I keep bottle-necking the heroes (advice)

Retreater · Mar 14, 2019

When I'm running 4E, I kept having the issue of bottle-necking the heroes. They'll be in the hallway going into a large, open, dynamic encounter area; my soldiers beat them on initiative. Obviously they will want to move forward to protect their squishy allied monsters. So it ends up being a long, dragged out fight between the party's defenders (who don't deal big damage and don't get hit often), and the brute/soldiers. Compound this with a party that doesn't have a lot of ranged or forced movement control options, and you can see the problem.

How do I address these issues? Do I wait and call for Initiative until after the party is in the room? Do I encourage the party to do maneuvers like Bull Rush to push the opponents out of the hallway?

Our 2nd level party had a two hour fight last session. Just looking at ways to speed it up and make it interesting for all players.

Celebrim · Mar 14, 2019

Soldiers are pretty infamous in 4e for producing grindy fights.

I'm anything but a 4e expert, but speaking from my perspective, I hate resolving encounter design issues with metagaming. That is to say, you could probably resolve this in a number of ways, none of which are going to be very satisfying conceptually:

a) You could avoid using foes that have high defenses, like soldiers, and thereby speed up the fight.
b) You could have first waves composed of minions, which would collapse quickly and therefore allow the party space to get into the room before engaging the main force.
c) You could use kid gloves on the party by having the opposition behave in ways that weren't tactically optimal, such as delaying or spreading out.
d) You could metagame by handwaving the party getting into the room, and then actually applying the rules only when in your opinion the fictional positioning was optimal for fun. This is called calling the bang, but note also that this is a railroading technique and overuse of railroading techniques like handwaves will often cause table disagreements.

Personally, I'm not fond of any of that, and quite frankly what I'd do in this situation most likely was fudge my roll. If it wasn't interesting for the soldiers to win the initiative, I'd roll initiative behind the screen and report the initiative I found tactically interesting. That's another railroading technique, but it's much less likely to get caught and therefore better maintains the illusion.

As an aside, I find it really interesting how the mentality of the game has evolved over time. Back when I first started playing in 1e, we deliberately would try to bottleneck ourselves in a narrow corridor or at a doorway or chokepoint in order to maximize the parties advantage of high AC's on the frontline fighters and minimize the monsters advantage of numbers.

I'm not sure exactly what the circumstances of this fight are, but one possibility that might have worked is subtly changing the strategy of the opposition. Instead of trying to bottleneck the players in the hallway, what would have happened if the opposition tried to bottleneck the players just inside the 'door'. That is to say, what if they surrounded an open space just inside the 'large, open, dynamic encounter area', and essentially dared the players to step into the room? If they did this, maximizing the advantage of their numbers against a fraction of the party, then you don't have to encourage the party to do maneuvers like Bull Rush to push into the room, or acrobatics to break through the trap, it will be to the natural advantage of the party to break through this cordon and thereby not be in a situation where a small portion of the party is being attack on three sides by the entire opposition.

Retreater · Mar 14, 2019

Celebrim said:
Soldiers are pretty infamous in 4e for producing grindy fights.

I'm anything but a 4e expert, but speaking from my perspective, I hate resolving encounter design issues with metagaming. That is to say, you could probably resolve this in a number of ways, none of which are going to be very satisfying conceptually:

a) You could avoid using foes that have high defenses, like soldiers, and thereby speed up the fight.
b) You could have first waves composed of minions, which would collapse quickly and therefore allow the party space to get into the room before engaging the main force.
c) You could use kid gloves on the party by having the opposition behave in ways that weren't tactically optimal, such as delaying or spreading out.
d) You could metagame by handwaving the party getting into the room, and then actually applying the rules only when in your opinion the fictional positioning was optimal for fun. This is called calling the bang, but note also that this is a railroading technique and overuse of railroading techniques like handwaves will often cause table disagreements.

Personally, I'm not fond of any of that, and quite frankly what I'd do in this situation most likely was fudge my roll. If it wasn't interesting for the soldiers to win the initiative, I'd roll initiative behind the screen and report the initiative I found tactically interesting. That's another railroading technique, but it's much less likely to get caught and therefore better maintains the illusion.

As an aside, I find it really interesting how the mentality of the game has evolved over time. Back when I first started playing in 1e, we deliberately would try to bottleneck ourselves in a narrow corridor or at a doorway or chokepoint in order to maximize the parties advantage of high AC's on the frontline fighters and minimize the monsters advantage of numbers.

I'm not sure exactly what the circumstances of this fight are, but one possibility that might have worked is subtly changing the strategy of the opposition. Instead of trying to bottleneck the players in the hallway, what would have happened if the opposition tried to bottleneck the players just inside the 'door'. That is to say, what if they surrounded an open space just inside the 'large, open, dynamic encounter area', and essentially dared the players to step into the room? If they did this, maximizing the advantage of their numbers against a fraction of the party, then you don't have to encourage the party to do maneuvers like Bull Rush to push into the room, or acrobatics to break through the trap, it will be to the natural advantage of the party to break through this cordon and thereby not be in a situation where a small portion of the party is being attack on three sides by the entire opposition.

In the most recent example, it was very advantageous for the enemies to have the party stuck in a confined area. I created a zone that could get everyone in the hallway, causing damage every turn. Then there were auras that weren't good for the characters to stay in the front ranks. So tactically it was better for the baddies to fight the party on these terms - but it made for a slow fight for the heroes.

Myrhdraak · Mar 14, 2019

I can also see a number of ways to address this problem.

If it is your own dungeon design, you should maybe think about how you design the encounter area to provide various ways to reach it in order to create more dynamic fights. Have a look at these two interesting links to dungeon design:
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...on-layout-map-flow-and-old-school-game-design
You could provide terrain features that the players could use if they are smart in order to get past the Soldiers, preferably with some skill checks
You could on the fly (if you see things stalling) allow skill checks that would allow the players to spot an opportunity to do a diversion or bluff move to create a hole in the enemy wall the thief in the party could use to get past the line, etc.
Maybe there is no problem with this happening in certain encounters where the objective is to create this wall of Soldiers between your players and the boss enemy (maybe a controller). However, 4th Edition design is built around the concept that every fight should be strategic. If you instead want to be able to mix smaller encounters, skirmishes and boss fights in your adventure design. Have a look at my "Changing the Combat Parameters of 4th Edition" link below.

/Myrhdraak

Also read my:
H1-E3: Demon Prince of Undeath Conversion
Pathfinder - Reign of Winter 4th Edition Conversion Path
Changing the Combat Parameters of 4th Edition
The Sunless Citadel 4.5 Edition Conversion

Celebrim · Mar 14, 2019

Myrhdraak said:
I can also see a number of ways to address this problem.

If it is your own dungeon design, you should maybe think about how you design the encounter area to provide various ways to reach it in order to create more dynamic fights. Have a look at these two interesting links to dungeon design:
https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/13085/roleplaying-games/jaquaying-the-dungeon
http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...on-layout-map-flow-and-old-school-game-design

You could provide terrain features that the players could use if they are smart in order to get past the Soldiers, preferably with some skill checks

You could on the fly (if you see things stalling) allow skill checks that would allow the players to spot an opportunity to do a diversion or bluff move to create a hole in the enemy wall the thief in the party could use to get past the line, etc.

Maybe there is no problem with this happening in certain encounters where the objective is to create this wall of Soldiers between your players and the boss enemy (maybe a controller). However, 4th Edition design is built around the concept that every fight should be strategic. If you instead want to be able to mix smaller encounters, skirmishes and boss fights in your adventure design. Have a look at my "Changing the Combat Parameters of 4th Edition" link below.

While I think a lot of the discussion in your "Changing the Combat Parameters..." thread, in this case the OP is reporting about a combat that occurred at 2nd level when the math shouldn't in fact be broken. Again, I think this goes back to the fact that the Soldier template (and especially the elite Soldier) is well known to lead to grindy long duration fights.

Your suggestions while some of them might work, go back onto the problem that I called out with all metagame solutions to this problem - at some level your asking the DM to deliberately override the simulated reality to produce a desirable game result either by ignoring the rules or else by ignoring what is reasonable for the fiction.

While those essays on dungeon design are worth reading, interwoven and branching dungeon layouts won't resolve the issue in the thread, because those threads address dungeon design at a large scale strategic or narrative level (multiple story paths) and not at a small scale tactical level. You can't Jaquay the problem away once an encounter has already begun, and even a well Jaquayed dungeon will still have chokepoints to exploit (and which rationally the defenders of the dungeon might want to exploit). I'd also like to say that Jaquaying a dungeon tends to be more useful in terms of replayability or tournament play (when different team choices lead to measurably different outcomes) than it does in terms of making for a fun game. This is particularly true because people no longer need a tabletop RPG to experience exploratory play - "roguelike" games are a dime a dozen these days.

Any terrain features you add that actually help evade bottle necks have to be rationalized as something that someone would actually build, otherwise they will be transparent elements designed to favor the PCs. And this isn't even to get into the problem that most terrain features you add would tend to make bottle necking easier, not less easier. I suspect this suggestion falls into 'far easier said than done'.

While your suggestion to house rule improvised combat maneuvers that allow for forced movement or evasion might have some merit in some systems, in the case of 4e it violates the entire spirit of the game to let players improvise stunts that give them forced movement options since 4e explicitly silos maneuvers as centrally important CharGen building resources. I can think of few game systems were stunts break the underlying game system to a larger degree than they would in 4e. Fixing this problem would I think be extremely challenging, as you'd need to come up with a balance that made such stunts worthwhile without making them ubiquitously attempted actions.

In short, to me this still most easily falls under the DM rule, "Don't let one bad dice roll ruin the fun." If the fight would have been a lot more fun if the PCs won the initiative, next time let the players think they won the initiative.

Beyond that, you'll have to get into fixes to the math that make 4e less grindy.

Myrhdraak · Mar 14, 2019

Celebrim said:
While I think a lot of the discussion in your "Changing the Combat Parameters..." thread, in this case the OP is reporting about a combat that occurred at 2nd level when the math shouldn't in fact be broken. Again, I think this goes back to the fact that the Soldier template (and especially the elite Soldier) is well known to lead to grindy long duration fights..

4th Edition is in no sense broken. It is built to run 5 challenging combat encounters per day, whatever your level. However, if you want more of a 5e like gameplay, where there is more of a mix of encounter challenge level (some minor, some medium, and some challenging), and maybe more smaller skirmishes before the big boss fight, then you might benefit from some tweaking of its parameters. This might result in fewer challenging battles where you face a wall of Soldiers, maybe only 2 out of 9 instead of 2 to 3 out of 5.

Celebrim said:
Your suggestions while some of them might work, go back onto the problem that I called out with all metagame solutions to this problem - at some level your asking the DM to deliberately override the simulated reality to produce a desirable game result either by ignoring the rules or else by ignoring what is reasonable for the fiction.

While those essays on dungeon design are worth reading, interwoven and branching dungeon layouts won't resolve the issue in the thread, because those threads address dungeon design at a large scale strategic or narrative level (multiple story paths) and not at a small scale tactical level. You can't Jaquay the problem away once an encounter has already begun, and even a well Jaquayed dungeon will still have chokepoints to exploit (and which rationally the defenders of the dungeon might want to exploit). I'd also like to say that Jaquaying a dungeon tends to be more useful in terms of replayability or tournament play (when different team choices lead to measurably different outcomes) than it does in terms of making for a fun game. This is particularly true because people no longer need a tabletop RPG to experience exploratory play - "roguelike" games are a dime a dozen these days.

To give an example. I do not know how this encounter and design is built. But IF if is built as a single entry room with the Soldiers and a boss controller, the PCs have very little choice. By building multiple entrances to the room, where some would give the PCs an advantage, and a possibility to avoid facing a wall of Soldiers, would lead to more PC choice. Even better if they are made aware that there seems to be other entrances to the room, which they might notice before having to enter the room and face the Soldiers. Then they can backtrack and try to find that other exit that would give them an advantage.

Celebrim said:
Any terrain features you add that actually help evade bottle necks have to be rationalized as something that someone would actually build, otherwise they will be transparent elements designed to favor the PCs. And this isn't even to get into the problem that most terrain features you add would tend to make bottle necking easier, not less easier. I suspect this suggestion falls into 'far easier said than done'.

Example again: Maybe the room have a chandelier a PC with good Athletics or Acrobatics can reach and swing above the Soldiers, or a flight of stairs with a balcony to the right which would allow any PC running up that way to get past the wall of Soldiers and attack the controller boss directly.

Celebrim said:
While your suggestion to house rule improvised combat maneuvers that allow for forced movement or evasion might have some merit in some systems, in the case of 4e it violates the entire spirit of the game to let players improvise stunts that give them forced movement options since 4e explicitly silos maneuvers as centrally important CharGen building resources. I can think of few game systems were stunts break the underlying game system to a larger degree than they would in 4e. Fixing this problem would I think be extremely challenging, as you'd need to come up with a balance that made such stunts worthwhile without making them ubiquitously attempted actions.

I agree that 4th Edition as written do not encourage this kind of game play. So it is up to the DM to decide if he or she want to do it. I would personally not overuse it, but once in a while if I see frustration around the table, or a need to move the story forward rather than getting bogged down in a fight nobody enjoys, I would personally use it. But it's up to the DM's game style of course.

/Myrhdraak

MoutonRustique · Mar 14, 2019

Retreater said:
When I'm running 4E, I kept having the issue of bottle-necking the heroes. They'll be in the hallway going into a large, open, dynamic encounter area; my soldiers beat them on initiative. Obviously they will want to move forward to protect their squishy allied monsters. So it ends up being a long, dragged out fight between the party's defenders (who don't deal big damage and don't get hit often), and the brute/soldiers. Compound this with a party that doesn't have a lot of ranged or forced movement control options, and you can see the problem.

How do I address these issues? Do I wait and call for Initiative until after the party is in the room? Do I encourage the party to do maneuvers like Bull Rush to push the opponents out of the hallway?

Our 2nd level party had a two hour fight last session. Just looking at ways to speed it up and make it interesting for all players.

My take would be to make it very, very advantageous for the PCs to get to the back lines ASAP.

Here is my "how" on the mechanical side :
- reduce the AC defense of the rear-rank by 2 or more
- reduce the hp of the rear-rank by 1/4 (half bloodied value)
- increase the damage the rear-rank deals by 1/4 (you can often simply add 1/2 the static modifier), but make it significant - enough so the players notice quickly
- (only at first) tell players how low the hp and defenses of the rear rank are
- reduce the damage of the front ranks (to encourage PCs eating a few OA)
- if the front ranks are very sticky, reduce that sticky-ness

- once "good" habits have taken root, lessen the modifications

On the "map" side of things :
- make sure to have lots of room for the players to fall back
- make the foes be protective, but maybe a bit too aggressive when players fall back

On the "resources" side of things :
- hand out plenty of one-use items that break formations.
-- --- examples include :

alchemist [element/energy] that create a zone that deals ongoing damage (don't be afraid of stepping on the controller's toes - you don't have one!)
version of "tanglefoot bags" that can used to pull a foe a few squares with an Athletics check (could be modeled as a minor action attack with a standard to pull, or vice-versa)
"ginsu" turrets that deploy in a square within 5 squares and deal area damage (either as an attack, or simply as an aura)
etc.

- make sure to give them in a way that makes the players feel these are "extra" loot so they don't hoard them (if you have the PC hoarder problem)

- again, once "good" habits are taken, and players start requesting and buying those kinds of things on their own, reduce (remove) the "extra" aspect

Jacob Lewis · Mar 14, 2019

Time to think outside the box!

darkbard · Mar 15, 2019

Celebrim said:
While your suggestion to house rule improvised combat maneuvers that allow for forced movement or evasion might have some merit in some systems, in the case of 4e it violates the entire spirit of the game to let players improvise stunts that give them forced movement options since 4e explicitly silos maneuvers as centrally important CharGen building resources. I can think of few game systems were stunts break the underlying game system to a larger degree than they would in 4e. Fixing this problem would I think be extremely challenging, as you'd need to come up with a balance that made such stunts worthwhile without making them ubiquitously attempted actions

This is incorrect. 4E *encourages* improvised moves that make use of terrain, force movement, etc. Dynamic tactical combat *relies* on such, in fact.

From the DMG, pg. 42: "Example: Shiera the 8th-level rogue wants to try the classic swashbuckling move of swinging on a chandelier and kicking an ogre in the chest on her way down to the ground, hoping to push the ogre into the brazier of burning coals behind it. An Acrobatics check seems reasonable.
This sort of action is exactly the kind of thinking
you want to encourage, so you pick an easy DC: The
table says DC 15, but it’s a skill check, so make it DC
20. If she makes that check, she gets a hold on the
chandelier and swings to the ogre.
Then comes the kicking. She’s more interested in
the push than in dealing any damage with the kick
itself, so have her make a Strength attack against the
ogre’s Fortitude. If she pulls it off, let her push the ogre 1 square and into the brazier, and find an appropriate damage number.
Use a normal damage expression from the table,
because once the characters see this trick work they’ll
try anything they can to keep pushing the ogres into
the brazier. You can safely use the high value, though—2d8 + 5 fire damage. If Shiera had used a 7th-level
encounter power and Sneak Attack, she might have
dealt 4d6 (plus her Dexterity modifier), so you’re not
giving away too much with this damage."

pemerton · Mar 15, 2019

[MENTION=42040]Retreater[/MENTION] - the DMG2 has a good discussion of "circular paths". I've sblocked a post of mine from 2010 where I described some changes I made to H2 maps to increase their circularity:

[sblock]

pemerton said:
For the Chamber of Eyes I did two things. First, I joined the introductory encounter (with the hobgoblins torturing the prisoner) onto the Chamber of Eyes: (i) run the corridor in the introductory encounter onto the entryway into the foyer of the Chamber of Eyes; (ii) add a secret passage exiting the NE corner of the hobgoblin chamber via a secret door and running diagonally, with staircases, up to the balcony in the Chamber of Eyes foyer; (iii) add a spyhole/arrowslit on the E wall of the hobgoblin chamber (near the barrels) looking onto the Chamber of Eyes foyer; (iv) add a portcullis that the hobgoblins can drop in the entryway to their chamber, making the secret passage the only easy path between their chamber and the Chamber of Eyes.

Second, I was prepared to run the introductory encounter, C1, C2 and C4 as a single encounter with waves. The PCs first heard the prisoner being tortured (I made it someone they had already met earlier in the campaign who they knew had been captured by goblins/hobgoblins and were hoping to rescue) and entered that chamber. The portcullis (iv above) was dropped, trapping them in that room. As they made fairly short work of the hobgoblin soldiers the warcaster opened the secret door and fled up the passage (ii above) with half the PCs chasing him while the others finished off the soldiers. The PCs correctly feared that he was going to get reinforcements. The PCs narrowly failed to stop him on the balcony, and he went through the other door and alerted the goblins in C2. I had the bugbear engage the PCs on the upper level, while the skull cleavers came out through the main doors to make missile attacks - some of the PCs jumped down to engage them, while others fought the bugbear and one who had been left behind in the first room attacked through the spyhole (iii above). The warcaster meanwhile went on and alerted the chief, who came forward to join the skullcleavers with his wolf while the archers controlled the long-ish corridor with cover from the shrine doorway (I eliminated the second warcaster as unnecessary).

This was a very dynamic encounter, with PCs moving around through the various corridors in the entry way, going back and forth into the original room to take advantage of the arrowslit, and in the end causing the hobgoblin archers to retreat after defeating the rest of the goblins. (They then took on the archers with the rest of C3 - roused from their drunken revelling - as a separate encounter.)

I also decided that the duergar would wait and see what happened rather than joining in on the potentially losing side of a fight - the PCs discovered the duergar in their rooms as they were looking for somewhere to take their short rest and ended up negotiating a contract with them, paying 300 gp to be delivered in a months time to pay for the release of the slaves (the players preferred this to the thought of having to assault a duergar stronghold).

In the Well of Demons I also ran the gnoll encounters together as a single more dynamic encounter (again leaving the tieflings out of the equation, figuring that they would make a more interesting encounter after the gnolls had been dealt with). The interesting aspects here were (i) the players thought the first chamber with the motely crew of monsters was the more challenging encounter, and so blew quite a few resources on it and therefore were really pushed to the limits with the gnolls, (ii) the use of the connecting tunnel from the boar room to the entry chamber as a way of making the PCs fight on two fronts (and yes, enemies were pushed into the well) and (iii) replacing the barlgura demon with a naldrezu (sp?) from MM2, which is a lurker that captures a PC and teleports it away to munch on it - combined with the two-fronts aspect this introduced extra mobility and tension into the fight.

[/sblock]

Another map-type change you might look at is to have pits, fires or whatever else behind your front-line soldiers that encourage your players to attempt forced movement even if their PCs are not optimised for it.

Also consider having your NPC front line break and rush forward - your NPCs don't have to be super-disciplined Swiss guards every time!

(You'll see from this I favour map-based and framing-based solutions rather than mechanical changes, mostly because they're easier to implement and their consequences tend to be easier to anticipate and accommodate into the unfolding game.)