Vayden
First Post
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?
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?
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