same shape are so rare we didn’t bother naming them.

In closing, campaigns have a repertoire of structures to leverage here and they in fact use them frequency (though the length of the night might help them decide).