Stalker0's Guide to Anti-Grind

I am not sure how much this was discussed about already in this thread, but my suggestion for paragon and epic play is to be careful with conditions. Avoid "action denying" conditions like immobilized/dazed/stunned/dominated. They can exist, but usually more as encounter powers and not as power from every monster.

Other conditions tend to work better - combat advantage, vulnerabilites, losing resistance, marked, ongoing damage. And they also hasten the demise of the PCs without prolonging the battle.

It's easy to feel loss of control over your actions, which changes the perception of the passed time _and_ it also actually limits how fast opponents can be taken down, since you can't use all your abilities. It's better if the opponent deals twice as much damage then the PCs deal only half their regular damage.

Iron Sky said:

There is some danger with turning solos into elites straight-up... as I found out in my game last week. I took some creatures I'd made as solos and just turned them into elites. Suddenly their powers I'd designed to be balanced with them as solos made them overpowered elites (which proceeded to kill 80% of my PCs, to death).

I would probably trim a power or two from most solos if I turned them into elites...

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Killed to death, you say? My that is harsh. Most folks try and leave the PC's somewhat alive when killing them.

ExploderWizard said:

Killed to death, you say? My that is harsh. Most folks try and leave the PC's somewhat alive when killing them.

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You say that, but it is actually my goal to get people Dying so that whether they live or die is in their hands, but almost never to get them actually Dead on my own merit

Ie, give them their 3 failed saves, their chance to stabilize, save vs. ongoing, what have you, but not to hit them so hard they go straight past 0 to -bloodied or have no ability to respond to someone getting knocked into Dying because of stun or aura damage or whatever.

The only problem with your article is that you didn't put up a pdf.

Here's a few other things I've done to speed up 4E combat encounters.

The times I felt an encounter was dragging on "too long", I ended up "minionizing" the generic monsters/badguys once they became bloodied. One more hit and a "minionized" monster/badguy was dead.

Another way of shortening encounters in mid-battle, I had some of the backline monsters retreat, such as an archer running out of arrows, or a monster's weapon breaking (such as from a critical failure) and subsequently running away from battle.

Sometimes I'll do a fake "morale" check and have the monsters retreat on a d20 roll of less than 5, 10 or 15, depending on the type of monsters.

If a particular monster has resistance to a particular type of damage (ie. fire, etc ...), or regenerates hit points every round, sometimes I'll drop the resistance/regeneration once they're bloodied to speed things up.

Another thing I've done which speeds up encounters slightly in my experience is to use group initiative, alternating between the player group and badguy group. Usually I allow the players to have the initiative, unless they've been surprised. In practice in my 4E games using group initiative, typically the player group first has the wizard (or another spellcaster) doing a ranged area or blast attack on the badguys, before the melee players go in and fight. I try to arrange the badguys such that the players can't easily gang up all at once on one particular badguy and killing it in one round.

This is absolutely suburb advice I wish I'd had at my disposal a few weeks ago when planning a 19th level one-shot for a gameday. This may have shortened the initial combat by a significant amount! (It was 3 hours...)

BUMP x 1000. Everyone DMing 4e needs to read this, immediately

voice220 said:

Excellent article with very sound advice!

A method that I've used a couple of times to throw in fast and dangerous fights is to halve the monsters' hitpoints and increase their damage output by 50% or more. It's "breaking" the core rules, yes, but used in moderation can make for a quick and exciting fight.

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Unless there's a Shaman in the party. Then I'd NEVER use this because it usually hoses him mightily.

Excellent article shows that grind can be minimized easily with good encounter design.

We hit the grind last night. Looking back, it was entirely due to my rushed preparation.

Short version: too many status effects, too little damage.

The fight was 17th level against 13th level PCs. A double handful of minions (5 damage each - so too low), three skirmishers (who did decent damage), three artillery (who did daze/weaken and low damage), a leader skirmisher (low damage), and a controller (two-target daze). If I'd written that up at any point before running the combat I'd have been running away. As it was, the PCs never felt threatened, even though they were all at low HP by the end of the fight.

Lessons learned: monsters need to be able to deal out damage. Status effects are nice, but not when they can effectively be applied every round. Daze is potent, but "I move over here - and that's my round" is not a fun thing to be able to do.

Kill Grind with roleplaying

I recently had an encounter (Brugg the Enforcer in H2) where the players started getting creative after their attack had failed to take down the Brute, and wanting to use a Free Action to get an Intimidate on him. I was indignant about anyone wanting a freebie fight-winner like that and flatly refused... And no one wanted to forego an actual attack to do a proper Standard Action Intimidate.

Analyzing it afterwards I realized that what had really been going on was that the fight was won, no one was having any fun grinding to the end, and though they didn't realize it consciously, that was what was making the players look for other ways to end it.

To reiterate Slayer0's point: if it's a grind, it needs to be brought to a satisfying conclusion as soon as possible (apart from when the drain on the party is important to the strength they might be able to bring to subsequent encounters). A standalone battle, like mine was, definitely needs to be ended gracefully.

So in situations like that, you need to signal to your players that the Intimidate needn't be a wasted action. Even for Brutes, the majority that are sentient are unlikely to want to fight to the death if that can't possibly achieve anything, so roleplay the monsters with a bit of intelligence and allow them to yield for the sake of a better game.
They could just surrender. But letting a PC action achieve the victory is surely more satisfying.

1. Roleplay only as much as will be engaging or fun for your players. Don't lead them to expect that you'll make their lives difficult with the need to babysit prisoners or with surrendered enemies suddenly going back on the offensive. It's realistic for beaten foes to be properly daunted by the PCs and/or honourable about their defeat.
2. The Rules-As-Written don't offer any black and white situational modifiers for Intimidate, except that in combat it can only work on Bloodied targets -- fair enough! -- and versus hostile targets is an attack at -10 vs their Will defence.
   Maybe offer situational +2s (1) for being cornered, and (2) for every attacker currently pounding on them. Offer a situational +5 if the total DPS is likely to put them down within a round and they don't even have a Bloodied target worth attriting on.
3. If a Minor Action can net you a Perception roll, let it allow an Insight roll too, to allow a PC to read whether an Intimidate is likely to be successful.
   Heck, if things are bad enough, you might eventually be able to give them it via Passive Insight!

Cheers!
--Os.