Sudden Death Combat

[Paul Strack]

Speaking about your ruling I find that this would lead to a big disadvantage to the players in that these monsters are only throw away villains who are almost supposed to die while your players are now at a much bigger risk of dying and causing a party wipe. If you plan to use this to challenge them then it may work, but I could foresee if the players all getting killed off, or they simple nova during the sudden death round and finish off enemies that much quicker.

I am not out to kill my PCs. I regularly throw N+2 and N+3 encounters at them, and no one has every been seriously at risk of dying. I manage to knock one PC down to 0 hit points in about 50% of the fights, and in the other half the fights, no PC goes down at all. No PC has ever been down long enough to fail more than a single death save for the entire campaign (level 1 to 6 so far).

I suspect that the Sudden Death rules will increase the chance of the monsters getting lucky and putting an extra PC down before they fall. Occasionally having two PCs go down in a single fight would be great (and by down, I mean 0 hp, not dead). The rest of the time, I think the PC could quickly knock off the rest of the monsters without taking any serious damage at all. Either possibility (a bit of extra pain or quick monster wipe out) works for me.

 

[Omnifarious Grey]

Well, I would suggest trying to take the encounters to a little higher caliber, such as listening to AbdulAlhazred. It sounds like your players are not having much of a challenge so that they are getting bored so I would suggest trying to make it more of a challenge rather than making new rules.

 

[Paul Strack]

Well, I would suggest trying to take the encounters to a little higher caliber, such as listening to AbdulAlhazred. It sounds like your players are not having much of a challenge so that they are getting bored so I would suggest trying to make it more of a challenge rather than making new rules.

Right now every encounter I run is the the "hard" range according to the DMG (N+2 to N+3). I am uncomfortably stepping it up any further. I don't want every encounter the PCs face to be at the highest level of difficulty suggested in the rules. I am worried I will cross some mathematical tipping point and spill over into a TPK.

Also, ramping up the overall combat difficulty doesn't fix the problem my group is having. They aren't bored for the entire fight. They generally enjoy the beginning and middle of the combats (3-5 rounds, 30-40 minutes), and usually can't tell whether they will win or not. It's the last 2-3 rounds (15-20 minutes) that are a slog, because by then it is clear they are going to win, but it still takes a while to kill the monster's off.

It's sort of like the problem with the game Risk, where the first 2 hours of play are interesting, but the last hour is boring, because by then it is clear who is going to win, but it still takes a long time to to play out.

Maybe the problem is just too situational to my group to generalize the rules. The games I run are not typical dungeon crawls. Mostly they are story-oriented and event-driven, with about 2 to 3 fights total in an entire adventure.

I've gotten some tentative feedback from my players now on the Sudden Death rules. They have concerns but are willing to give them a try. I will give Sudden Death a shot in my next game (2 weeks from now) and see how they go.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right now every encounter I run is the the "hard" range according to the DMG (N+2 to N+3). I am uncomfortably stepping it up any further. I don't want every encounter the PCs face to be at the highest level of difficulty suggested in the rules. I am worried I will cross some mathematical tipping point and spill over into a TPK.

Also, ramping up the overall combat difficulty doesn't fix the problem my group is having. They aren't bored for the entire fight. They generally enjoy the beginning and middle of the combats (3-5 rounds, 30-40 minutes), and usually can't tell whether they will win or not. It's the last 2-3 rounds (15-20 minutes) that are a slog, because by then it is clear they are going to win, but it still takes a while to kill the monster's off.

It's sort of like the problem with the game Risk, where the first 2 hours of play are interesting, but the last hour is boring, because by then it is clear who is going to win, but it still takes a long time to to play out.

Maybe the problem is just too situational to my group to generalize the rules. The games I run are not typical dungeon crawls. Mostly they are story-oriented and event-driven, with about 2 to 3 fights total in an entire adventure.

I've gotten some tentative feedback from my players now on the Sudden Death rules. They have concerns but are willing to give them a try. I will give Sudden Death a shot in my next game (2 weeks from now) and see how they go.

I'll say this, you are not alone in your observations Paul. Pretty much everyone playing 4e has encountered the combat grind, usually pretty often. The last big battle my players took on they managed to kill off all the hobgoblin minions and warcaster and had a soldier that was down to about 1/4 hit points and an undamaged commander left. At that point the battle was a forgone conclusion. The soldier made a run for it. The party rogue went after him and at that point I just ruled that if the party expended 30 points worth of HS they could declare the commander dead, which they happily did since it was 11:30 PM and it would have taken another 20 minutes of dice rolling to get the same result.

Personally it would kind of bother me to be using a significantly different set of rules during one part of a battle than during another part. Supposing one were to declare sudden death and then the monsters win? Maybe it is too remote a possibility, but that would certainly raise a few eyebrows. In any case it feels like a lot of a hack, plus there is still a bunch of fairly pointless dice rolling to me.

As for encounter difficulties, there is such a wide variety of tactical skill levels of players, and styles of play, that some groups are going to find every encounter difficult above their level and other groups will handle N+3 encounters fairly easily. Some factors in the DM's control can make a difference though. One being pace. I don't care HOW tactically proficient a group is, if the group is facing an N+3 encounter, cannot count on a long rest afterwards, and may have expended some daily resources in several earlier encounters already, then it is tough to see how they will not be challenged. Whenever a party is in "last encounter of the day" mode things always get significantly easier for them, assuming they have dailies available at that point. You might try the experiment of constructing and adventure where the party is required to relentlessly press forward and can't stop. The whole 4e milestone/daily/AP/HS/item use thing really shines in that scenario. OTOH constant single encounters in a day leads to difficulty challenging parties.

 

[Paul Strack]

Some factors in the DM's control can make a difference though. One being pace. I don't care HOW tactically proficient a group is, if the group is facing an N+3 encounter, cannot count on a long rest afterwards, and may have expended some daily resources in several earlier encounters already, then it is tough to see how they will not be challenged. Whenever a party is in "last encounter of the day" mode things always get significantly easier for them, assuming they have dailies available at that point. You might try the experiment of constructing and adventure where the party is required to relentlessly press forward and can't stop. The whole 4e milestone/daily/AP/HS/item use thing really shines in that scenario. OTOH constant single encounters in a day leads to difficulty challenging parties.

I can't really do much to change the pacing. I run a monthly 6 hour game, and attendance of players is unpredictable. This means I run an episodic adventure that lasts at most six hour each session, so I don't have to worry about who will or will not make it each month. I've changed resource management so that they are "per adventure" rather than "per day", but it still means the group can generally predict how many fights they will be facing, when their last fight will occur and when they can safely offload their dailies.

The benefits of episodic play by far outweighs the cost of occasional combat grind. I'm not willing to alter the pacing of the adventures, because they are working so well for us. That's why I am looking for other (house rule) solutions to combat grind.

I'm not spring anything on my players without consent. We discuss all our house rules as a group, and if the rule doesn't work, I will change it. I've even had one house rule become an official rule (I ruled that only end-of-turn saves can make your condition worse, something that became official with PH2).