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

jbear · Nov 26, 2012

Stormonu said:
This is not a "silly scenario", it's actually a valid tactic back in Keep on the Borderlands/Caves of Chaos and highlights a difference of playstyle in 1E/2E and 4E. The main goblin chamber in the goblin caves has in the neighborhood of 12 goblins in it - far more than most parties can handle all at once. Any wandering monster patrols the party encounters/kills in the halls of the warren are subtracted from the number in that room. A cunning party could draw out the goblins in small numbers and eliminate them this way rather than face all of them at once. Stealth kills (sneak attack or other one-shots; these are goblins after all) could also mean no sounds of battle were the sentries and remaining goblins in adjacent rooms.

I don't see 4E's encounter design handling this sort of tactic very well, and would probably try and model it as a Skill challenge. I'd somewhat feel for the DM whose players did this spontaneously; I'd imagine many DMs would chafe at the party "destroying" the planned encounter in the goblin room.

I wouldn't be chafed by PC attempts to ruin a planned encounter using different tactics. Actually I fed a hook into my campaign which if followed would allow the PCs to engage in a skill challenge that would give the PCs a chance to wipe out the vast majority of the encounters on level 1 of the dungeon. Depending on their success with the skill challenge they could wipe out more and more encounters.

The thing I like about 4e is that the baseline is so solid that it is really easy to think of ways to deal with a situation that steps outside the realm of a 'typical encounter, and yes, a mini skill challenge could support the situation you describe, but you could make it a mix of combat and challenge, eg. The PCs use bluff, dungeoneering and stealth to draw out the guards successfully (without going into details of how they managed this) which means they deal an auto crit on a hit with CAdv and a +2 to hit +1[W]of dmg during there surprise attack. Use an encounter power to deal this and you will pretty much kill a normal creature outright. If they don't manage it then PCs enter another mini challenge to silence/restrain creature as it tries to sound the alarm before it dies. In any case in a round and a half this is done at the VERY most. Depending on how well it goes will influence their continued attempts to lure out more goblins. And if the PCs do well enough or describe an exceptionally clever ploy why bother rolling dmg ? That goblin is dead.

In any case when I play I don't think of 'my precious carefully balanced encounter that can't be messed with' and take agency away from any players that attempt to do so. Honestly, I DM the game the same way I would DM any other system. Anything I feel is missing I add. Anything I don't like I avoid. Anything that is causing issues gets changed. Anything I don't know I make it up.

Rechan · Nov 26, 2012

Also if you build an encounter and then for whatever reason, the Players don't Fight the Bad Guy, then just slap a new name on the bad guy (and possibly change the damage type of the attacks) and use it later.

Neonchameleon · Nov 26, 2012

NewJeffCT said:
That was the primary advantage I found in 4E - I was so anal about making every bad guy in my 3.5E campaign different than the previous bad guys the players fought that I spent many hours researching prestige classes, templates, different races or variant races, etc, that I couldn't devote as much time to story and NPC development.

However, if I started doing the same with 4E, I know I'd go through dozens of different powers to find just the right one, and I'd be back to where I started in terms of prep time.

Honestly, making unique enemies in 4e isn't hard. If we look at the basic orc and kobold in 3.X then to get from the numbers the PCs see for the kobold to the orc we add: 1 hit point, a few points of damage, move a few points of to hit, and change the skills. It's not that much.

To get from a basic Kobold Quickblade to the standard orc skirmisher (I forget its name) we:

Change the racial powers - the kobold gets to shift one square per turn as a minor action (you can't catch the slippery #@*&s) and the orc gets a free standard action when it dies (they take a lot of killing).

Change the levels - about the equivalent of the changes above for 3.X.

The standard orc skirmisher has a shock-trooper style charge. 1/encounter if it throws its javelin and hits it can then charge - this is really nasty and very memorable, and gives the sense of orcs getting up in your face (as well as doing a lot of damage). Orc skirmishers: Brutal, get in your face, and take some killing.

The Kobold Quickblade (remember these are the basic level 1 skirmishers) gets Fleet - as a move action it can shift three squares. It also has an ability where it does +2 damage for each square it's shifted since the start of its turn (remember between Fleet and Shifty that can be +8 damage). Fast, slippery, and memorable for completely different reasons from the orc.

Using monsters straight out of Monster Vault doesn't make them un-memorable.

Tony Vargas · Nov 30, 2012

pemerton said:
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.

It's not a unified market. There are a /lot/ of people playing 4e. There was clearly a market for it that it serves much better than 3.5 did. It just wasn't the whole market that had been putting up with 3.5...

I'm not surprised that WotC believed complaints about D&D that had been going virtually since its inception. They were valid complaints, and probably will be valid again when 5e comes out. I was surprised that they tried to address so many of them in 4e, and shocked that they actually succeeded to the degree that they did.

I think what WotC misjudged about the market was how sharply divided it actually was. There were lots of people playing D&D only because it was just easier to find people to play D&D than it was to pull together a group willing to play anything else, and they were dis-satisfied with it, and vocal about it. They wanted it to be better so they could find a better campaign. They obscured the relative contentment of a core of D&D fans who loved the game not in spite of its flaws, but for it's flaws - be that out of nostalgia or desire to exploit said flaws.

4e fixed too much, and the nostalgiacs and system-masters revolted. It's not just that they didn't want to play a game like 4e, it's that they didn't want /anyone/ to have the choice to play a D&D that wasn't /their/ D&D.

I think WotC has figured that out, and that's why re-unification is such a cornerstone of 5e.