D&D 4E How to build encounters in 4e (aka Only you can prevent Grindspace!)

[Vayden]

My Tip: Give the Players A Goal as the Combat Unfolds

As I've been reading about Grind and experienced it for the first time in my game where 3 hobgoblin Soldiers fled the battlefield shrieking out of sheer boredom, I decided to add some pizzazz to my encounters, and have things going on that aren't just : who should I kill next.

Quick examples: A simultaneous Skill Challenge/Battle to stop a Drow Ritual involving unlocking various arcane circles which had different effects on those who entered into them. The main lock had a confusion effect and the valiant rogue who approach it to disable the device suddenly found himself licking the Statue of Lolth... Young Drow Minions rained down attacks as the PCs alternated between taking them out and trying to stop the ritual and save the person about to be sacrificed. The Minions were actually stopping the ritual from preceeding until the master returned. And as the last one fell the Ritual kicked in again....and with the arcane lock still keeping them out of the circle of sacrificial stones and a massive Shadow Drider being summoned and leeching life from the person they were trying to save....arggh!
I won't go into more details, but needlees to say it was fun for everyone.

Another Example: After walking through a desecrated cementary with an evil looking tree with hanging skulls the PC's were met on the other side as they left, by furious headless skeletons and the heads on the tree inside the cementary on the tree began calling out to them in a strange indeciphrable language. Suddenly the PC's clicked on that the words the skeletons heads were calling out to them were backwards and that as the skeleton bodies pummeled them mindlessly, the heads were begging for help to be returned to their bodies and have their suffering lifted. (heir bodies were obviously unable to enter into the cemetary) The party split, half keeping the bodies at bay and the other half raced back into the haunted cementary to retrieve the heads and bring them back to their bodies, ending their curse and setting them to rest. This ended the combat before a single skeleton died as the PC's decided it wouldn't be wise to kill them. But it was tense, exciting, fun til the end and justly rewarded, more so than if they had simply bashed the skeletons to bits.

I won't treat every single encounter I do this way, but it certainly is something I want to add to many encounters so it's not just: Fight these monsters until they are dead, there is no other way around this until you've killed every last m.@# f.@#$$ one of them.

No matter how interesting the terrain I think other stuff needs to be going on as well, and conflicts can be resolved in other epic ways.

Great point. The final encounter in the Well of Demons section in Thunderspire Labyrinth (is anyone sick of me talking about how great that particular mini-dungeon is?) utilizes this tactic very well too - the Gnoll Warlock is in the middle of a ritual to drain the life of a pair of captives when the players burst in. When I ran my 2nd group through this last week, the swordmage pulled an awesome move where he teleported way out in front of the rest of the party and then leapt off the altar into the victims, knocking them out of the sacrificial circle. Of course, this left him prone in the middle of a circle of demons (he ended up one hp away from negative bloodied before the cleric got into range for Healing Word), but it was a very memorable move, and really spiced up the fight.

 

[LostSoul]

What's an "All Quests" system?

All the XP comes from Quests.

 

[yagyuninja]

Great stuff. My players (all completely new to tabletop gaming) all get really sad when an encounter or daily power misses. I think they would all prefer to be rocking the bad guys than slogging through a bunch of soldiers too, so your cool list of PC likes and dislikes is much appreciated.

Last time we got together they took out Kalarel, and it actually kind of worked out that he was so hard to hit. They worked together more than I'd ever seen them before to disable the circle and give each other combat advantage and attack bonuses. Of course it also became kind of a slog once his undead buddies died since he's not actually a solo, and therefore only had one attack a round (not to mention stupid HP).

Anyway, taking this thread into account, I'm thinking about another encounter for them when they get back to Winterhaven. The PCs never returned to Winterhaven, even after being somewhat informed about the stuff going down there. So upon return I'm going to have the Ninaran undergo some kind of horrifying transition into a Zombie Abomination (lvl 6 solo brute undead from the compendium to please my Cleric, Paladin, Warlock, Ranger, and Barbarian) and assault the walls of winterhaven.

I'm not sure what I should include to accompany the brute, though. One thought was similarly grotesque zombie minions swarming over the walls to please my fire-loving wizard, or hordes of skellies in the distance firing arrows to give the ranger and wizard something else to shoot at. I also thought I could just use the NPCs on top of the wall to spice up the fight, essentially making them hero-minions the party has to protect.

I don't know which way I'm going to go...which sounds more fun?

Also, any updates from Paragon play, Vayden?

 

[Vayden]

Anyway, taking this thread into account, I'm thinking about another encounter for them when they get back to Winterhaven. The PCs never returned to Winterhaven, even after being somewhat informed about the stuff going down there. So upon return I'm going to have the Ninaran undergo some kind of horrifying transition into a Zombie Abomination (lvl 6 solo brute undead from the compendium to please my Cleric, Paladin, Warlock, Ranger, and Barbarian) and assault the walls of winterhaven.

I'm not sure what I should include to accompany the brute, though. One thought was similarly grotesque zombie minions swarming over the walls to please my fire-loving wizard, or hordes of skellies in the distance firing arrows to give the ranger and wizard something else to shoot at. I also thought I could just use the NPCs on top of the wall to spice up the fight, essentially making them hero-minions the party has to protect.

I don't know which way I'm going to go...which sounds more fun?

Also, any updates from Paragon play, Vayden?

Why not use zombie and skeleton minions? Keep them spaced out so that the wizard can't get them all in one turn and bring the pain. Make sure the PCs get to enjoy at least one night as heroes of the town first though.

By the way, thanks for saving me from having to perform necromancy on my own thread, since I was planning to drop in my paragon update after DMing paragon for the first time this afternoon. I've been playing in a level 16 game for a couple of weeks now, and once we re-specced our characters to do some more damage we haven't seen much grind there.

DMing paragon for the first time today was a lot of fun. It's a new campaign for us - the PCs are captains of a privateer ship working for one of the noble families of Amn. We started out with them docking the ship in Athkatla and going to meet up with their boss. Before the session started, I had each of them roll two perception checks and kept those in reserve on some note-paper, since I knew I was planning to ambush them. Their pre-emptive checks failed to notice the knife-slash in the coat of the coach-man waiting for them, so they didn't realize their employer's coach-man had been killed and the coach was an ambush. One of them did make the 2nd perception check, to notice that the carriage was taking the wrong way, but that didn't help much, as the false coachman ran the carriage down an alley way and bolted the doors closed. They were still wondering what was going on when I set the carriage on fire - they spilled out quickly after that though - I went with 4 Banshrae (2 warriors, 2 dartswarms) which I re-skinned as wooden men controlled by a hidden flute-player, and two human thugs and a human mage (all level 4) as the ambushers. (I personally have a little bit of hard time making generic human thugs higher than 4-5th level - if you get past level 8-9 as a member of a PC race, you're something special).

Anyway, those monsters, combined with the ambush and the fact that the wizard blew some of his powerful spells on the humans before realizing they weren't the threat, ended up being way too much for my 3 11th level PCs, so I had the Banshrae knock them out, stop their bleeding, and drag them off to the dungeons. What did I learn here? At-will Stun/Daze affects are especially powerful, and you should generally avoid having too many monsters that can do this. Not just that they can be extremely lethal if they keep hitting, but the player(s) who get stunned repeatedly don't have a lot of fun. They're fun and nasty in moderation, but try and make sure you keep it in moderation, and spread it around so that you don't do what I did and have a player who never got a chance to use a single power in the entire fight (stunned or unconscious all the way from turn 2).

Thinking on my feet, I quickly mocked up a basic dungeon in the basement of the house of the rival noble who'd kid-napped them, and dropped them into the basement, naked and in chains. I gave them a few hours to see if they could manage an escape on their own (one escape attempt check/hour), and the rogue managed to pick the locks on the manacles and pick the door open (we had an interesting discussion on where he stores his lockpicks). They quickly overwhelmed the 2 level 4 guards outside and the rogue and fighter took their weapons. I had decided that the noble wasn't very used to having prisoners, especially powerful ones, so all he had guarding them were the two guards and a golem in the next room. The golem was mostly an interesting fight from the point of view that they were nervous without their gear - I halved his hitpoints to keep it from going on too long and putting me to sleep. After that, I let them sneak up through the basement into the mansion, over-hear a conversation between two of the nobles who had captured them, then vault the garden wall and lose themselves in the city.

All in all, not too different from heroic tier on the first brush, though I think the hitpoints may be a little high. We'll see. The two main take-aways for me were the note about stunning I mentioned before, as well as the satisfaction of being able to adapt and move on from my mistake of throwing too much at the party. It helped that I had a general idea of the power factions and motivations of everyone involved in my head, so that I could quickly spin up an alternate path after my planned adventure knocked the party out.

 

[Vayden]

Hello again all! I'm back with what I've learned from 2 more sessions of paragon play, one as a player and one as a DM. I'm also excited because I got a chance to start DMing an Epic campaign - no real details from that yet, as we basically just did character creation. Hopefully I'll have some good experience at Epic soon that I can try to boil down to tips. Meanwhile, I have 3 quick notes of what I learned from Paragon play last week:

1) Minions can be frightening if you tweak them up!

Like I said earlier in the thread, I like to use a ton of minions and basically treat them as terrain hazards. However, in the paragon game I'm playing in, our DM unleashed an army of homebrewed minions on us that did 2d8 + 7 damage on their attacks. We learned very quickly to fear and respect those minions. When our wizard was trying to decide whether to unleash a daily power on the boss monster, or use scorching burst on the minions, we all screamed at him to kill the minions before they wiped us out. Very different and exciting change from the normal feel of minions.

2) Monsters at paragon tier don't have enough powers for their hitpoints

The basis behind 4e monster design, as the designers have explained multiple times, is that they didn't want to give monsters too many powers because the monsters were usually dead in 4-5 turns. While this is true at the heroic tier, paragon monsters have enough hitpoints that they tend to live quite a bit longer unless the party is a well-honed damage dealing machine. There are exceptions to the rule, but for many monsters, they can start to get boring and predictable pretty quickly (and even more so at epic based on my very limited testing there). Solution? Cut their hitpoints aggressively, give them more powers, or use a wider variety of monsters.

3) Every tip in this thread for heroic tier applies more so at paragon

The big fight that I DMed this week in paragon worked much better than the fights I ran last week, mostly because I sharpened in the focus and worked hard to apply everything I'd learned. The players were on a ship being pursued by enemies in another ship - they partially succeeded on a skill challenge I set up to out-run the enemy ship - they lost the enemies in a series of islands, but the enemies managed to send some summoned monsters after them before they got away cleanly. I used a Roc (hp reduced) and 4 homebrewed snakes (constrictor snakes with the addition of the flame-spitter snake's ranged attack, with a different element for each snake). I used the ship as interesting terrain, with the Roc attempting to pick characters up and drop them over the side. I introduced the snakes on the 3rd round to change the setup of the combat, forcing them to adapt their tactics. And in the best move, I took the advice of one of the posters here and introduced an objective that wasn't "kill all the enemies" - I had the Roc crash into the mainsail of the ship and become trapped, and started damaging the mast as it attempted to free itself. The players were rejoicing at first because the Roc was temporarily out of the fight, then panicked as they realized they were about to lose the mast. The various attempts to save the mast became the highlight of the fight.

I'll hopefully be back next week with more paragon and epic lessons, but until then, what about you? For those of you playing or DMing at Paragon or Epic, what have you learned?

 

[TheLordWinter]

I had two big fights over the past two weeks, one good and one very bad.

The bad: The PCs were ambushed in a narrow defile. Four Orc Archers (a ranged monster I made based around the Kobold Slyblade but at ranged) peppered the group with arrows while two Orc Raiders charged the group. The valley had steep walls that were three squares high and required a climb check. The battle seemed to drag on forever and neither the party nor I had any fun.

The good: The party reached a massive fortress where a priestess of Ioun was held. After scouting it out they saw the orcs leader was a green dragon, along with a half-dozen orc minions and three orc raiders. Rather than stumble in as if they hadn't planned at all, the group called it a night and spent a week devising a plan. They had the ranger and rouge sneak in the back while the rest of the party provided a distraction. As they slowly made a fighting retreat back out the door, the two sneaky party members helped the priestess escape and then the party dumped an 1,000 lbs. of rocks in front of the doors via Tenser's Floating Disc. The dragon flew up and began a very tense fight, constantly diving down to attack and bite the PCs and then getting stuck in a pincer as the other PCs road around the side.

I followed some great advice from these boards and saved the dragon's action points until almost the end. Every PC was almost completely out of healing surges, the wizard went down to nearly negative bloodied and the paladin and rogue spent the entire fight trying to stay just above the bloodied mark. The last three rounds had the PCs debating whether or not to flee, but they pushed on and brought the dragon down. The orcs then fled and attacked on the run, leaving the PCs feeling especially triumphant. It was agreed upon by all that it was exciting, and everyone felt like their characters had really done something to contribute to the battle.

 

[Citan]

Is there a collection of terrain options and interesting terrain ideas somewhere on the web? If not, perhaps we could collect some ideas and make one.

 

[Vayden]

The good: The party reached a massive fortress where a priestess of Ioun was held. After scouting it out they saw the orcs leader was a green dragon, along with a half-dozen orc minions and three orc raiders. Rather than stumble in as if they hadn't planned at all, the group called it a night and spent a week devising a plan. They had the ranger and rouge sneak in the back while the rest of the party provided a distraction. As they slowly made a fighting retreat back out the door, the two sneaky party members helped the priestess escape and then the party dumped an 1,000 lbs. of rocks in front of the doors via Tenser's Floating Disc. The dragon flew up and began a very tense fight, constantly diving down to attack and bite the PCs and then getting stuck in a pincer as the other PCs road around the side.

I followed some great advice from these boards and saved the dragon's action points until almost the end. Every PC was almost completely out of healing surges, the wizard went down to nearly negative bloodied and the paladin and rogue spent the entire fight trying to stay just above the bloodied mark. The last three rounds had the PCs debating whether or not to flee, but they pushed on and brought the dragon down. The orcs then fled and attacked on the run, leaving the PCs feeling especially triumphant. It was agreed upon by all that it was exciting, and everyone felt like their characters had really done something to contribute to the battle.

Great fight. I'm slowly trying to teach my players to use rituals in interesting ways like that. It feels like only now, 8 months into 4e, is our group really starting to look at the rituals and the possibility of using things beyond Knock and Comprehend Languages.

Is there a collection of terrain options and interesting terrain ideas somewhere on the web? If not, perhaps we could collect some ideas and make one.

Hmm - not sure if there is one, but why not start one? Here's a couple to get going with:

1) Cliffs - the old classic. Simple, and easy to understand - if you push/slide/bull-rush someone off, they're ****ed. Some variations you can throw in to spice them up - multi-level cliffs/ledges, so that being knocked off just moves the fight up or down, and various types of railings/parapets on the edge (provide a +2 situational bonus to the save vs falling off, but get destroyed the first time someone gets knocked into them).

2) Rivers, Lakes, and other bodies of water - again, quick and simple to understand, but they can get brilliant with creative use. For instance, in the paragon game I'm playing in, we recently ran into an army of elementals (the nasty minions I mentioned), led by two huge elemental lords. Feeling safe because we were on the other side of a swift and hazardous river, we opened up on elemental lords from range. At that point, one of the two lords submerged himself in the river and froze the entire river into a solid surface, allowing the other lord and the army to attack us. Thanks to Wall of Fire, we survived long enough to kill the elemental lord attacking us, at which point the first lord became enraged and rose out of the river (unfreezing it and drowning his army) to attack us. It provided a great changing environment and forced us to adapt our tactics repeatedly (including eventually retreating) as the battle shifted into different phases with the changes to the river.

3) Lava - another classic. One of my highest level characters ever (16-17 or so in Iron Heroes) died ignominously at the end of the campaign when the Goddess of the Underworld hit him with an attack that knocked him 100 feet out into a lake of lava. I'm a strong believer in the simplified Lava rules floating around the web, so I took it like a man.

That's all for now - got to get to lunch. More later.

 

[Vayden]

Okay, I promised myself I wasn't going to necro this thread, but I do have one more significant thing to add. This is the list of classes/builds you want to subtly discourage your players from playing if you're having problems with grind. As a disclaimer, I would never forbid a player from playing anything if they want to play it. This is just something you should suggest to your players if you're having problems with grind - if they don't want to change their concept, don't push them, and there are of course exceptions to all of these cases, but in general, if you see too many of these classes/builds, you can expect a bit of grind. The concepts are all tactically viable and can help a party survive, they just turn your combats into grind by doing so.

1) Shielding Swordmage - by far the worst offender in my book. If you've read the thread, you know my philosophy is that lots of damage on both sides is what leads to good dramatic combats. Not only do Swordmages in general do less damage than other defenders, the Shielding Aegis is doing less damage to the enemies and preventing damage to the PCs (less drama on both sides). I'd discourage Swordmages in general, but if you have your heart set on one, please go Assault.

2) Infernal Pact Warlock - this is a trap. Not only do warlocks in general do less damage, the Infernal Pact Boon is defensive and grindy (temp HP are inherently grindy), and the Con-based warlock ends up with less power selections and is sad panda. Fey or Dark pact are drama's friends, if you are stuck with a warlock.

3) Bow Ranger - this is a bit of mixed bag. The bow ranger does fantastic amounts of damage, but it is grindy in 2 ways - if the bow ranger is constantly staying out of range, they're in less threat and there's less drama, and the ranger class in general has a tendency to fall into "move - twin strike - repeat" which can be a little boring for some players. This is less grindy than the first two, but I still think melee ranger makes for more excitement.

4) Laser Cleric/Inspiring Warlord/Resourceful Warlord - these three get lumped together as being the leaders more focused on healing and defense. Smashy Clerics, TacLords, and Bravura Crazy Warlords all focus on getting everyone a chance to hit more often and deal more damage, which is what you want if you're fighting grind.

5) Charisma Paladin - again, the defense/healing oriented build is bad for drama. The only situation in which I recomend a Charisma Paladin is if you don't have any true leaders in the group, and even then I think the Strength Pally is better based on my personal experience.

That's about it - again, all of these builds can work well and are tactically viable - any one of them will be fine in a group, but if you have several of these in a group, don't say I didn't warn you. I also have a personal belief that all Rogues should be Brutal Scoundrels, and I hate Orb Wizards because they keep putting my big bad boss monsters to sleep, but those are more matters of personal taste.

 

[grickherder]

This is the list of classes/builds you want to subtly discourage your players from playing if you're having problems with grind.

I like how you premised it by saying such builds can be a factor, if you're having problems (I bolded the most relevant part above). I'd also add that the advice in this thread about the encounter design side of things can more than compensate for such builds being present.