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

As with many things 4E, I liled the idea of encounter design, but not the implementation.

Xp budgets are easier to use than CR, and 4Es simple monster design (compared to PCs) is really nice. (Xp budgets really are not so very different from CRs, just easier to use.) This ought to have made 4E encounters awesome, but instead they were slow, unwieldy slugfests that seemed to lack direction.

In practice, I felt 4E's encounter design produced only set-piece battles. Smaller skirmishes were not interesting to play. Others here have commented on how patrol encounters are played as skill challenges instead of full encounters, so I am not the only one to notice this. Monster hp are such that its almost impossible to take put a patrol silently (unless it is all minions), and the power economy is also geared towards set-piece battles. It's the reverse side of the coin from swinginess; by increasing everyone's hp you make things less chancy, but also make ambushes practically impossible.

I think this could have been cured with better minion rules, rules that made minions more dangerous (and thus priority targets) and less vulnerable to auto-hit powers. As they were, minions were largely ignored and left to some minion-specialist auto-hit powers or just ignored completely. Making a patrol out of minions did not feel viable. In my Feng Shui derivative game, most creatures encountered are minions and it works well because minions are dangerous but go down fast - thus very swingy (if easy) making such encounters feel more dangerous than they are.

Another problem with both CRs and Xp budgets is that creatures lower in level lose their value too quickly. A CR -2 or 2 levels lower creature is almost worthless. Players in my groups tend to put emphasis on defenses, which makes such creature's chance to hit too low. Creatures of a higher level/CR become very tough for the same reason, making most attacks against them discouraging misses. Put simply, the math is too steep for my taste. This makes Next's flatter math interesting.

But these are comments about 4Es game system, not specifically about its encounter model. With a better engine to power it, I think 4E's encounter system could have been great.

Manbearcat said:

I don't see how you have a problem here. The default is just a baseline that produces predictable results. It actually aids your interests here. You can set your own default to m + 3 or even m + 5 if that is your wish...and be assured that it will produce reliable results. A baseline must be chosen somewhere. So long as it produces predictable, reliable results as you move up and down the spectrum, what difference does it make what value m is? The default encounter at my table is m + 2...it doesn't bother us one bit that m as default is a relative walk-through. If I want that (and I do now and then), I will use that value.

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I'm aware that I can, and my standard encounters higher level than the players.

My point is that I wish that was the default baseline, not above. As people below me have pointed, a level appropriate monster is weaker than the same level PC, even if they are treated as equals in terms of challenge.

If m+2 is what it takes to make a typical encounter challenging, than it should be the standard, as what is "challenging" should be hgiher.

It's semantics, but it's still my point, that I think a standard encounter for a party should make them sweat. This isnt' a criticism of 4e, but of D&D.

@Rechan

I've heard/read this situation argued before. Once, we've established (as we have) that it has no impact on the maths or on your own autonomy to set the "standard" encounter to your whims, I find myself wondering what specifically the issues are. Could you elaborate what those are? Is it:

1 - A cultural concern that inter-table dynamics will be predicated upon rigid adherence to this standard and/or people will refuse to (or be too dim-witted sort it out) fit an m + (whatever) standard as their table needs dictate?

2 - Is it a concern that the published adventures will have that baseline as their "standard" and thus further exacerbate 1 and make it annoying for you to tailor it to your campaign?

3 - Something else I'm missing?

@Manbearcat At this point we're getting threadjacky. All I'll say is that it's not a Concern. It's just a Dislike. Call it philosophical disagreement. I just Dislike that the average fight, the PCs are assured victory and blow through it. If it's assured, then why bother play it out? Playing it out is a Waste of Time. The philosophy is that the Average fight is just meant to diminish PC resources by 20%. Better to just deduce 20% of resources, handwave it to move on to something that matters.

On the one hand, I agree with many of the above...encounter building in 4E can be real easy...and once you have the hang of it, its easy to do stuff on the fly or tweak the assumptions (standard monsters not equal to number of pcs, hordes of minions, that kind of thing). It holds up much better, not perfectly, but much better, at higher levels. Actually, there is really no comparing at 10+ to other editions.

And when I say "encounter building" I mean from the ground up. Right now the pcs are in a "gamma world" so I have been converting over mutants and npcs from some old gamma world materials. In 4E this is amazingly easy to do, especially with DDI. Again, no comparing.

But, I also agree that 4E has the "set piece" problem in a big way. A problem greatly exaggerated by the early adventures, were it would be one elaborate battle against, say, goblins, after another. A key aspect of pacing and variety seemed to have been lost to the 4E design team.

You can work around this, but it makes certain kinds of "dungeon crawling" tricky, though not impossible. The DM will need to make an effort to pace things and inject some variety to avoid the game from being one big fight after another.

4e encounter design is great, but leads to a certain sameness to encounters. Granted, a lot of this has to do with the combination of monster redesign and changing the system so that all monsters are subject to pretty much all attacks.

To elaborate, in 1e I could easily design a "NEEDS FIGHTER" encounter by using a monster that, tactically, was more trouble for a fighter-light party: a stone golem, maybe. In 4e, that same encounter no longer screams for a fighter. Likewise, an all-fighter group can take out green slime or a black pudding nearly as easily as an all-wizard group.

There are now far fewer- very few, in fact- monsters that present interesting "how do we kill it??" challenges.

Where 4e encounter design really shines is in the ability to gauge about how tough an encounter will be. If I have four 10th level pcs and I use four 10th level monsters, I pretty much know that the encounter is winnable for the pcs and won't be super rough. It's also good for building an encounter into a dramatic set-piece battle because of terrain and the like. But it's terrible for building an encounter that will surprise you (the dm).

DerekSTheRed said:

I didn't say you couldn't do the sentry, just that it didn't feel natural to me. My dungeon crawls are designed as multi day mini campaigns not a series of encounters. The problem is not just the encounter design system but also the focus on encounters and resources tied to them. I hoping D&D Next will keep the good and get rid of the bad by focusing on the adventure day.

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There is absolutely nothing in 4E forcing you to build your adventure in any way other than how you want to build it. If you don't want to focus on encounters, then don't! You won't get the benefit of easily predictable encounter difficulty, of course, but sounds like you don't care about that.

Also, "Encounter" powers are just short hand for "abilities that come back after 5 minutes of rest". You can easily run your "encounter-less" game, and if the PCs manage to set themselves up enough time to get in a short rest, then there you go: they get their "encounter" powers back. Let them plan accordingly.

In the context of an isolated encounter, 4E's design is pretty good. For overarcing adventures/stories, it's a tad too limiting due to its self-contained nature.

Stormonu said:

In the context of an isolated encounter, 4E's design is pretty good. For overarcing adventures/stories, it's a tad too limiting due to its self-contained nature.

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I'm assuming you are referring to encounter powers, healing surges, and long-ish fights when you say "self-contained"? I've run what I thought were good overarching adventures/stories in 4e so I'm perplexed by your observation.

Quickleaf said:

I'm assuming you are referring to encounter powers, healing surges, and long-ish fights when you say "self-contained"? I've run what I thought were good overarching adventures/stories in 4e so I'm perplexed by your observation.

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Yep, pretty much - it's very difficult to carry consequences from one encounter to another and I've not seen where 4E makes use of the outcome of one encounter to affect other encounters - each is isolated so you don't see things like wars of attrition as you do in, say Caves of Chaos (where can, for example, lure a patrol of goblins out and bushwhack them, then have fewer opponents to face in the various rooms).