Why is 4E so grindy?

[JohnSnow]

Well, if my group's experience is any indication, "grindiness" largely comes down to how an encounter plays out.

I've noticed that when the party members forget they're on a team, and don't even try to work together, combat can turn into a grind that devolves into "I'm going to use <power> on that guy. I got a <number>; do I hit?" My KotS group has had a few fights that started to feel like a grind (although the hall of sarcophagi turned out pretty cool).

By contrast, I ran nearly the same group of players (with different PCs) through Encounter at Rivenroar on Sunday, getting through the bar fight and the ogre fight in an abbreviated session. Both fights were pretty entertaining, but the ogre one was AWESOME. When they work together as a team, combats play out like a fight scene from an X-Men comic.

Terrain, environment, mobility, and threat level seem to be what makes the difference with my group. That ogre had my PCs so scared that they were VERY focused on working together, and the combat ran beautifully. Interestingly, the primary determining factor in "grindiness" with my group seems to be whether the PCs move around or don't. When they stand still, the combat quickly starts to feel like a grind. I think the 4e designers built the game with mobility in mind and that may be the (not terribly well) hidden secret to making 4e combats work. When PCs forget that and just stand still like a 3e character doing a full attack, things get slow. By contrast, motion keeps things interesting. The tavern brawl was fun, but not quite up to what I want out of an encounter like that.

The other thing that happens sometimes is if both the PCs and I are having an off-night with the dice. That usually just gets painful, although the fumbles can occasionally be amusing - if they're well-described. But hey, bad luck happens...

I'm trying to encourage my players to move more and be more creative in combat (p.42, I love you), but it's definitely an uphill battle.

 

[Gort]

Yeah, when building your party, fulfil the roles of tank and healer, then just beeline for damage. People like doing damage.

When in doubt, add barbarians. I love those guys - they're like the brutes of the PC side. They do tons of damage, but are easy to hit! Perfect!

 

[NewJeffCT]

I've often wondered this myself. I DMed about 5 sessions of 4E, and while most of the combats weren't too bad, there were a couple of extended ones, including one that lasted the entire game session (about 5 hours). The characters were only about 3rd level.

I encountered it at Gen Con, too, where one combats during the Dungeon Crawl Classics tournament took up 3 hours of the 4-hour time slot. Of course, both the Paladin and the Fighter were petrified near the beginning of that combat (against a gorgon and a manticore), so that probably contributed. Not a lot of fun for the players of those two characters, though, since they just got to sit around and watch for several hours while the combat ground on and on and on.

Towards the end of my recent 3.5 campaign, most of the combats took two extended sessions because we had a big group and one foe could never challenge them sufficiently, as they were deadly if they could all focus their firepower on a single target. By extended, I meant an extra 1-2 hours beyond the normal 4 hour sessions we had.

However, even when the party was level 4 or so, we had one extended combat that ran 3+ sessions because the party handled it in stages instead of as one big battle.

So, a 1 session combat seems like nothing to me.

 

[Paradox]

4e can feel less "grindy" if the DM turns to page 20 of the DMG and focuses more on one of the other "modes" of D&D.

1- Setup - I wouldn't stretch this out too far.

2 - Exploration - This is the most common way of playing D&D; DM describes scene, players describe what they want to do, DM details the results.

3 - Conversation - This is the ineraction with various NPCs. It could be an in character haggle over prices, or telling stories at the local tavern, or asking the King permission to hunt a rare monster in his lands.

4 - Encounter - Notice that this mode isn't labeled "combat". Combat is a big part, but it's not the ONLY part. They could encounter traps, or have a skill challange.

5 - Passage of Time - For those "big project" or items that let you skip weeks of time. The wizard wants to research a new spell, the fighter wants to train.

If all your DM does is plop down a map and tell you to roll inititive, (while not exactly "wrong") he's the one that's making it too grindy. It's the DM's job to make the game move along. The DM has to inject the story. The DM has to present the situations for the players to interact with.

 

[Shazman]

All of those things you describe are good things for a DM to do to keep players interested in the game, but I don't see how they have anything to do with the "grind" of a combat encounter, which is what this thread is about. The DM can do things to speed up combat, but they pretty much all involve fudging/Dm fiat or houserules. For various reason the people I have played 4E with only want to or are able to play LFR, which means no house rules and preferably little DM fiat or fudging. Generally, the people I play with do a reasonable job of making capable characters, know the rules, focus fire fairly well, and favor strikers over other roles, but the grind still happens almost every time.

 

[Plane Sailing]

Before the conversation goes much further: could the people saying "our group doesn't find 4e grindy" please put an actual time figure on how long it's taking you to clear level-appropriate fights? The baseline we're working with here is "hour-long combats on trash, two-plus-hour combats on solos/big fights, are too much". So is "not grindy" like half-an-hour, or is it still an hour and just a matter of word choice/differing tastes?

Problem is that 'grindy' isn't necessarily related to time taken, but more to perception of the combat, as others have already mentioned. Half an hour could be grindy if the party miss with all their encounters and dailies and have to wear the solo down with at-wills, even if they get through it quickly

Cheers

 

[Sanzuo]

My tactics for avoiding grind don't rely on houseruling creatures, like cutting their hit points and so on. I think the key to good combats lie in overall encounter design.

Stalker's Guide is extraordinarily useful and full of good advice. In addition to what's there, I also recommend tailoring the fight to the individual parties. My party consists of three strikers, a defender, and a super-healer. So I'm inclined to design encounters with lots of high-damaging monsters and one or two beefy monsters. This gives the healer a reason to heal, the tank something to tank against and the strikers can damage down the creatures with lots of hp.

 

[ExploderWizard]

My tactics for avoiding grind don't rely on houseruling creatures, like cutting their hit points and so on. I think the key to good combats lie in overall encounter design.

Stalker's Guide is extraordinarily useful and full of good advice. In addition to what's there, I also recommend tailoring the fight to the individual parties. My party consists of three strikers, a defender, and a super-healer. So I'm inclined to design encounters with lots of high-damaging monsters and one or two beefy monsters. This gives the healer a reason to heal, the tank something to tank against and the strikers can damage down the creatures with lots of hp.

While this certainly can help your particular group, much like my houserules help mine, the underlying issues that prompt these measures don't get addressed by any of these solutions.

Neither of our fixes does anything to help commercially produced adventures for example. These can't be written with my houserules in mind or the encounters designed specifically for your group's composition.
The basic grind problem needs to be addressed at the core rule level to benefit the greatest number of people.

 

[Badwe]

I honestly have to say that my group doesn't experience much grind. Generally they can polish off the encounters in H2 within 4-5 rounds, typically just as their level 4-6 characters are running out of encounter powers. In a 6 hour session we'll usually do 2-3 combats, though it could be 4 except that i insist on playing up RP moments and trying to sow doubt in the players as they explore (aka "things that add time to the session").

We have between 4 and 6 players show up on a given session. with one notable exception (the green dragon in the 3rd dungeon) i have only ever modded encounters by changing the number of monsters encountered rather than the type or level to fix the challenge and match with the number of PCs. sometimes i don't even have to do this, simply modifying tactics is enough to engage the players.

Out of those 6, we have some players focused on damage and some not-so-focused on it. One of our strikers is a major min-maxer Rogue|Ranger hybrid, another is a less damage oriented warlock who focuses on stealth and attacking from hiding. We have two damage focused leaders (a tac warlord and an artificer wielding a greatbow), and a defender focused on damage (assault swordmage), but our wizard is summons focused. Also, the damage oriented artificer, while he does play aggressively, is playing his first 4e game and so he doesn't always make super-optimal-correct choices based on damage per round.

Honestly, our bigger problem is people making sure they're ready to take their turn and take it quickly despite the table chatter, and that's been a problem for as long as i've played D&D.

 

[Jack99]

Yeah, not much grind here as well. Had a tendency towards start-mid-paragon in the previous campaign, but after fixing the hit-point/damage ratio (-25% HP/+33% damage), it has not been an issue. In fact, during the last 5 hour session, we had 7 combats. While 1 was a short combat against 4 minions, the rest were pretty much n or n+1 combats, except for the last one which was a n+4/n+5 in multiple waves, spanning multiple rooms.

Do however note that for me, grind has nothing to do with length of combat, but only to do with it becoming boring and repetitive, when the result is given. So an encounter that lasts 20 rounds is not a grind - if interesting things happen in those 20 rounds. Standing against the hydra with only at-wills, chipping away it's massive amount of hit points is not a grind - if the characters are running the risk of dying.

As to what causes the grind? - Well, less than stellar encounter building by the DM (already more or less covered earlier by others), poor choices by the players, and/or sheer unluck.