General encounter advice

[Glorthindel]

I am looking to start up a 4e campaign in the near future. Our group plays a lot of different systems, and I feel we never really gave 4th ed a fair go back when we first tried it. All our players loved playing it (myself included) when we first tried it, which is why I want to give it another try, but it was the DM role where it kinda came apart, both myself and another DM in our group both tried running it, but really struggled to get in to it.

For myself, the problem was combat encounters. I found there were a few fundamental issues that I just couldn't get past, and that seriously impacted my enjoyment as a DM. The main issue was that fights seemed to last too long past the point where the players had "broken" the encounter. The best fights seemed to hinge on monster synergy - the fights were fun and engaging whilst abilities played off one another, but once monsters started dying and synergies broken, the fights moved into a clean-up slog phase, in which the players weren't in any real danger. It just became busy-work, and somewhat unfun to just be sitting there rolling dice that had no real effect on anything.

From what i gather, there is a quite well-accepted issue with early-book monsters, that was addressed in later material. As I only have MM1 and 2 (which sound like the main culprits of the problem) I was just wondering whether there is any advice on how to structure encounters to get around this problem, or any quick-and-dirty surgery I can perform to most monster stats to bring them into a more reasonable place.

[Meta]

Here's the coveted "MM3 monster creation on a business card" that a lot of people seem to like: http://blogofholding.com/wp-content/...inessfront.gif

As far as adjusting older monsters, you can pretty safely up their damage by 50-75% and reduce their HP 20-33%. If your party builds strong characters, you can easily go further. I believe our DM is using well over 200% of MM1-MM2 damage.

Make sure to give solo monsters more ways to shrug off negative status afflictions, and more out of turn actions will help action economy. It can be as simple as giving enemies once a round 'strike back' type effects, to giving them entirely new initiative passes at set intervals (they get an additional standard action/full ations at -10 and -20 of their rolled initiative. Good for stuff like hydras). Get creative, 4e PCs are pretty durable.

Our DM also likes to use 3 stage fights for enemies that are fought solo. Each phase can fight pretty differently and should keep combat a little more dynamic for you. I'll poke my DM to see if he has more specific advice he'll post.

[MwaO]

All good advice above. Another trick to do is hand out a free +2 to hit for your next attack roll for anyone who gets their turn done in under a minute. Keeps people prepared and ready to go.

Also, if you've hit the clearly 'Monsters are boring now' stage, just have them surrender if they can. Or subtly reduce their hp at that point to end the combat faster.

[Beoric]

All good advice above. Another trick to do is hand out a free +2 to hit for your next attack roll for anyone who gets their turn done in under a minute. Keeps people prepared and ready to go.

Also, if you've hit the clearly 'Monsters are boring now' stage, just have them surrender if they can. Or subtly reduce their hp at that point to end the combat faster.

Or if the monsters can't/won't surrender, just call the fight. The players won, team monster is dead, move on to something interesting.

Note if you design some encounters that are close to other rooms with allied monsters, as soon as team monster realizes its losing, the encounter changes to "can anyone escape and run for reinforcements". When using intelligent monsters I design a lot of encounters in clusters, where each individually is a pretty easy fight - or would be if the real objective wasn't preventing the call for reinforcements - but if the rooms support each other the fight becomes very hard.

[Meta]

Having monsters that surrender can also be a good way to put good PCs in difficult positions. Taking captives in the middle of a dungeon is certainly not ideal.

[ThePurple]

The best fights seemed to hinge on monster synergy - the fights were fun and engaging whilst abilities played off one another, but once monsters started dying and synergies broken, the fights moved into a clean-up slog phase, in which the players weren't in any real danger. It just became busy-work, and somewhat unfun to just be sitting there rolling dice that had no real effect on anything.

My solution to the boredom of the "clean-up" phase isn't to just end it faster. My solution is to keep it important.

I've pretty heavily houseruled by game and one of the bigger changes I've made is to dramatically diminish the ability for players to recover healing surges (they're only allowed to take an extended rest *between* adventures rather than simply by resting for a night wherever they might be; I do a bunch of other things to balance out the impact of this), which means that, while they might not be at risk of death or dying, they're still subject to a bit more resource loss before the fight ends. Since I tend to run adventures as an entire level's worth of encounters (between 7 and 12, depending upon relative level), this means that my players are subject to a pretty severe resource management meta-game that makes those little hits at the end of a fight that pose no risk of death add up over time and can *really* make a difference towards the end.

[Beoric]

Even in resource attrition games (and most DnD campaigns are attrition based to some degree), there is a balance to be struck between the value you place on seeing if a rapidly diminishing team monster can get in any lucky shots that will cost a healing surge or two, and the value of ending an encounter in the mopping up stage if nobody is enjoying it (and your players might surprise you, they might enjoy an easy mop-up phase after a few tense moments at the beginning of the fight). Every table needs to figure out where that balance is.

[Beoric]

As far as adjusting older monsters, you can pretty safely up their damage by 50-75%

I think this is a bit generous to the monsters at low level; for instance first level monsters see only a 13% increase using the MM3 math. I think a better rule of thumb is to add half the monster's level to damage for at-will powers, rounding up fractions; and add 2/3 to 3/4 for limited use powers. Other than that:

- brutes need all their attack bonuses increased by 2
- soldiers need all their attack bonuses decreased by 2
- elites and solos need their defences corrected to be the same as if they were standard monsters. This is a bit more complicated; a good rule of thumb is to reduce the defences by 1 or 2, usually 2, but until you have a feel for it, it is probably better to just rebuild the defences from scratch, using the "monster on a business card"

I feel like I'm missing something, but I can't remember what it is.

[ThePurple]

I feel like I'm missing something, but I can't remember what it is.

Artillery monsters need to have their to hit bonuses increased by 2?

[Beoric]

Artillery monsters need to have their to hit bonuses increased by 2?

No, MM1 artillery already had that.

[Meta]

I could see scaling the damage back a little at low levels, but I do think that in general MM3 math is only a start.

I'm under the impression that OP's group is fairly knowledgeable given their experience and so it's probably safe to make combat a little more dangerous. Judgment call, imo.

[MoutonRustique]

Specifically with regards to the "clean-up phase" issue, my suggestion is this:

- create encounters where some foes enter the fray on round 3
- count said foes as ~75% exp for the overall encounter budget
- (this takes a bit of use) have the "reinforcement" foes be of a kind that can "re-awaken" the encounter synergies

- once you "re-enter" clean-up phase, either :
1 - have foes attempt to run away (even if they'll suffer OA for it)*
2 - have foes surrender (truly! don't have them "betray" or somesuch later - maybe run away, but never more than that. If not, PCs will learn very quickly to kill instead of accepting surrender.)
3 - end the fight with this micro-game: players roll, for every hit, kill one significant foe, for every significant foe left, a "random" player takes one HS of damage (or the equivalent - and adjudicate for resistances and such). No matter the result, the foes have been vanquished.

That's my usual take on it.

*Note that you can very much impose a "campaign" cost to killing helpless/fleeing foes by hitting them in the back - these kinds of actions get known rather sooner than later. The PCs could see their reputations be rather less heroic than they'd wish - to the point where very moral people or institutions could impose penalties on them.

[Glorthindel]

Thanks everyone, that all looks good. And yeah, I'll probably go with Meta's suggestions, my players definitely prefer it rough

[UrielAwakened]

Meta's DM here. I ran a full 4e campaign from levels 1-30 against five of the most inventive and optimized players. I used MM3 numbers through my last campaign but I found it wanting and ended up usually throwing monsters 5-7 levels higher at my party. This time around, I'm trying something different.

I use these damage numbers:

http://dmg42.blogspot.com/2012/02/bo...e-forever.html

It keeps combat through 30 levels roughly as deadly as level 1, which so far through level 10 has proven interesting for my party. Instead of throwing difficult to hit monsters at them that always connect, instead it's much more 50-50 in terms of hits vs. misses but they feel just as lethal as last campaign. It's also much less of a slog-fest.

Slog phase is a bit of a drag and a few people have come up with ways to get around it cleanly using smart monster AI: Unintelligent monsters should flee once their lives are in danger, they won't fight to the death for what is nothing more than a meal. Intelligent monsters should either surrender or flee unless they're fighting for something worth dying for (their homes, family, priceless artifacts that are their entire world to them, etc..)

Likewise, for solos, I've used an Angry DM idea of 3-stage bosses with another blog's idea called "Worldbreaker" abilities.

I divide the solo's HP into 3 chunks and give each chunk to a form. The 1st form fights most conventionally, the 2nd form ushers in a worldbreaker ability that completely changes the dynamic of the fight, requiring some combination of tactical maneuvers or puzzle-solving to overcome, and the 3rd form fights in desperation, usually hitting harder at the expense of defense or survivability. I also give each form three out-of-turn actions beyond their normal immediate actions they may possess. One is usually an attack, one is usually movement or defensive in some way, and one is a bonus saving throw in between any turns. I find that this allows the monsters to remain a threat outside of their turns and not immediately collapse to status effects being piled on.

I can provide an example in detail when I get home, but the 2nd level boss of my new campaign was one such monster. I called it the "Mecha Mimic."

It began as a standard skirmisher monster. It ran around the room being a solo doing solo things, and building up charges. In the second form, however, it unleashed a bevy a of baby mimics. I believe it started as dropping four, and then it dropped four more every turn, plus one of its out-of-turn actions was to release four more. Its worldbreaker effect was basically to turn those saved-up charges into minions. It could also spend time on its turns building charges in case it ran out. In its third form it turned desperate, becoming a lurker and turning invisible, attempting to eat players who it caught off-guard.

The worldbreaker effect also prompts each PC to use one of four skills to mitigate the effect in some way. This can be anything you want, from using Athletics to gain a climb speed for the remainder of combat, to using Arcana to limit the effects of a magical trap every turn, to Acrobatics to take half damage from an area attack, to Endurance reducing an ongoing-damage effect. The possibilities are truly endless.

Lemme know if there's anything else you want to know.

[darkbard]

Lemme know if there's anything else you want to know.

All of that sounds very cool! There's no such thing as too much detail, so bring it! I'm sure many would love to look at some full stat blocks, etc.

[Yakk]

Uriel, you might want to tweak those damage expressions so that the SD stays in ratio with player HP as well.

At low levels, 1d10+5 is pretty swingy. Scale that to 10d10+50 and the result is not very swingy at all. Adding more dice reduces swing; so as you gain levels, you want to decrease the portion of damage that is a flat bonus, and/or add critical hit mechanics and damage.

---

Another problem in 4e is that at level 1 levels, a level +2 or 3 monster has about 50% more damage and HP.

At level 30, a level +2 or 3 monster has 10% more damage and HP.

Now you can just use elites; but at level 1 you might use a level +2 elite or even solo for a hard fight. The same kind of thing just doesn't exist at level 30 unless you homebrew it, even if you do Uriel's modification to damage expressions.

---

I'm really tempted by a 2 or 3 axis monster difficulty. I think we can apply this to 4e monsters pretty easily.

Level is what level it is a challenge for. Its ATK, DEF and the like.

Scale is how many "slots" it takes up in an encounter. Minions are less than scale 1. Normal monsters are scale 1. Elites scale 2. Solos are scale 4. Higher scale monsters have better action economy (they do more things, they soak disabling conditions better, etc), and are more complex.

HD (for lack of a better term) is how "big" it is. How many HP it has, how much damage it does.

MM3 on a business card convolves Level and HD together, and then applies modifiers for Scale.

We can tear Level away from this. Level would have some effects: it determines what kind of disabling effects are kosher, and maybe how many limited-use abilities the monster has (to factor in some of the non-linear boost in higher level character capabilities).

Scale remains similar to Minion/Normal/Elite/Solo. It can act as a multipiler on HP and damage, plus it means the creature mitigates status conditions (greater amounts at higher levels) and has more multi-target abilities.

HD would be used to determine baseline HP and baseline Damage.

A level 1 normal creature becomes: HD 4, Level 1, Scale 1.

A level 4 elite creature becomes: HD 7, level 4, Scale 2.

A level 35 god becomes: HD 38, Level 35, Scale 4.

(Old Level+3 = HD)

Now that we have done this, we can manipulate HD separately from Scale and Level.

So we can have a HD 52, Level 33, Scale 2 elite that will scare level 30 heros as much as a level 4 elite does at level 1.

---

All of this needs a way to calculate the XP value of such a modification of a monster.

One way to do this is to multiply the XP value by HD/(Level+3).

---

Now let us simplify this. We'll replace HD with something more granular. A Star.

A monster with a Star has +50% damage and +50% HP and is worth +50% XP. It gains the "Shrug it Off" power: 1/encounter, no action, start of turn, remove an effect with duration "end of encounter" or less.

A monster with two Stars has +100% damag eand +100% HP and is worth +100% XP. It has "Shrug it Off" recharge 6. When bloodied, all effects with duration of "end of encounter" or less are removed (no action), and "Shrug it off" recharges.

Now we can emulate those low-level "badass" monsters with more HP/damage at higher levels.

[Yakk]

Meta's DM here. I ran a full 4e campaign from levels 1-30 against five of the most inventive and optimized players. I used MM3 numbers through my last campaign but I found it wanting and ended up usually throwing monsters 5-7 levels higher at my party. This time around, I'm trying something different.

I use these damage numbers:

http://dmg42.blogspot.com/2012/02/bo...e-forever.html

It keeps combat through 30 levels roughly as deadly as level 1, which so far through level 10 has proven interesting for my party. Instead of throwing difficult to hit monsters at them that always connect, instead it's much more 50-50 in terms of hits vs. misses but they feel just as lethal as last campaign. It's also much less of a slog-fest.

So, we can MM3 on a business card this.

Base Damage: 2+Level/2

Multipliers:
Minion: x2
Low: x3
Medium: x4
High: x5
Damage Limit: x6
Dangerous Fall: 20' + 5' per level

That doesn't match your numbers exactly, but it comes close enough.

Note that this results in level 30 minions dealing 34 instead of 28 on your chart: damage scales a *bit* faster than yours does. I am ok with that.

---

More explicit:

Minion Damage: 4+Level
Low Damage: 6+1.5*Level
Medium Damage: 8+2*Level
High damage: 10+2.5*Level
Limit damage: 12+3*Level

We then build a chart:

        Minion    Low      Med    High     Limit
1       5         1d6+3    1d8+5  1d12+6   1d10+10
2       6         1d6+5    1d8+7  1d12+8   1d10+13
3       7         2d6+3    2d8+5  2d12+5   2d10+11
4       8         2d6+4    2d8+6  2d12+7   2d10+13
5       9         2d6+6    2d8+9  2d12+10  2d10+16

+5:     +5        +2d6     +2d8+1 +2d12   +2d10+4

This approximates the above, but should be easy to work out.

Scaling rate (what percent of a 5 HP /level hero this damage converges to)

Minion: 5/5 = 1.0 damage/level, or 20%
Low: 7/5 = 1.4 damage/level, or 28%
Medium: 10/5 = 2.0 damage/level, or 40%
High: 13/5 = 2.6 damage/level, or 52%
Limit: 15/5 = 3.0 damage/level, or 60%

which is pretty close to the target numbers above.

A level 27 creature doing Limit damage on a hit:
Level 2, and 5 *+5

1d10+13
+ 5* (2d10+4)
= 11d10+33

Limit moves damage to the static bonus, because the risk of limit is a critical hit one-shotting someone from full health.

Max damage scaling:
Low: 12/5 = 2.4 damage/level, or 48%
Medium: 17/5 = 3.4 damage/level, or 68%
High: 24/5 = 4.8 damage/level, or 96%
Limit: 24/5 = 4.8 damage/level, or 96% (note: the same as High: +2d12 and +2d10+4 have the same max, but 2d10+4 has a higher average)

If you are a 5 hp/level character or better, and not bloodied, a critical hit from the hardest hitting even-level foe should not one-shot you to dead.

If you are at full HP, a Limit attack can maybe drop you KO in one blow on a crit.

[UrielAwakened]

Oh yeah, we haven't gotten to epic yet but I planned to change the upper die sizes to keep the same average damage with less extremes.

Your chart is amazing though and really simplifies things. I have that entire chart printed and consulting it constantly while creating monsters can be a pain.