D&D 4E 4e Encounter Design... Why does it or doesn't it work for you?

Quickleaf · Nov 21, 2012

Tony Vargas said:
I don't know, if they're really 'glaring,' you'd expect some sort of vague consensus, at least among those determined to find flaws...

But the idea that D&D ever /wasn't/ 'combat-centric' seems strange to me. 0D&D was a wargame....

Example of a glaring 4e flaw: "I daze-stun-petrif-stupify him until the end of his second cousin's next turn...!" Tracking conditions at the table is a PITA, and only later in 4e's lifespan do you see class/monster design try to minimize that stuff. That's almost universally cited as a problem, especially by players running PCs in paragon/epic tier.

The "4e is combat-centric, moreso than pre-3e editions" really has to do with length of combats and the presentation of each combat as deserving of each treatment in terms of time it takes to play through them. 4e assumes you break out minis and a battle map for every combat, and all the modules have copious amounts of combat. All that time devoted to combat takes away from time role-playing or exploring. Of course, a 4e session doesn't need to be that way...but if you're doing it differently it's because either you have prior experience with an older edition or you've learned from trial & error. You did NOT learn it from the official material (DMG2 being a possible exception).

Really, the greatest flaws I see with 4e are it's presentation (and also marketing). IMO, that's where WotC screwed the pooch.

Tony Vargas · Nov 21, 2012

Quickleaf said:
Example of a glaring 4e flaw: "I daze-stun-petrif-stupify him until the end of his second cousin's next turn...!" Tracking conditions at the table is a PITA

Try tracking all that stuff when some durations are in rounds/level, others 2/rounds per level, others minutes, etc, all with different starting times. In 4e, conditions are either EoNT, SoNT, or (save ends). Now, I'll accept that tracking conditions is a tasty pocket bread, but it's less of pain in 4e then it has been in the past, because they're at least consistent. And, it's less of a game-breaker, since they're not the exclusive province of some classes, and everyone can get in on the act (or not) if they want.

That's almost universally cited as a problem, especially by players running PCs in paragon/epic tier.

At those levels, it's interrupts I've seen problems with. Players really need to /know/ their available off-turn actions and triggers and be decisive about them or it gets very disruptive...

The "4e is combat-centric, moreso than pre-3e editions" really has to do with length of combats and the presentation of each combat as deserving of each treatment in terms of time it takes to play through them. 4e assumes you break out minis and a battle map for every combat, and all the modules have copious amounts of combat.

So, completely unfounded, then. 4e guidelines do give you non-trivial combats that are engaging and reasonably balanced (not quite as neatly as classes are balanced, but better than ever before). You don't /have/ to use those guidelines, though, if you want quick, trivial combats you can throw a few minions or single standard monster at the party and call it a fight, with little or no need of minis and very rapid resolution, indeed. And, if you don't use the guidelines, you're no worse off than you were shooting for a good encounter design in the dark with classic D&D.

All that time devoted to combat takes away from time role-playing or exploring.

This complaint amounts to "the game doesn't advise me to run boring combats." OK, fair enough. Like so many complaints, it's ragging on the game for being good and getting something right. If you're counting on D&D to give you such boring and frustrating combats that your players would rather talk to some NPCs for two hours to avoid having to break out the dice, 4e is going to fail you, true.

Really, the greatest flaws I see with 4e are it's presentation (and also marketing). IMO, that's where WotC screwed the pooch.

Can't argue with that, particularly the marketing and WotC's "attitude." WotC tried to pull a dirty trick with the GSL and it backfired on them. It's unfortunate that 4e was tied to that, as it's been taken as a lesson that D&D /must/ be a mechanically inferior game to succeed.

Rechan · Nov 21, 2012

Quickleaf said:
The "4e is combat-centric, moreso than pre-3e editions" really has to do with length of combats and the presentation of each combat as deserving of each treatment in terms of time it takes to play through them. 4e assumes you break out minis and a battle map for every combat, and all the modules have copious amounts of combat.

Were we playing different games entirely?

Combat in 3e took forever too. It's just that each round took longer. A combat could be 3 rounds, but it takes about an hour for everything to resolve. 4e combat can take an hour, but it's just more rounds.

It was a rare combat I played in where minis were not used.

And this wasn't just one table experience, but about a dozen games over the life of 3e.

and all the modules have copious amounts of combat.

Almost all of the 3e modules WotC put out had copious amounts of combat. They were dungeon crawls - look at the Forge of Fury - aside from the succubus, there's no one to talk to in the dungeon. Even Speaker of Dreams, which takes place in a city, was copious fights. Hell, the same is true for a lot of Paizo modules - I played through an adventure in the Shackled City series and wanted to tear my face off for the tedious dungeoncrawling in it.

Rechan · Nov 21, 2012

This is probably really late in the conversation but:

If you want to simulate a situation where the sentries/guards run and alert the people in the next room, there's an easy way to do this without resorting to Skill Challenges.

Build an encounter where not every enemy is in the same room. The sentries are two monsters in the encounter. In an adjacent room, there's a monster. In another room close by is a second. Perhaps a third room has a bunch of minions. Or, sprinkle the minions into the rooms with the other two monsters.. Increase the difficulty of the monsters so that this would be say, a level + 1 or 2 encounter, due to the number of monsters (in order to save XP, you could use monsters of one level lower).

What this does: If the PCs manage to take out the sentries or sneak past them, then the encounter becomes easier; the monsters in the other rooms don't know it's coming, and can be taken out in smaller chunks. If, however, the PCs botch it and the sentries alert the immediate area, then it becomes a big brawl, with enemies arriving in waves due to being alerted.

pemerton · Nov 21, 2012

Manbearcat said:
It seems that a decent chunk of D&D players have come from a mental framework/table agenda that is something of a hybrid of Gamist/Simulation.

Yes.

From time to time I've wondered what mental picture WotC had of D&D players when they were designing 4e. They seem to have completely missed what - with hindsight - seem to be deep simulationist commitments on the part of many D&D players. In the abstract, I can see how you might get surprised by that - D&D is not a very sim game, after all (hp, action economy, etc). But didn't they do any market research?

On an unrelated point - what's your view of LostSoul's hypothesis about skill challenges, situation design and player agency, that I responded to half-a-dozen or so posts upthread?

Quickleaf said:
Tracking conditions at the table is a PITA

Tony Vargas said:
Try tracking all that stuff when some durations are in rounds/level, others 2/rounds per level, others minutes, etc, all with different starting times.

Yes to both of these: 4e condition tracking can be irritating, but so are classic D&D spell durations.

Quickleaf said:
all the modules have copious amounts of combat.

Rechan said:
Almost all of the 3e modules WotC put out had copious amounts of combat.

Yes to both of these. The 4e modules that I know - H2, P2, E1 plus some of the early free Dungeon ones - are pretty poor. H2, for example, has excellent maps but crappy encounter design - once you ignore the suggested encounter framing, and really take advantage of the cool maps, you can do interesting stuff with it. P2 is primarily a political challenge, but is bizarrely presented in combat format with all the political stuff hidden in another book, in a format that makes it hard to extract the info and adjudicate it.

But 3E modules tended to be weak too. Bastion of Broken Souls, for instances, is thematically and conceptually first rate, but then - as written - has needless combat after needless combat: to get useful info from a dream hag, you have to fight her; to get useful info from a banished god, you have to fight him; to get to the banished god, you have to fight the angel who serves as a living gate. When I ran the module, I ignored all this - the PCs negotiated with the dream hag, persuaded the angel that it was her moral duty to let herself be killed so the gate could open (which led to an interesting sub-plot of conflict with her offsider, who didn't see things the same way), and befriended the banished god.

Tony Vargas said:
This complaint amounts to "the game doesn't advise me to run boring combats." OK, fair enough. Like so many complaints, it's ragging on the game for being good and getting something right. If you're counting on D&D to give you such boring and frustrating combats that your players would rather talk to some NPCs for two hours to avoid having to break out the dice, 4e is going to fail you, true.

While this is harsh, I can relate to it in one respect - I don't want filler combats, and 4e gives me monster builds, action resolution rules and encounter design guidelines which reliably produce non-filler combats. It's hard (not impossible, but hard) to make them filler, or boring, by accident.

This relates back to the dungeon crawl discussion upthread, and also to [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s complaints about attrition and exploration mechanics. 4e does not support a game where the interest is not in the action (in an action cinema, heroic romance sense of "action") but rather is in operational management - how well did we do climbing that cliff while minimising piton loss?; in fighting those 4 kobolds without costing a healing potion?; etc.

If that sort of stuff really is D&D for a lot of people, how did WotC miss that when they were designing 4e? Or did they just think that people wouldn't notice that the game wasn't good for that sort of play?

Argyle King · Nov 21, 2012

Tony Vargas said:
This complaint amounts to "the game doesn't advise me to run boring combats." OK, fair enough. Like so many complaints, it's ragging on the game for being good and getting something right. If you're counting on D&D to give you such boring and frustrating combats that your players would rather talk to some NPCs for two hours to avoid having to break out the dice, 4e is going to fail you, true.

The problem I had was that players never felt the need to talk to most npcs because they (the players) were so powerful compared to the world around them that it was hard to not view brute force and violence as the best answers to everything.

As I've said in past threads, I have no problem with combat. I highly enjoy it. However, it tends to get a little old --even as a player myself-- when the weekly D&D game turns into little more than simply showing up to squash a few encounters and then go home. At one point, I honestly feel as though more thought was put into playing Descent when the group would break that out than what we were putting into D&D at the time.

Toward the end, when I was running a game, I made some tweaks which made my enjoyment of the game a lot better. I feel I learned how to get the results I wanted. Oddly, I found that doing so meant ignoring a lot of the official advice given by WoTC. I will always agree that 4E is/was a very easy game to learn and play. It's an extremely easy game to get off the ground and get moving.

What I found difficult was when I wanted to do more than simply get to that minimum bar required to move the game forward; when I wanted to delve deeper into the experience. By the time I had started to figure out how to do it, Essentials was released and changed the direction of the game. By the time I figured it out, the game was being put to pasture in favor of a new edition.

The other thing I found difficult, and it was something which surprised me greatly, was that I had a tougher time teaching 4E to people who had never played rpgs before. I found that surprising because the structure of the game was something I found very easy, and teaching people who had played previous editions of D&D to play 4E was not problematic at all. For some reason, the same was not true when I sat down with people who were completely new to the concept of a rpg.

What was even more surprising about that difficulty was that I seemed to have a relatively easy time teaching the same group of new-comers a different game which tends to be viewed as being difficult by many of the D&D players I know. I think part of the problem was how things worked out in actual play of 4E versus how things were imagined in the mind's eye. I remember one of the people I was teaching having a really tough time grasping why he could only use certain weapons with a barbarian power. The same guy was confused about what exactly was going on with the Grab action as well because it didn't seem to have the effect on an enemy that he thought it would.

pemerton said:
If that sort of stuff really is D&D for a lot of people, how did WotC miss that when they were designing 4e? Or did they just think that people wouldn't notice that the game wasn't good for that sort of play?

"Ze game will remain ze same!"

Apparently, D&D players care about more than grappling rules. Who would have thought?

Rechan · Nov 21, 2012

Johnny3D3D said:
The problem I had was that players never felt the need to talk to most npcs because they (the players) were so powerful compared to the world around them that it was hard to not view brute force and violence as the best answers to everything.

Wow, I... wow.

That just blew my mind.

I think that's more a Player problem than anything. Only the most reckless of players IMO would just say "screw it we are tougher than you, you'll do what we say". Usually I'd expel someone from a group because they think torture and bullying are the ways to go about things.

Hell, I remember playing Exalted, where the game's SETTING says "You, PCs, are Godlings" and the system pretty much says that the PCs at first level are more powerful than 70% of the world's population, and still never thought you could just barrel through and punch NPCs to get what you wanted.

Being a powerful character is like being a Superhero. Not a supervillain. :erm:

Pemerton said:
If that sort of stuff really is D&D for a lot of people, how did WotC miss that when they were designing 4e? Or did they just think that people wouldn't notice that the game wasn't good for that sort of play?

Apparently, D&D players care about more than grappling rules. Who would have thought?

Some D&D players. It's a matter of style. 4e swings very heavy to the NG side of the SNG spectrum. It's just not suited for the 10-foot-poles. But I do think that a system can't cater to everyone. It just can't satisfy the high-flying wahoo cinematics AND the nitty-gritty 10'-pole poles and rules-of-the-world mindset. It needs to pick one and go with it, because trying to appease both sides is going to end up with something that satisfies neither.

pemerton · Nov 21, 2012

Rechan said:
4e swings very heavy to the NG side of the SNG spectrum. It's just not suited for the 10-foot-poles. But I do think that a system can't cater to everyone. It just can't satisfy the high-flying wahoo cinematics AND the nitty-gritty 10'-pole poles and rules-of-the-world mindset. It needs to pick one and go with it

No argument from me on any of this.

I mean, I'm glad WotC got it wrong (if they did) when they designed 4e, because I play it, whereas I have zero interest in playing 3E/PF, and not much more than that in playing classic D&D with its 10' poles and mapping and the like.

I'm just puzzled. WotC seems to have really misjudged their market (or at least a good chunk of it), and I'm curious as to how that happened.

Blackbrrd · Nov 21, 2012

If I wanted to sum up 4e I think most of the bad reputation when it gets to non-combat comes from bad presentation of the skills as mentioned in this post by pemerton and the nearly completely combat focused adventures that got relased around launch. (Also mentioned by pemberton in this post)

Another thing mentioned is how badly 4e handles just having one encounter pr day - not that it's much worse at it than 3e, but it isn't good anyway. If you have just one encounter for a day in 4e you need to up the difficulty by a lot to make it interesting, especially at higher levels with multiple dailies.

I think 4e could have gotten a completely different reception if the first few adventures had at least one that focused less on dungeon crawling and more on other role playing aspects, like skills and interaction with NPC's. If they had highlighted something else but combat, maybe 4e wouldn't have gotten the reputation it has.

Part of the reason I stopped DM-ing 4e was that the system also puts a lot of pressure to shower the players with magical items. If you don't, the "math" of the system relatively quickly breaks down.

One thing I did do to make overland travel with some random encounters a bit more challenging was saying that they didn't get to take a long rest until they reached their destination. It did work out ok, but I switched back to the regular long rest cycle when they got to their destination. It felt kind of weird, but partially because there are no examples of houserules like that in the core, something I think they should have.

Argyle King · Nov 21, 2012

Rechan said:
Wow, I... wow.

That just blew my mind.

I think that's more a Player problem than anything. Only the most reckless of players IMO would just say "screw it we are tougher than you, you'll do what we say". Usually I'd expel someone from a group because they think torture and bullying are the ways to go about things.

Hell, I remember playing Exalted, where the game's SETTING says "You, PCs, are Godlings" and the system pretty much says that the PCs at first level are more powerful than 70% of the world's population, and still never thought you could just barrel through and punch NPCs to get what you wanted.

Being a powerful character is like being a Superhero. Not a supervillain.

The best illustration I can give for what the Saturday group's game had turned into is to give a brief recap of a conversation I had with the guy who was usually the DM.

He commented to me that he didn't see the point of designing social challenges anymore. The reason he gave was that he fully expected several of the players to bully their way through them. The example he game (and one I've repeated in previous conversations here on Enworld) was having an audience with a king or a lord. Even surrounded by guards and whatnot, he expected a significant portion of the group to be on board with simply killing the king/lord/whatever and then just mowing down the guards and other pcs if need be to get away.

While I do agree (to some extent) that it was a player problem, I also sat and tried to consider the situations from the point of view of a character in the game world. To be quite honest, if someone gave me the powers of Superman here in the real world, I cannot say I believe I would be a completely good person. I think the problem is made a little worse after realizing that the other beings in the world (demon lords, dragons, gods, and etc) who supposedly are on the same level as you sometimes struggle to do something even as simple as breaking through a wall or door. Meanwhile, the supposedly unbreakable gates which guard one of the levels of hell are wiped out by one of your at-will abilities.

Rechan said:
Some D&D players. It's a matter of style. 4e swings very heavy to the NG side of the SNG spectrum. It's just not suited for the 10-foot-poles. But I do think that a system can't cater to everyone. It just can't satisfy the high-flying wahoo cinematics AND the nitty-gritty 10'-pole poles and rules-of-the-world mindset. It needs to pick one and go with it, because trying to appease both sides is going to end up with something that satisfies neither.

Part of the reason I quoted the "ze game will remain ze same" mantra is because that swing was coupled with an advertising campaign which seemed to indicate the swing wouldn't be noticeable at all. For me personally, what I took from the 4E preview books (such as Worlds & Monsters) was a completely different vibe from what the actual game gave me. When looking at the preview books, my impression was something which was potentially darker than what 3rd Edition had presented; perhaps bordering on sword & sorcery. Granted, there were no mechanics. It was simply the feel which I took from the product. I'm sure there are others who had a completely different feel when reading them.

More than anything, I think what gave me problems with 4E is that I didn't feel the mechanics of the game system meshed very well with the type of story that was attempting to be told with the early books. One of the reasons I feel I had such great success with the last few games I DMed is because I completely ditched the fiction as presented. For many people, I am told that is not the case. I accept that I am in the minority when it comes to that, but I do not believe I am alone in feeling that the 4E mechanics are trying to tell a different story than that of the 4E fluff. I think it is especially noticeable within certain D&D settings.

All things considered, I am certainly capable of enjoying the game style 4E has. However, there are many fantasy influences I have which I do not feel I can do very well with 4E. That it no way implies I cannot enjoy 4E. I am also not implying that 4E absolutely cannot aid me in telling stories which are a product of those influences. I'm simply suggesting that I find that -while 4E can tell some of the stories I want to tell- it does not necessarily do a good job of telling them. It most certainly does do a great job of doing what it does. I just wish that -during the time when I was still buying 4E products- what 4E did well was a better match for what I wanted it to do well.

I came to the realization that a lot of D&D aspects do not make sense at all outside of D&D, and that makes trying to do something which didn't originate inside of the confines of D&D difficult. You might be able to fake it well enough to be happy with the result. What I found especially jarring in the case of 4E was that some of the things which originated within the confines of D&D didn't really make any sense either given a world which worked differently. It may be that this is also true of the transition from 2nd to 3rd. I'm not sure because I haven't played 2nd, and I'm only just now becoming acquainted with 1st edition.

The best example I can think of for what I felt did not make sense anymore would be to think back upon the Dragonlance books. If those books were written with the 4E books in mind, I do not feel the books as currently written would make any sense. Dragonlance based around the way a 4E world works might very well be an excellent story, but I argue that it would not be the same story. It wouldn't make sense for it to be the same story.

To shed more light on what I want out of a rpg, I'll provide this link and point to the comments I've recently made in a different conversation:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/tabletop-gaming/331887-why-realism-lame-3.html

To be fair, I don't think 3rd Edition was the best fit for me either. However, there were a few factors involved in why I didn't notice. The first is more than likely because I didn't really know any better. Having little experience with rpgs outside of D&D at the time, I was happy to just have a game to play and accepted some of the thorns along with the roses so to speak. The second is that 3rd Edition did a pretty good job of faking it; of making me believe it was a certain type of game without actually tying itself to being it.

In many respects, I do feel some of the things 4E changed were for the better. Unfortunately, I find that it was built with ideals which have a tendency to conflict with my own. I have learned how to reconcile those two sets of ideals, but I've now also learned that I have other choices when it comes to system and game as well. Also unfortunate is that I learned how to reconcile my differences with 4E after the decisions was made to stop supporting it in favor of a new edition. Going forward, I'll end this response by simply saying that I feel similarly toward what I currently see of 5th edition and where it is going: I'm sure it will be a great game for what it does, but I'm not convinced I'm part of the target audience.