Running combat faster without cutting corners

Slow combat almost never comes from players thinking too long about what to do. It comes from the bookkeeping around the decision — remembering whose turn is next, what condition someone is under, how much HP a monster has left — taking longer than the decision itself. That bookkeeping is fixable, and fixing it does more for pace than any house rule about turn timers.

The turn order is the first bottleneck

"Whose turn is it?" asked more than once a round is a sign the initiative order isn't visible to the table, not a sign anyone is being slow. Write it somewhere everyone can see — a whiteboard, a shared screen, a tracker on a phone passed around — rather than keeping it in the DM's head or a notebook only they can read. The second-order fix is telling the next player it's nearly their turn while the current player is still acting, so they're thinking about their move instead of finding out cold.

Track conditions where they'll actually be read

A condition that exists only in the DM's memory gets forgotten by round three, and re-litigating "wait, is he still restrained?" mid-fight costs more time than applying the condition did in the first place. Whatever you use to track initiative should carry conditions on the same line as the combatant, not in a separate list you have to cross-reference. The specific rules text matters less in the moment than having something visible that says "restrained" next to the right name — see the condition tracker if you want the rules text and the tracker in the same place.

Pre-roll what doesn't need to be interactive

A lot of a monster's turn is not a decision at all — it's arithmetic. If a monster's tactics are simple (attack the nearest target, no real choice to make), roll its attacks and damage before its turn comes up rather than during it, so the only thing that happens live is announcing the result. This is especially worth doing for a group of identical monsters: roll all four goblins' attacks as a batch, not one at a time.

Decide flat damage numbers for anything that recurs constantly

Rolling a handful of d6s for a minion's basic attack, every round, for every minion, is where a lot of real time goes and where the variance barely matters. A flat average damage number for a monster's routine attack is legal by the rules as an alternative to rolling, and nobody at the table can tell the difference between "8 damage" and "you rolled 8" often enough to be worth the dice time. Save the rolling for the moments where the number visibly matters — a crit, a boss's signature attack, anything the table is watching for.

Resolve the boring rolls at the same time as the interesting one

When an attack needs both a to-hit roll and a damage roll, and the table already has a sense of whether it's going to hit, roll both dice at once rather than pausing between them to announce a hit before rolling damage. The pause is dead time more often than it's suspense — save the deliberate pause for the rolls where the outcome is genuinely uncertain or a lot is riding on it.

The fastest fights are the ones with a clear read on stakes

None of the above matters much if nobody at the table knows why the fight matters or what losing it would cost — decisions slow down when players are guessing at stakes rather than weighing them. A fast combat starts with a clear frame going in: what the monsters want, what happens if the party loses, and what winning actually gets them. That's a prep problem, not a bookkeeping one, but it's the one that makes all the mechanical speed-ups above worth doing.