DnD Fast Play Rules

I have a busy family where we rarely have more than an hour of uninterrupted time to do things like play board games. This presents a problem when attempting to play longer games together like Dungeons & Dragons (DnD), where a typical game session is about four hours. Whenever we do get to play, it becomes a chore when a battle breaks out, because an average combat encounter seems to last about half an hour.

For this project, I’m looking for tweaks to the DnD rules that I can make to significantly speed up the game. Ideally, I would like a game session to last no more than one hour. I have several ideas in mind already for making the game run more cinematically and less granularly.

I wrote an article on my blog about one simple rules change you can make to greatly reduce the time it takes to play a DnD game session.