Solos, Status Effects, and a House Rule

[Morgan_Scott82]

This is a separate issue from the main point of this thread, but I'd worry that your changes to increase solos' action ratio would make them too powerful (edit: looking at the book, the Adult White Dragon does look pretty weak; still, these changes would substantially increase its power). In particular, solos have higher defenses and four at heroic (five at paragon/epic) times the HP of normal monsters. A solo is still essentially as powerful until the end of a fight (besides using its action points and having to recharge powers). By comparison the players get weaker over the course of a combat, using up encounter and daily powers and switching to at-wills.

In a normal combat, the players can and will focus fire, so the monsters lose offense over time as they are killed off, while the players have more ways to prevent the monsters from focusing fire and have healing surge triggers, which enables them to have "group hit points" in a way that monsters do not. So a solo should have lower damage capabilities than a group of 5 normal monsters. If a solo started out with the damage capabilities of close to 5 normal monsters of its level, it could easily be too strong.

I've been using my action ratio inspired design philosophy for just a few weeks now and only run one actual encounter for my party, and two independent playtests I've run for myself, but so far my experience hasn't shown them to be too powerful. I believe MM solos suffer in two ways that makes them a problem at the gaming table.

1.) They're boring
2.) They're not a challenge

The second is basically a subset of the first. They just don't do enough to be interesting or a challenge, this is what gives people the impression that solo encounters are uninteresting "grinds" that everyone wants to be over as soon as possible. They're a lot like the 3.5 edition fighter focused exclusively on getting the highest AC possible, sure he's hard to kill but he's about as threatening as a tortoise. In a word: Boring. Some people have proposed reducing this feeling of "grind" by reducing solo hp, and while that will reduce the feeling of "grind" it doesn't make the solo any more interesting it just reduces the amount of time the solo has to be boring. That's a compounding one bad design with another, essentially diluting the solo making him less potent, and therefore even less challenging or interesting.

I instead propose the opposite: concentrate the solo, make him more effective, give him more to do. Of course its possible to go overboard in this regard and make the solo too powerful, however I actually think that's hard to do. 4e has such an elasticity of challenge, PCs are resilient, resourceful and have powers enough to last themselves through the challenge. For example when I ran Jaxia, the solo I discussed in the other thread, she had an action ratio of 5:3, she could actually do more than the PC party in a given round, but at no point did I think we were in danger of a TPK. I thought I did a good job challenging my party.

I take the position that a majority of daily powers are written to be better against a solo than regular monster. This contributes to my players expending them only during the various challenging encounters, especially solos. At 7th level where my PCs were when this encounter took place each PC had three encounter powers and two dailies, not even a full compliment of powers compared to the higher tiers and yet the encounter was over in four rounds, a few dailies were spent and most people were just expending their last encounters when the solo was put down.

While some effects are stronger in an encounter against solos than normal monsters (Lead the Attack, for example, in addition to the debuffs that this thread is mainly concerned with), other effects are weaker (Area attacks). At level 9, the White Dragon's level, debuffs are less of a problem than they'll become- I don't think there are any encounter stun powers in the heroic tier, for example

Now, I think that it would have made sense for D&D solos to be designed with slightly fewer HP and greater offense. However, given their high HP, you have to be careful with how strong you make their offenses. Edit: after having made this comment, I spotted the Adamantine Dragon MM2 preview (Monster Manual 2 Excerpts: Adamantine Dragon), and it looks both significantly better offensively and weaker defensively than the comparable solo 22 soldier Red Dragon. Its defenses are lower and its HP are four times that of a normal monster's, not the 5 in PH for paragon/epic solos. So if this is a trend, WotC is already redesigning solos in this way (no "outs", though).

While I think that outs are important, as we continue this discussion I'm leaning more towards saying they're not required, and especially advocating against any universal power for all solos, if for no other reason than a lack of variety leads to boring encounters, with cookie cutter monsters.

 

[Elric]

1.) They're boring
2.) They're not a challenge

The second is basically a subset of the first. They just don't do enough to be interesting or a challenge, this is what gives people the impression that solo encounters are uninteresting "grinds" that everyone wants to be over as soon as possible.

I agree that as a whole, MM solos are too boring. Adding actions would make most solos more interesting and is essential to making some solos usable (Hydras!).

I instead propose the opposite: concentrate the solo, make him more effective, give him more to do. Of course its possible to go overboard in this regard and make the solo too powerful, however I actually think that's hard to do. 4e has such an elasticity of challenge, PCs are resilient, resourceful and have powers enough to last themselves through the challenge. For example when I ran Jaxia, the solo I discussed in the other thread, she had an action ratio of 5:3, she could actually do more than the PC party in a given round, but at no point did I think we were in danger of a TPK. I thought I did a good job challenging my party.

I believe you had 6 PCs. So that's 6 level 7 PCs against a level 10 solo, roughly a level +2 encounter. If the players still have the ability to use all of their dailies, this should be a challenging but not a "danger of TPK" difficulty fight, if the monster is built appropriately for level 10. When you're designing a solo, you're going to compensate for overall greater action percentage and the result you got indicates that you pretty much got it right as a level 10 encounter.

I highly doubt the White Dragon with the changes you've envisioned would even come close to TPKing a level 9 party that had its full resources available. However, would it be more dangerous than a typical level 9 encounter? I think that's the relevant standard. By the book, I'd say "less dangerous", but that doesn't mean that you couldn't have overshot a little. Difficult terrain aura that it ignores, a minor action attack that pushes, with a rechargable version that hits multiple enemies, and greater resistance to save ends effects is quite a bit.

While I think that outs are important, as we continue this discussion I'm leaning more towards saying they're not required, and especially advocating against any universal power for all solos, if for no other reason than a lack of variety leads to boring encounters, with cookie cutter monsters.

The alternative I think it is relevant to compare "universal power for all solos" to is "using existing published solos, the vast majority of whom have no 'outs', without adding any outs whatsoever." I'm not going to dispute that if solos were designed with similarly useful, flavorful outs as fit them individually, things would be better than if you added one out to all solos. If that's a realistic alternative for a DM to do him (or her)-self, he or she doesn't need any universal power and it can be left at that.

 

[jamesmanhattan]

There's one more thing to keep in mind when doing math for a solo. The damage a solo does per round is not actually meant to be equal to five monsters. It's less. The game designers assume monsters will be dying over the 10 rounds of combat. They also assume most players concentrate their damage to take out one monster at a time. A solo's staying power is what makes a solo dangerous. They are alive and dishing out their full damage for the entire combat. While a group of 5 monsters will have 5 damage dealers in the beginning and slowly drop off as combat continues. So when you stun a solo you are preventing the avg monsters that are alive in a randomly chosen round of combat which is actually 3 monsters.

 

[Elric]

There's one more thing to keep in mind when doing math for a solo. The damage a solo does per round is not actually meant to be equal to five monsters. It's less. The game designers assume monsters will be dying over the 10 rounds of combat. They also assume most players concentrate their damage to take out one monster at a time. A solo's staying power is what makes a solo dangerous. They are alive and dishing out their full damage for the entire combat. While a group of 5 monsters will have 5 damage dealers in the beginning and slowly drop off as combat continues. So when you stun a solo you are preventing the avg monsters that are alive in a randomly chosen round of combat which is actually 3 monsters.

This is a good point; I get to it in the post Morgan_Scott quotes at the top of this page, but I never really updated the main post to reflect it. This is a reason why you definitely don't want status effects to be so weak as to be 1/5 of a normal monster's average duration against a solo, since a status effect that hurts offense used on a whole combat of normal monsters would be stronger than one used on a solo (and there aren't many 'status effects' that affect defense much more greatly when used on a solo than a regular monster- you need something like Lead the Attack, which isn't a condition at all).

A similar calculation for elites indicates that they should be roughly 1.7 normal monsters worth of damage or so. If you assume 2 elites with 2.5x normal monster HP, you get that there are 1.5 alive at a typical point in the combat, which means they should have about 2x the offense of a regular monster if you assume you're facing 3 regular monsters; then roughly scale this down for a 2x HP elite.

With this assumption, it's pretty clear that save ends effects used on elites aren't that much stronger than normal monsters when accounting for the save bonus and higher defenses (1-round effects are comparatively stronger, but not that much stronger). Still, solos have substantially more firepower than elites, but no higher defenses, and no higher saves.

This does suggest, though, that a smaller rather than larger fix could be appropriate.

Previously my idea for a specific stun-fix was:

Immutable Opponent When this creature would be stunned or dominated, if it is not dazed it can make a saving throw. If that saving throw succeeds, it is dazed instead (the effect has its usual duration).

You could probably add some further penalty beyond dazed and leave a stun on a solo still comparable "monster-offense equivalents prevented" than on an elite. -2 to hit on top of Dazed seem about right?

Of course, if the adamantine dragon preview is an indication, the balance of solos may end up shifting towards more offense, less defense, in which case a solo might be more like 4x offense (and have lower defenses to compensate), which would substantially strengthen stun effects, since they take away more monster offense and are more likely to hit the monster's lower AC in general.

 

[KarinsDad]

I agree that as a whole, MM solos are too boring. Adding actions would make most solos more interesting and is essential to making some solos usable (Hydras!).

My solution for Dragons was to give them an arcane or divine Class Template. Not just because solos are boring, but also because Dragons in 4E have no magic to them. They are just big bricks with several attacks.

I think that adding a functional template or class template to a solo might help out in this regard.

 

[KarinsDad]

My houserule for this problem is going to be a bit simpler.

Any condition that prevents a creature from taking any actions on a solo will get an immediate save. It does not matter if the condition normally gets a save or not. If it is a "lasts until the end of the next turn" type of condition, it still gets an immediate save.

This is only for conditions that decrease actions to zero. To my knowledge, that would include Petrified and Stunned only.

It would not affect Weakened or Dazed or any other condition where the creature can still take one or more actions.

The save is not modified by anything. 10 or better, the solo saves. 9 or worse, the solo does not save.

I have no problem with PCs ganging up on a solo and getting an action advantage. But, the action advantage cannot be taking the solo to zero actions without a save.

 

[Nebulous]

I kind of like the idea about 2 saves a round the solo has, and each one can possible degrade a condition to one step lower. Maybe getting rid of the +5 bonus to +2 would help balance that. And they would get saves vs. conditions that don't normally allow a save.

I haven't used solos much yet, but i've already decided to bump down their hp and probably add in an additional encounter power to surprise the PCs.

 

[Nebulous]

One of my favorite priniciples of fourth edition is exception based design, a single simple set of general rules applied all of the time, unless something specific says not to. A house rule making saving throws work differently for solos moves away from this priniciple. I believe having saving throws that work one way most of the time, but a different way of solos is two sets of general rules. All solo's is too general to me, which is one reason I favor specific outs written into monster write ups as specific exceptions.

Morgan, you have a good point here too. I'm sure as 4e evolves the designers (and DMs) will continue to find better ways of doing things. I guess what i foresee happening is that solos in the MM2 and MM3 will be flat out more INTERESTING than any solo in the MM1. So, I guess the simplest solution would be just to "borrow" ideas from the new critters and slap them onto the old ones. Unless one just feels to constrained to use them as is.

 

[Elric]

Of course, if the adamantine dragon preview is an indication, the balance of solos may end up shifting towards more offense, less defense, in which case a solo might be more like 4x offense (and have lower defenses to compensate), which would substantially strengthen stun effects, since they take away more monster offense and are more likely to hit the monster's lower AC in general.

This guess was right: WotC has changed the way they design solo monsters in general with MM2. See: D&D Alumni: Demogorgon.

In your own version of this challenge, you might play these two as originally presented, or you might reconfigure Orcus closer to the newer solo monster design tenets: give him 20% fewer hit points, -2 defenses, but also increase his damage output by 50% when bloodied.

I don't have MM2 to know exactly how they've implemented this, but it seems like solos are becoming roughly 4x the offense and 4x the defense of a normal monster, rather than 3x the offense and 5x the defense. Since status effects tend to affect monster offense much more than monster defense, this change means that status effects become stronger when used on solos than they were for MM1 solos. I don't know if they've started giving monsters "outs"; besides multi-headed monsters, which already had something like this built in, have they added "outs" to solos?

 

[Stalker0]

The game designers assume monsters will be dying over the 10 rounds of combat.

However, what people's gaming experience is also showing is that solo's are often more vulnerable to the numerous effects a party puts out.

In a group of 5 monsters, a wizard might stun 2 of them, but 3 go on. With a solo, you can rack up save penalties, conditions, and the like to debilitate them for a number of rounds.