Three characters fight three monsters. Let's assume that for each of these 6 characters, their (Level + Discernment + initiative abilities) give 6 actions per flurry.

For each of these 36 tests, players have to...

1. Announce what they want to do
2. Confirm what to roll
3. Roll it
4. Compare dice to determine results
5. Think up some fun stuff to narrate
6. Type it in
7. React to the new situation (see #1)

Let's assume that each of these steps takes about 15 seconds by the time you include mentally transitioning from one step to another, and waiting on comments from other people.

Seven steps per action, at 0.25 minutes per step, for 36 actions per flurry, takes 63 minutes to resolve a flurry.

Even granting that my numbers are a little off, or even a lot off, it seems like Donjon combat would be painfully slow over IRC, especially since in a normal combat so little is at stake: the PC's can't die easily, and the only real point of fighting is to loot corpses, which can be done simply by rolling your "detect corpses" ability.

This makes me sad because IRC is the only way I can game, and I'd really like to play Donjon sometime.

Would anyone care to suggest a fix?

Here are some cheap dodges:
1. Declare there will be no combat ("You musn't harm anyone on this mission," says the king.)

2. Declare that combat is a simple test like anything else. (Oh, you wanna fight this dragon? Well, it's the 3rd level and that's a Crazy difficulty, so you roll 8 dice vs. my 15.)

3. Limit combat to a single flurry. People either backtrack, run away, or get separated somehow. Story resumes.

4. Options 1-3 kind of suck in my own opinion though.

It might be possible to set up another dicebot that's specialized for Donjon rolls, making steps 3 and 4 much shorter. (Especially if it takes two arguments and automagically figures out who won with how many successes.)

I actually wrote a Java applet to do that, though I'm having trouble adapting it as a chatbot (because I don't know what I'm doing).

But the real issue, as I see it, is that even with some automation combat in Donjon involves a hell of a lot of "handling time" in order to resolve very little.

Does anyone have any thoughts on running Donjon combat as a form of conflict resolution?

(It's not necessarily Donjon's fault: it's a trait of the whole Dungeons & Dragons stuff thta Donjon tries to emulate. In a game about intrepid adventurers exploring monster-infested ruins, combat should be flamboyant, dramatic, and fraught with risk. Instead it often becomes meat & potatoes stuff, with little at stake.)