Tonight's session of Pathfinder consisted of about two hours of great role playing (in which the players befriended a slightly mad volcanic dragon while scouting the base of an active volcanic range in search of a mysterious temple) and two and a half hours of a single combat session involving a platoon of fire salamanders (30 fighters and 10 clerics) who intended to ambush them and enslave or otherwise do great harm to the party. The party consists of 9 13th-14th level adventurers with a heavy weight toward combat. It was a long but nearly sure massacre, though the gnome cleric perished during the fight only to be brought back later through the miracle of raising the dead (or something along those lines).
Still....when campaigns hit high level in D20 era 3.5/PF games, combats can often drag on excruciatingly. This was an issue with 4th edition, too....combats at any level could suck up time unexpectedly.
Now, in all fairness high level games I ran back in 1st and 2nd edition could be lengthy affairs, too...but not like this. And more over, I remember running games in which a half dozen level 12+ characters could face down 80 slaad and the combat still took maybe an hour.
I may need to run a test game o high level D&D 5E and see how it handles play at level 14+. Should be an interesting experiment on whether the system's bounded accuracy can smooth out the math madness of high level play from the last two editions.
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