How to build encounters in 4e (aka Only you can prevent Grindspace!)

[Vayden]

Hey all - with the plethora of threads about grindspace recently, as well as looking at some of the published adventures WotC has come out with (Keep on the Shadowfell, I'm looking at you), I'm convinced a lot of people could use some help in building encounters. To that end, I've prepared this list of tips (many of these have been mentioned in other places by many people, but I haven't seen them consolidated anywhere). I hope everyone finds this helpful.

Tip #1) Know your party

This is kind of DMing 101, but it can really pay off in making a good encounter. Get a good feel for your group, their tactics, what they enjoy, their builds and capabilities. Have a wizard or someone else with lots of area attacks in the party? Make sure you sprinkle in minions and swarms fairly frequently so that they get a chance to shine taking those monsters out. Have a cleric, paladin, or other radiant damage dealer? They love fighting undead. You'll want to use very different set-ups against a party with 4 melee people than a party with one meleer and 3 ranged. Each character type will generally have a certain monster type they excel against - don't avoid those monsters, use them. And use them at higher levels or in bigger numbers than you normally would - the fight stays challenging if you use 16 minions instead of 4 against the party with the wizard, but the wizard gets to feel like a sexy shoe-less god of war.

On the flip-side, be very aware of the monster types that your party is weak against - for instance, soldiers can be a killer if 3/4 of your party does most of their attacks against AC. Used sparingly, an encounter that hits your players weak spots can be a good change of pace, but most of the time you want to avoid this. In general, your players (and you) will have more fun if they have to fight their way through a very challenging encounter that's well above their level by the XP rules (but that they're optimized for) than if they spend the whole fight wasting their attacks against a level-appropriate monster group that goes completely against their style. Again, variety is essential, but most of the time you want to let them do what they're good at, in encounters that they wouldn't be able to tackle if they weren't good at them. This applies to all editions, but is much easier to do in 4e with the clear labelling and categorization of monsters.

Tip #2) Err on the side of challenging your players

While it's good to have the occasional fight that your players steam-roll through, in general you should embrace the philosophy that 4e is a system for doing blockbuster action movies. Old habits die hard, and a lot of DMs (including whoever wrote Keep on the Shadowfell and most of Thunderspire Labyrinth) are still going with the philosophy of using several encounters to slowly sap the party's resources before the big fight at the end. While the basic concept is sound, you can do this better by having fewer, more challenging encounters. Time to get together and play with your friends is precious - don't waste it on encounters that the party can get by without expending a single daily among 5 people and only saps one or two surges away from their resources. Instead of 6-8 fights and then the climax, try 2-4 before the climax.

There are multiple other benefits to throwing harder encounters at your group - tougher situations train them to be better at fighting - their tactics and teamwork will increase, leading to faster fights and more enjoyment of the game. The knowledge that they're at risk in any fight adds spice and interest to the game. Everything gets a little more intense, a little more memorable, and a little more fun when life and death hang in the balance. Again, you need to throw in the occasional easy fight for them to steam-roll someone, but err on the side of making it harder.

The final benefit to aiming hard is that it's always easier to scale down than up mid-combat - if you've made the fight too tough, you can always fudge the monster's hp down without telling anyone, or make a couple dumb tactical moves to give the players an opening, or have some of the lesser monsters flee - you probably have a dozen tools in your back pocket to let the players off the hook, while tilting the encounter's difficulty up mid-combat is much harder.

Tip #3) Tweak the monster math

4e gives you a great tool-set levelling monsters up and down, and in addition, since the mechanics are so divoriced from the fluff, it's amazingly easy to re-skin monsters. Say you want to use Sahuagin for an encounter, but it's the wrong level and they don't have the roles you need to really set things up right for your party. Take a couple of the Sahuagin and bump them up or down a couple levels (never do this more than 4 levels - the math stops working at that point); flip through the index of the monster manual looking for roles and levels that fit your needs, then reflavor the monsters as Sahuagin. Bump hp up or down mid-combat as it suits your needs (though it's best to do this before the monster gets bloodied, otherwise they may catch on). Monster died too easily? Give one of the other monsters the ability to bring the first one back to life at bloodied. There's a million things you can do, and the more you tweak, the better you'll get at it.

Tip #4) Terrain matters

This has been said many times many places, but it can't be said often enough. 4e glows if you have a combat with a couple of pits, some hazardous terrain, a few traps - anything that gives your players a motivation to move and adapt, or attempt to use the terrain to their advantage, is going to help. One example that a friend of mine used - we were fighting in a chapel in hell (think that one level in Diablo II), and the strange light pouring in through the stained glass windows created moving bands of shadows across the floor - anyone standing in the shadows took necrotic damage. We were fighting a vampiress who didn't care about necrotic damage, so we had to keep chasing her across the chapel, while deciding whether or not we could take the necrotic damage to cross certain squares (which were changing at the end of every turn as the shadows moved).

Tip #5) - Play your monsters differently than you play your PCs

Remember, the goal is not to win the fight against the PCs - the goal is for half of them to be unconscious and the other half bloodied when they finally strike you down. Don't play your monsters using the tactics you would use if you were controlling a group of PCs. The worst thing that can happen for a 4e fight is for the defender(s) to pin the monsters down in one spot while the ranged attackers line up behind and casually pour in the damage. While your players may be high-fiving the first couple of times they pull it off, if it happens too often, fights turn into boring slogs as the players whittle away the high hp of 4e monsters at little to no risk to themselves. How do you fix this? Eat some damage to get away from the defender and get to the juicy back line - this has soo many benefits -
1) The defender gets to punish the monster, which is usually more fun for the defender than just standing there getting hit.
2) The back-line fighters are in danger, which makes combat more interesting and risky for them.
3) The monsters take more damage, which makes them die faster - this a good thing, since you made the encounter a little tough anyway
4) The players have to make decisions on how they're going to shift and respond to the new situation, increasing the flow of movement, which is always a good thing.


I hope this helps people out - any questions/arguments about this, or tips of your own you'd like to add?

[Dausuul]

I agree with everything above, and I'll add one more that only recently came into clear focus for me:

Tip #6) Dynamic battlefields

The essence of grindspace is predictability. Stable terrain, foes who use the same attacks over and over, unobstructed sightlines, what you see is what you get... these things make for boring battles.

So change it up. Put hidden traps in the terrain, like concealed pits or monsters lurking in ambush. Introduce dynamic terrain elements that reshape the battlefield round by round, like moving platforms or rolling boulders or a flood of (water/acid/lava/liquid Schwartz) that creates steadily shrinking islands of safety. Have the monsters pull out new and different abilities as the battle continues. Bring in reinforcements for the monsters.

These things keep the players on their toes, forcing them to pay close attention and revise their plans as the battle unfolds. Vayden cited my cathedral battle above, I'll cite his bridge battle here: I won't go into all the details (see this thread if you want the blow-by-blow), but to sum it up, our party was holding a bridge against an army of undead, Horatio-style. We had a couple of NPCs hidden below the bridge ready to collapse it at the critical moment.

We fought back a couple waves of undead, and were starting to run a bit low on resources, when we discovered that three ghouls had slipped up and killed the NPCs! Suddenly we had to figure out how to get somebody down there, take out the ghouls, and collapse the bridge, while still holding off the undead who were pressing us hard up top. It really changed things up on us, and made the battle far more exciting.

[Rechan]

This is a bump.

[mach1.9pants]

Interesting points and thanks for compiling them...I have been known to be caught in the dreaded GrindSpace

[Whimsical]

Tip #6a) Dynamic battlefields: make distance matter.

About one out of five encounters, have the opponents appear more than 12 squares away from the party. Set up your encounter so players will have to choose between running and granting combat advantage, double moving and the charging the next round. Moving and then using a ranged attack. Staying in location to sheathe readied weapon, stow shield, and then draw a bow or cross bow.
Then the players will have to deal with the consequences of the PCs being far apart from each other, which will affect their ability to help each other.

Tip #6b) Dynamic battlefields: heroes on the defensive.

Around every two levels, arrange for the PCs to defend a site from forces which will arrive the next day. This will allow the players to exercise their strategy to arrange the site with traps, to cleverly use the terrain and elements of opportunity, to persuade and coordinate with NPC allies at the site, and plan to direct enemy forces to their advantage. This is the kind of encounters that puzzle solvers enjoy.

[TheLordWinter]

Wow! This is some really excellent food for thought, particularly those caveats that Whimsical suggested. One important note that I'd like to throw in is to roll with the players.

In my last session of a higher level game (20th level at this point) the group finally found the woman they'd been looking to rescue in a hellish dungeon. She was trapped in a suspended cage above a pit of lava amongst numerous other cages. She was held there by a partially crippled marilith (knocking off her elite status) who proposed a fight to recover her. The marilith leapt onto one of the cages and wrapped around the chain, inviting the PCs to follow suit and fight her.

Their response was to use the Wizard Power "Arcane Gate," steal their companion from under the Marilith and run. While I thought it'd be a great and dramatic encounter to leap and fight across these hanging cages, I loved the way they chose to solve it.

So just a thought to remember that the best laid plans of mice and DMs can always be thwarted by player inventiveness, and to encourage thinking outside of the box rather than punish it.

[CapnZapp]

Interesting advice, but...

...What about encounters where you spot the enemy several hundred yards away?
...What about outdoor encounters in "normal" terrain (no lava, no chasms: just forests, villages and rolling hills)


(Not all adventures can be a dungeon roller-coaster with Gygaxian disco effects...! )

[DonAdam]

Don't forget that enemies can flee and surrender when appropriate.

Having players who will use the Intimidate rules in a non-abusive and story-advancing way goes a long way here.

[weem]

Tip #6b) Dynamic battlefields: heroes on the defensive.

Around every two levels, arrange for the PCs to defend a site from forces which will arrive the next day. This will allow the players to exercise their strategy to arrange the site with traps, to cleverly use the terrain and elements of opportunity, to persuade and coordinate with NPC allies at the site, and plan to direct enemy forces to their advantage. This is the kind of encounters that puzzle solvers enjoy.

This reminds me of our last game session I ran. The PC's were in an upstairs room at an Inn that was in the center of an abandoned town -- at night. The heard a sound form outside and when they looked out the window, they saw these small black skinned creatures (creatures I created - I'll spare the details) running to the Inn from across the street - basically entering the Inn below them. They frantically threw the bed against the door and started to get situated as I described the clawed feet of the creatures sliding along the floor and quickly scurrying up the stairs towards them.

Anyway, it really built the suspense - during the fight I had more of the creatures burst through the windows behind them - it was a great encounter

Good advice, great read.

[Stalker0]

To push the dynamic battlefield concept more...have the terrain change as the fight goes on...especially with solos.

Have a dragon's fire tear up some of terrain, making new obstacles and taking out old ones, etc.

[Vayden]

Originally Posted by CapnZapp

Interesting advice, but...

...What about encounters where you spot the enemy several hundred yards away?
...What about outdoor encounters in "normal" terrain (no lava, no chasms: just forests, villages and rolling hills)


(Not all adventures can be a dungeon roller-coaster with Gygaxian disco effects...! )

Thanks for the responses and additional tips everyone! I was a little worried the thread was going to die at first! To answer Zapp's questions:

Encounters that start at a long distance - it's been a while since I've run one of these, I usually handle this one of two ways; for both ways, it helps that the maximum attack range I've seen in 4e is 20 squares (100 feet)

1) Let people decide if they're going to try and close, or try and avoid the encounter. If the PCs and the monsters are both trying to close, just assume that they're heading towards each other and start the combat with about 20 squares of distance between them - this gives you the nice situation Whimsical mentioned where the party spreads out as they determine how to use their first turn to advance. If both sides are trying to avoid combat, just have each side melt away. If one side is trying to close, and one is trying to avoid, then I'd run a skill challenge to see if the PCs can either escape (if they're trying to avoid) or catch up (if the monsters are trying to avoid.

2) In some situations, where there's a possibility one or both sides might split up, I'll just use a piece of scrap paper to track distances - I may pull out the battlemap if more than two people get into close combat, or I may run the entire encounter on the scrap paper and feverishly track distances for everyone involved. It's kind of a pain for you as the DM, but it can work in some situations.


Fights on "generic" terrain like plains or hills - obviously if you're fighting outside in a situation where the terrain is relatively harsh (a cliff, lots of trees to climb/hide behind etc) then you already have interesting terrain. If you really are setting your fight on a relatively feature-less plain, then my advice it to use mobile monsters. Without any terrain that the PCs can use to their advantage, fast, agile monsters can easily slip by the defender(s) and screw with the backline of the party. Just have your monsters be constantly moving and pursuing - the party will either have to move in response or get hammered into the ground. Again, this isn't something I would do very often, but it can be just as good of a fight if you have the right monsters and go for the PCs throats.

In addition, even the most feature-less of plains and hills may have a bit of terrain to make use of - some boulders jutting out of the ground here, a fallen tree or steep slope there. It won't be as big of a player as normal, but it can still factor in.

[CapnZapp]

Originally Posted by Vayden

Encounters that start at a long distance - it's been a while since I've run one of these, I usually handle this one of two ways; for both ways, it helps that the maximum attack range I've seen in 4e is 20 squares (100 feet)

Well, to not make the game completely unrealistic, and to break away from the nagging feeling that even if outdoors, you're still running a claustrophobic dungeon encounter... I'm considering using a houserule that allows ranged fire at longer than "long range":

Add another -2 penalty for each "range increment" (as determined by the "short range" of the weapon) up to five range increments, the new maximum.

(This rule effectively incorporates long range into the general rule, and extends the range of ranged weapons to five times the short range. You can then shoot a longbow 100 squares at a -10 penalty; hardly useful against well-matched opponents but then again, D&D characters are epic heroes, their skills surpass mortal bounds, and by the way, 166 yards is actually lower than what real life archers could manage)

In contrast; 20 yards - that's a distance everybody covers in less than two rounds. Where's the advantage of being at a distance if you only get to make one or two shots before you're jumped?

At least with this rule, you would have approximately 10 rounds to shoot unopposed at any melee combatants trying to close with you. (If you're backing up 6 squares a round and the enemy running 16 squares a round; that means a relative distance of 100 squares takes about 10 rounds to cover)

In addition, even the most feature-less of plains and hills may have a bit of terrain to make use of - some boulders jutting out of the ground here, a fallen tree or steep slope there. It won't be as big of a player as normal, but it can still factor in.

Thanks. Yes, something like this would probably be worthwhile to add to your guide. :-)

[James McMurray]

Vast increases in the distance of ranged attacks breaks the balance between melee and ranged combat that currently exists. Sure, it's more realistic, but it's less fun. D&D ain't about being real, and never has been.

[Nail]

Great thread, and great tip compilation, Vayden! This should be required reading.

...but this quote is the best of 'em all:

Originally Posted by Dausuul

The essence of grindspace is predictability.

[Vayden]

Originally Posted by James McMurray

Vast increases in the distance of ranged attacks breaks the balance between melee and ranged combat that currently exists. Sure, it's more realistic, but it's less fun. D&D ain't about being real, and never has been.

I agree. The 100 foot distance cap does a lot of good things for the game - it helps you keep the fight on a realistically sized battlemap (and I for one love playing with miniatures), and if you have a villain that you need to stay alive for story purposes, having it fly 200 feet above the party is a great, easy way to do so.

None of that, of course, is to say that you can't use the proposed house-rule if that fits your playing style better.

[Jhaelen]

Originally Posted by CapnZapp

Well, to not make the game completely unrealistic

Why do you keep insisting on trying to make 4E into something it isn't?

Realism isn't on the agenda (and actually never was [in D&D])!

Encounters should start at a maximum distance of about 20 squares because that's the kind of encounters that are the most fun and because it's hard to use battlemaps for much longer distances, i.e. for _gamist_ reasons.

If the encounter doesn't lend itself to make an exciting encounter, handwave it!
If you're worried about boring wilderness encounters, turn the overland travel into a skill challenge and then use a prepared set-piece that IS interesting, adjusting it for the results of the skill challenge (or don't have a combat encounter at all).

[Vayden]

Originally Posted by Jhaelen

Why do you keep insisting on trying to make 4E into something it isn't?

Realism isn't on the agenda (and actually never was [in D&D])!

Encounters should start at a maximum distance of about 20 squares because that's the kind of encounters that are the most fun and because it's hard to use battlemaps for much longer distances, i.e. for _gamist_ reasons.

If the encounter doesn't lend itself to make an exciting encounter, handwave it!
If you're worried about boring wilderness encounters, turn the overland travel into a skill challenge and then use a prepared set-piece that IS interesting, adjusting it for the results of the skill challenge (or don't have a combat encounter at all).

That's a little bit harsher than I would say it, but it does basically sum up my next tip:

Tip #7) Don't enter 4e encounter design with a 3e mindset

Combat in 4e is designed to be fast, fluid, dangerous, and yes, unrealistic. While a 3e combat in a 5x5 featureless room, or at a range of 100s of feet, or against monsters who don't really present a threat, could be fun, 4e isn't really designed for that.

7a) One of the subtle pleasures of 3e was the game of resource management - players had to assess the threat level of fights and decide whether to burn precious resources (high level spells, potions, wands, scrolls etc) or whether to save them for later. In this way, even a non-threatening fight could be interesting, because the players would handicap themselves and make a game of trying to win without wasting resources. I myself don't find that playstyle very enjoyable, but the key take-away here is that 4e was designed to mostly eliminate that style of gaming. You have it to a limited extent with daily powers/magic items, but the majority of the groups resources can be spent freely in any fight. Because of that, non-threatening encounters are even more boring than they were before. Therefore, if you build encounters designed only to wear out your player's resources (level-appropriate or lower) you're basically wasting everyone's gaming time. I think this paradigm shift was something the game designers themselves didn't fully understand, since they advise you to frequently use level-appropriate encounters. I, on the other, advise you to almost never use those. Use level+1 as your "easy", resource-grinding fights. Only use level-appropriate if you have a severely un-optimized group or have come up with a great setting for the fight.

7b) Similarly, try to avoid designing dungeons with choke-points - while it may occasionally be fun for the party to find one and dominate, leaving chokepoints everywhere drops your fights into boring territory. Always have multiple approaches available for both sides - have a side room that the monsters can detour through to hit the back-line, have multiple paths through the pile of rocks, etc. Or, if you're going to give your characters a nice defensible chokepoint, take that into account in the challenge rating and throw a hideously unfair encounter group at them. It can even be fun in this case to allow them several hours sometimes to set up there defense - however nasty the traps they have laid are, just set them off with filler monsters and bring the real heat behind - if they only actually fight a level-appropriate fight, but their traps/chokepoints have cinematically killed 4-5 encounters worth of monsters, they'll feel like the kings of the world.

7c) Minions are your friends. Ignore the 1/4 xp budget for them, especially if you have a wizard in the party. I'd treat them more like 1/16 of a monster, especially if they're melee minions. In 3e, every monster was a monster - I tend to use minions more as mobile, somewhat dangerous terrain than monsters once you get your players past levels 3-4.


Anyone else have some good paradigm switches to apply?

[CapnZapp]

Originally Posted by James McMurray

Vast increases in the distance of ranged attacks breaks the balance between melee and ranged combat that currently exists.

I knew some fanboy would come along... Thanks for unthinkingly passing on the One True Word!

Edit: Jhaelen, don't feel left out. I would have used your quote instead if I had seen your post before posting this.

Originally Posted by James McMurray

Sure, it's more realistic, but it's less fun.

Says who? Says you!

In reality, it's all about expectations.

What's fun about always being jumped by monsters; never being able to take care of them from a distance? If anything, the DMG advice to never start off any encounters more than 20 squares away fosters a real sense of... not fun!

Yes, I realize 100 squares doesn't fit any battle map. But I have news for you: you don't need battle maps when the action is about shooting foes at a distance!

If you aren't raised solely on what the D&D books tells you, you wouldn't be as much surprised or dismayed or whatever to find that, once in a while, your Dwarven Fighter will have to stand idly by, while those more well-rounded characters in the party (who actually thought of bringing along a bow, something the DMG do remind you of, btw) get to shoot at the Orcs below the Unscaleable Cliff or wherever the ranged-fight-that-stays-ranged-for-more-than-two-rounds takes place.

See?

(And if your response is "then I would only want to play a character with at least some ranged ability if I had to play in your campaign", then my response is: Great! We understand each other! )

Besides, if one player perseveres, and do stick with that Dwarven Fighter, then he'll be richly rewarded in all those close encounters that do keep coming around; probably saving the party's ass several times over if he's the only non-squishie around.

But yes I confess; if your definition of "fun" has anything to do with Wizards' mentality that "everybody must feel special all the time", then no, my DM:ing style probably won't feel like fun to you...

Take care,
CapnZapp

[James McMurray]

Originally Posted by CapnZapp

I knew some fanboy would come along... Thanks for unthinkingly passing on the One True Word!

Pointing out the obvious and restating the designer's goals is fanboyism? wow. Never realized that. Thanks for your opinion.

[Jhaelen]

Originally Posted by CapnZapp

I knew some fanboy would come along... Thanks for unthinkingly passing on the One True Word!

Edit: Jhaelen, don't feel left out. I would have used your quote instead if I had seen your post before posting this.

Don't you worry, _I_ knew exactly how you'd react

@Vayden: Thanks for the excellent elaboration and additional advice!