Yet another Solos fix: "Solo actions"

[Rolenet]

My reaction to this is, frankly, astonishment at the effort you manage to put into this. The reason is very practical: I certainly understand the value in all your encounter design goals, and I certainly see why it's a great idea, and how attractive such an encounter is. But it seems a nightmare to actually deliver this, time and again.

4e is great because designing encounters can be very quick - very easy to balance; very fast to prepare monster stats, and even modify them. But add to this basic things like preparing the terrain, its features, basic relationship with the plot, tactics etc... in my experience, for a weekly game featuring 2-3 encounters, plus every thing "in between", that's already quite enough work!

Now add novel mechanics, full plot integration, when all of this has to be balanced outside of the more usual combat mechanics, my head hurts! Even worse: alternatives - that means thinking about several outcomes, balance them, even though they may very well not arise.
So while I do this kind of things myself, that's pretty rare.

Of course, one may say that "if you don't make your encounter interesting, you might as well not run it!".
So my point is actually: the good thing about 4e is that straight fights are already interesting as is - notably more that pretty much all games I know. Hence, developing them much further seems certainly awesome... but not that crucial!
AND because 4e has a strong internal logic/balance, it is more work to add these elements to a 4e fight than, say, a AD&D fight. This is why I would normally tend to expect this kind of prep for other games. (you may recognize this argument from the Trash Mob Fight thread)

So to sum up: great idea, but I cannot see myself doing this every time, at least IF this has to be pre-planned, AND preserve the internal encounter balance. (this is why I was asking you whether you improvised these things or not).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My reaction to this is, frankly, astonishment at the effort you manage to put into this. The reason is very practical: I certainly understand the value in all your encounter design goals, and I certainly see why it's a great idea, and how attractive such an encounter is. But it seems a nightmare to actually deliver this, time and again.

4e is great because designing encounters can be very quick - very easy to balance; very fast to prepare monster stats, and even modify them. But add to this basic things like preparing the terrain, its features, basic relationship with the plot, tactics etc... in my experience, for a weekly game featuring 2-3 encounters, plus every thing "in between", that's already quite enough work!

Now add novel mechanics, full plot integration, when all of this has to be balanced outside of the more usual combat mechanics, my head hurts! Even worse: alternatives - that means thinking about several outcomes, balance them, even though they may very well not arise.
So while I do this kind of things myself, that's pretty rare.

Of course, one may say that "if you don't make your encounter interesting, you might as well not run it!".
So my point is actually: the good thing about 4e is that straight fights are already interesting as is - notably more that pretty much all games I know. Hence, developing them much further seems certainly awesome... but not that crucial!
AND because 4e has a strong internal logic/balance, it is more work to add these elements to a 4e fight than, say, a AD&D fight. This is why I would normally tend to expect this kind of prep for other games. (you may recognize this argument from the Trash Mob Fight thread)

So to sum up: great idea, but I cannot see myself doing this every time, at least IF this has to be pre-planned, AND preserve the internal encounter balance. (this is why I was asking you whether you improvised these things or not).

Well, there were many people who didn't, at least consistently, find all 4e fights to be excellent and super entertaining. PERSONALLY I was pretty OK with a percentage that were just straight up hackathons, as long as they weren't TOO constrained (IE you had some terrain that created a couple tactical options or at least presented a wrinkle, and/or some interesting interactions between foes, etc. This level of encounter IS quite easy, you can almost just follow the templates in DMG1 and mix in a bit of terrain.

However, these things can be longer than many want to spend on purely tactical considerations. If the GM is proactive and the players are on top of things, then a combat can take 1/2 hour, or 40 minutes. If not, then things can start to drag and you get into a spiral with loss of interest by players that just want to get back to exploring or whatever.

So, I found that the game attained added depth when I focused on plotting encounters and really adding some more detail to them and being very selective about their plot significance.

I recall the first adventure where I really entirely brought all the tools together in their mature form. The party was around 5th level IIRC. I invented a story arc where some ancient ghostly shifter-like lycanthropes showed up, which I totally implemented as reskinned wargs and whatnot. There were a couple bigger elites that were something else reskinned, and a final boss that was a reskinned white dragon.

ALL of that took what, 30 minutes to come up with? I mean I just went through the compendium and scanned through roughly similar monsters of the levels I wanted, grabbed them, made a couple notes on appearance and flavoring powers, and that was it. Whole story arc lasted 5 or 6 sessions (I think there was a bit of a side thing at one point that took up one session). It ended with a huge climactic battle, there was a short dungeon crawl at one point, etc. I spent all my time, maybe 4 or 5 hours total, drawing up a few sketch maps, making notes on terrain, and plotting out a level's worth of encounters. I think we ended up having a few extra on-the-fly encounters too, and a couple quests got invented, along with a few added NPCs that addressed some player interests at one or another point.

I think that was awesome. The encounters were mostly reasonably well plotted. There were a few that were probably kinda just routine, but most of them I still can remember fairly well. It was a good adventure. If I'd played through a pre-written module I'd have gotten more raw material probably, but it would have required equal time and likely delivered less interesting results.

Surely if I contrast this with my old 2e games, the time needed for basic encounter nuts-n-bolts was so much more back then that I never got to consider a lot of crazy stuff or minor plot points, etc. So I relish the idea of plotting out an encounter, it is much more fun for me than creating a spell list for yet another 2e caster.

 

[darkbard]

So, I found that the game attained added depth when I focused on plotting encounters and really adding some more detail to them and being very selective about their plot significance.

I recall the first adventure where I really entirely brought all the tools together in their mature form. The party was around 5th level IIRC. I invented a story arc where some ancient ghostly shifter-like lycanthropes showed up, which I totally implemented as reskinned wargs and whatnot. There were a couple bigger elites that were something else reskinned, and a final boss that was a reskinned white dragon.

ALL of that took what, 30 minutes to come up with? I mean I just went through the compendium and scanned through roughly similar monsters of the levels I wanted, grabbed them, made a couple notes on appearance and flavoring powers, and that was it. Whole story arc lasted 5 or 6 sessions (I think there was a bit of a side thing at one point that took up one session). It ended with a huge climactic battle, there was a short dungeon crawl at one point, etc. I spent all my time, maybe 4 or 5 hours total, drawing up a few sketch maps, making notes on terrain, and plotting out a level's worth of encounters. I think we ended up having a few extra on-the-fly encounters too, and a couple quests got invented, along with a few added NPCs that addressed some player interests at one or another point.

This is all well and good (and I mean than sincerely, not ironically!), but your response focuses mainly on mechanical tweaks to monster stats. It doesn't really address [MENTION=6874615]Rolenet[/MENTION]'s questions about designing alternate combat goals, how combat was only featured at vital plot points, or even how combat advances plot in the above examples.

 

[Rolenet]

But it does answer an important question... that I didn't really ask! And that's player expectations. It seems quite clear from reading [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION]'s post that his table wasn't too excited by basic and/or long fights. That is quite important, and I overlooked this.

While I agree that "not all 4e fights are excellent and super entertaining" as you point out, still it delivers results out-of-the-box that we found entertaining enough for over 300 sessions now, which is something that can't be said for most other games I know.
But again, the dozen or so players that this involved were perfectly alright with 2+ hours fights to the last hp - so YMMV. If the table isn't thrilled by the prospect, you need to spruce things up...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is all well and good (and I mean than sincerely, not ironically!), but your response focuses mainly on mechanical tweaks to monster stats. It doesn't really address [MENTION=6874615]Rolenet[/MENTION]'s questions about designing alternate combat goals, how combat was only featured at vital plot points, or even how combat advances plot in the above examples.

I think a lot of it was just that I would kind of outline ahead what the likely story points would be where some kind of significant action would happen. Sometimes other things would come up, or the plot would turn in some less obvious direction of course, but after a lot of years of GMing I can do a quick rework of a few elements in those cases.

As for HOW to determine what is plot-critical? The players ideally should be the determinants of that. For instance they took a significant interest in the 'bad cop' character, and so they became invested in working out the various aspects of that character. They were less interested in the 'work boss' character, and the 'damsel' character, but took a proprietary interest in the 'small clever boy' character. So of course various scenes presented themselves in which those particular characters factored in some bigger way, although the 'damsel' in particular was still fairly important even though the PCs simply didn't engage with her and treated her as "that girl that needs to just listen to dad and not get in trouble" vs actually actively championing her cause or really caring much about what befell her beyond what got the story arc finished out.

Consequently I injected encounters where the 'clever boy' showed the party how to ride the log flume (and they had to keep him safe while furthering their mission) instead of some other one where something would have gone on with the girl.

If, say hypothetically, one of the PCs had decided the girl was a romantic interest, then certain obvious concomitant events could have been unfolded. As it was the actual story from the BBEG's standpoint didn't change, but the PCs just didn't follow that thread, it became mostly background.

Overall this WAS a pretty structured story arc. Some of them are more freeform. Depending on the players you've got you can foist a lot of that end of things off on them to just decide where they're going to go with stuff (I think this is pretty much [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION]'s approach).

 

[darkbard]

I think a lot of it was just that I would kind of outline ahead what the likely story points would be where some kind of significant action would happen. Sometimes other things would come up, or the plot would turn in some less obvious direction of course, but after a lot of years of GMing I can do a quick rework of a few elements in those cases.

As for HOW to determine what is plot-critical? The players ideally should be the determinants of that.

QFT

 

[pemerton]

A couple of thoughts (more about encounter design generally than solos, sorry):

(1) I don't think a lot of the stuff that [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] is talking about needs special rules. Just one example: when the PCs in my main 4e game were fighting an Aspect of Vecna on an earthmote,

The chaos sorcerer rolled a 1, pushing Vecna 1 square. Vecna failed his save and went tumbling 100' to the ledges below the earthmote. Then something hit the paladin and pushed him over the edge. At which point an Acrobatics roll was requested, to "do a Gandalf" (from the Two Towers film) and fall down on top of Vecna. The roll was successful, and the paladin dealt damage to Vecna with a successful basic attack, as well as taking damage himself for the fall.​

Page 42 is enough for most of this stuff.

(2) I think a lot of the dynamism that [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] talks about mostly comes down to setting. The first combat I ran in 4e was adapted from the old B/X module Night's Dark Terror. Some cultist-types have strung a chain across the river that the PCs are boating down, and so their boat grinds to a halt and the cultists attack.

I had a slinging cultist on the bank, some minion cultists swimming through the river to swarm the PCs' boat, and a mage + bodyguard punting on a raft to attack the PCs. There was a sandbank/island. And so as well as the fight, the PCs had local "objectives" like (i) take cover in the boat from the sling stones, (ii) get out of the water onto the sandbank, (iii) take control of the cultists' raft, etc.

The result is a lot of separate but connected elements of action, no focused fire either from cultists or PCs, a lot of mobility (including what DMG2 would call "circular paths"), etc. It plays out more like an action sequence from a film than a wargaming episode, but there's no need to force that: the set-up engenders it more or less organically.

(3) As far as objectives other than "kill 'em all" are concerned, I leave this to the players to sort out for their PCs. Sometimes there are; sometimes not - and in practice (2) can easily bleed into this sort of thing (or vice versa). If you follow the link earlier in this post, you'll see that in the Vecna-fighting session the PCs also dealt with a demon, which ended up with them binding it into service rather than fighting it. And here's a link to a write-up of a fight (with Kas and a necromancer) where the PCs goal was to "rescue" the necromancer from evil necromancers (when they started out they didn't know she was one too) and they ended up entering into Kas's service. That all emerged out of the players' engagement with the situation.

Overall, I would say that strong situation in 4e has two components: (i) PC (and therefore) player goals which are engaged by the situation; and (ii) good setting material, whether that's terrain and disposition of enemy forces for combat, or vibrant stuff in the fiction for the players to latch onto in a skill challenge. I would even say that if (ii) is carrying its weight, you can slack off a bit on (i) and still have a really fun encounter. But I wouldn't want to skimp on (ii)!

 

[darkbard]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], since the issue you address (so ably!) above comes up a lot in various iterations in this forum, I wonder if you would consider creating a new post wherein you (1) sketch out your notes and design prep for a scene, then (2) provide a write up of how it turned out in "actual play." (I have no idea whether you have any desire to do so or if you even have sufficient notes from a recent session, but....)

This way frequent experienced posters would be able to provide a direct link to this thread whenever the topic comes up. But I understand entirely if you don't have the time or desire for doing so.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION], since the issue you address (so ably!) above comes up a lot in various iterations in this forum, I wonder if you would consider creating a new post wherein you (1) sketch out your notes and design prep for a scene, then (2) provide a write up of how it turned out in "actual play."

Here's a link to a post from some years ago now - but I think it does a fair bit of what you're asking for (it's missing the monster stats, but I think these were mostly taken straight from books, with damage MM3ed).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A couple of thoughts (more about encounter design generally than solos, sorry):

(1) I don't think a lot of the stuff that @AbdulAlhazred is talking about needs special rules. Just one example: when the PCs in my main 4e game were fighting an Aspect of Vecna on an earthmote,

The chaos sorcerer rolled a 1, pushing Vecna 1 square. Vecna failed his save and went tumbling 100' to the ledges below the earthmote. Then something hit the paladin and pushed him over the edge. At which point an Acrobatics roll was requested, to "do a Gandalf" (from the Two Towers film) and fall down on top of Vecna. The roll was successful, and the paladin dealt damage to Vecna with a successful basic attack, as well as taking damage himself for the fall.​

Page 42 is enough for most of this stuff.

(2) I think a lot of the dynamism that @AbdulAlhazred talks about mostly comes down to setting. The first combat I ran in 4e was adapted from the old B/X module Night's Dark Terror. Some cultist-types have strung a chain across the river that the PCs are boating down, and so their boat grinds to a halt and the cultists attack.

I had a slinging cultist on the bank, some minion cultists swimming through the river to swarm the PCs' boat, and a mage + bodyguard punting on a raft to attack the PCs. There was a sandbank/island. And so as well as the fight, the PCs had local "objectives" like (i) take cover in the boat from the sling stones, (ii) get out of the water onto the sandbank, (iii) take control of the cultists' raft, etc.

The result is a lot of separate but connected elements of action, no focused fire either from cultists or PCs, a lot of mobility (including what DMG2 would call "circular paths"), etc. It plays out more like an action sequence from a film than a wargaming episode, but there's no need to force that: the set-up engenders it more or less organically.

(3) As far as objectives other than "kill 'em all" are concerned, I leave this to the players to sort out for their PCs. Sometimes there are; sometimes not - and in practice (2) can easily bleed into this sort of thing (or vice versa). If you follow the link earlier in this post, you'll see that in the Vecna-fighting session the PCs also dealt with a demon, which ended up with them binding it into service rather than fighting it. And here's a link to a write-up of a fight (with Kas and a necromancer) where the PCs goal was to "rescue" the necromancer from evil necromancers (when they started out they didn't know she was one too) and they ended up entering into Kas's service. That all emerged out of the players' engagement with the situation.

Overall, I would say that strong situation in 4e has two components: (i) PC (and therefore) player goals which are engaged by the situation; and (ii) good setting material, whether that's terrain and disposition of enemy forces for combat, or vibrant stuff in the fiction for the players to latch onto in a skill challenge. I would even say that if (ii) is carrying its weight, you can slack off a bit on (i) and still have a really fun encounter. But I wouldn't want to skimp on (ii)!

Sorry, this miserable excuse for a web browser doesn't really leave me the choice of editing the quote...

I think you're entirely correct that there aren't any additional rules required. This is the expected way of 4e play, ideally. I think that the writers of the DMG imperfectly conveyed it, and the writers of adventures couldn't deliver (and that in many respects begs one to ask if a commercial module actually CAN be written for 4e which utilizes the game in its true intended way).

Anyway, yeah, you build your encounters such that they cater to the elements the players want to engage, and they do so in a way that will lead to dynamic play. USUALLY its enough to have some diverse terrain and hazards or whatnot coupled with plot significance for the encounter itself.

I mean this is something you didn't specifically point out here, but your example from Night's Far Reach, the encounter is extremely significant to the plot, its the establishing event for a lot of what can happen beyond that IIRC. I'm not super familiar with the module, but certainly it isn't just some sort of "you were going down the river, this obnoxious crap happened, now survive" kind of thing. There are actual goals.

Contrast this with room 3 of a run of (IIRC) 7 rooms full of hobgoblins in KoTS which you engage with for no other more meaningful reason than "these guys are in the way". They don't offer any choices beyond the most basic tactical 'how do I kill this?' nor do they add to the story, etc. This type of encounter should simply not exist. If you feel it MUST exist for 'color' then wrap several of them together, add some minions, and make it spread over the whole 7 rooms. At least it might not be utterly static...