Tension in combat

[kaisel]

While I understand the intention behind some of these suggestions, I'd personally avoid any "you can't use encounter/daily powers until X occurs" house rules. I know that, as a player, if I saw the perfect opportunity for a specific power and wasn't permitted to use it because the DM felt the combat hadn't gone on long enough--by whatever measure he was using--the frustration would far outweigh any potential benefit.

I agree with this, not being able to use an encounter/daily power when I want to would be more annoying than anything else.

I think good monster selection/encounter building could also be a less system-impacting way to fix this. If you don't now which creature is the scary one, you'd want to poke around with your at-wills, rather than wasting an encounter or daily on one that can be killed relatively easy.

Otherwise, I'd support house rules to encourage the player to save their encounters/dailies rather than forcing them to wait. Especially if monsters are able to blow through their high damaging powers from the start. It makes for a scarier fight, but it would annoy me to no end, at least.

 

[KahnyaGnorc]

One problem with adding Dailies to that is that some classes need to use their Dailies early in the fight to use them to full benefit (like Barbarians' Rages or Wardens' forms).

 

[Stalker0]

At the simplest level, this "issue" occurs because all classes in 4e lose power as the fight goes on.

This change occurred because of 2 main game designs:

1) All classes receive limited powers...ie encounter and daily powers.
2) Buff powers are much less frequent.

In a 3.5 combat, a fighter's sword swing is a powerful attack...and stays powerful throughout the fight. In many cases, he will receive buff magics through the fight, and so get even stronger.

To accomplish the same thing in 4e, you could allow recharging of powers, additional action points acquired during the fight, combat bonuses as the fight carried on, bonuses while bloodied, etc.

Each one carries its own complexities, but can get the job done.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

The way my group can get frustrated some time, I think I'd be tempted to implement "groove" based entirely on a "fail compensation" mechanic. For example:

As the fight goes on, you can get an increasing "groove" bonus to all attacks and saves. It does not reset until the end of the fight. You get +1 to your groove every time you miss. You get +1 to groove when you are blooded. You get +1 to groove if you fail a save.

This is more or less self-correcting, as the more groove you get, the harder it is to get more.

As far as balancing the monsters, I'd probably go with something more group oriented (except for solos and minions). Perhaps +1 groove to all remaining monsters when a monster is downed, or an elite is blooded. Solos would instead get the standard character boosts. Though if you didn't have too many monsters, it woudn't be that hard to track by tokens. Heck, if you've got 4 of that monster and 3 of that other monster, it could be by group, using the character rules, but no more than +1 groove per round. So if one monster misses an attack or save, they all get +1 groove. That would certainly lead to pressuring the players to get the monsters down early, while not giving them the tools until later. Might be too much ...

But again, for my group, and a fun, "heroic adventure" kind of pace, I'd probably just leave groove out of the monsters entirely, and instead balance by making the monsters a bit tougher up front. I've been thinking about using the inherent bonus instead of equipment bonuses (like a +2 sword), and then replacing the expertise bonuses with equipment bonuses by tier (that is, +1 at heroic to +3 at epic). However, I could also see me just dropping the existing equipment and expertise bonuses completely. Instead, the PCs get "groove", which I can now rename to "awesome", as per the usual inherent bonus dicussion.

Short version: PCs are seriously under-powered at the start of every fight, but get increasingly stronger as it goes.

 

[Dausuul]

One approach would be to try to define what each class or role "should" be doing, Iron Heroes style, and then reward them for doing it with action points.

Say you start each encounter with zero action points. You do your class's thing some number of times, and you get an action point. Calibrate the math so that "some number of times" comes out to about five rounds' worth in a typical fight.

The result of this would be that you have access to an action point about 50% of the time, just like now; however, it shows up in the latter half of each encounter, providing a boost right about the time things are starting to lag. Action points are a generic resource available to all PCs, so you don't have to worry about differences in daily powers from one class to another. At the same time, the potential of action point combos will provide some incentive to hold your dailies for when you can use them with APs.

 

[Nyronus]

While I understand the intention behind some of these suggestions, I'd personally avoid any "you can't use encounter/daily powers until X occurs" house rules. I know that, as a player, if I saw the perfect opportunity for a specific power and wasn't permitted to use it because the DM felt the combat hadn't gone on long enough--by whatever measure he was using--the frustration would far outweigh any potential benefit.

What I'd suggest instead is house rules to encourage people to save their encounters/dailies for later in the fight, but that don't require it. Some ideas, off the top of my head...

1) Encounters/dailies gain a bonus to hit after you've been bloodied for the first time. Or, alternatively, after you've been bloodied, each time you use an encounter/daily power, you can make a roll to see if you can keep the power even though you've used it. (It would have to be a pretty difficult roll, but even the possibility would make saving those powers for later in the fight into an attractive option.)

2) Each round in which you use only at-will powers, you gain a cumulative +1 bonus to your next attack with an encounter/daily power (expires at the end of the encounter if not used).

3) If you've been bloodied and use an encounter power, you can choose to spend your second wind in that same turn as a move action instead of a standard. If you use a daily when bloodied, it's a minor instead.

Again, these are just a few spur-of-the-moment ideas, that I haven't even remotely examined for game balance. But they illustrate my point, which is "bonuses for delaying encounter/daily powers," rather than "forced to delay said powers."

The main problem with this though is that nine times out of ten, ending a fight early is the best tactic. The main way to kill 4th Edition PCs is grinding them down and taking their surges one by one. As such, it is in the PCs very best interest to kill quick and kill hard. Particularly since monsters have gotten so much more dangerous. Give a post MM3 Solo a chance to Nova and you'll regret it. Furthermore, most of the bonuses you mention are insignifigant compared to what a semi-dedicated leader can drop when needed. I've seen Artificers and Ardents more or less end combats against post-MM3 solos with one round of well timed buffing and multi-attacks. Alpha-striking is to attractive a tactic for people looking to be effective in combat.

-

Remember the good old days when peopled whined about the grindy-ness of 4e combat?

 

[interwyrm]

I DM'd paragon LFR for the first time on monday. Round 1: bang flash boom, monster drops. Rounds 2:10 = grind.

You can have both problems. In this case, the grind was because the encounter was composed of soldiers and controllers.

 

[sobchak]

I am finding the new monster damage scales cause plenty of tension in combat. Fights very rarely felt out of control before the MM3 or monster vault or wherever these new scales came from.

Now it doesn't take much for a battle to spin out of control.

 

[FireLance]

I'm currently using what I call a combat escalation system in my campaign. It seems to have worked out pretty well so far. Essentially:

1. After the first round of combat, everyone (PCs and monsters) gains a +1 bonus to damage. This increases by +1 at the start of each subsequent round.

2. After the bonus to damage rolls increases to +2 or more, everyone gains a bonus to attack rolls equal to half the bonus to damage.

3. After the bonus to attack rolls increases to +2 or more, everyone's crit range increases by half the bonus to attack rolls.​

To help keep track of the variable bonuses, I made up a set of cards (attached) and at the start of each combat round, I just put the card for the new combat round on the table.

 

[Mouseferatu]

The main problem with this though is that nine times out of ten, ending a fight early is the best tactic.

That may be. In which case, the trick is to balance the benefits so that it's worth altering those tactics, at least some of the time. As I said, those were off the top of my head; it's possible they need to be more robust. I don't think that invalidates the concept, though.