D&D 4E The grindyness of 4e combat: anyone tried a solo monster yet?

[DracoSuave]

Well -that- dragon is actually made of higher stats than the one in the MM.... strange that.

 

[defendi]

I've done somewhere between five and ten solos, I think. The only one we've had, with six or less characters, last more than an hour was a playtest of a bad guy that was a 7th level encounter played by 3rd level characters. I actually think that we hit the point where I said "If the battle ended here, would that have been an exciting battle?" at about an hour (and that's where it's going to end in the published adventure), but we continued on after that to see if the players could defeat the monster as I'd designed it (at about 150% the normal amount of hit points). That took an hour and a half.

I have a Wednesday game where we're playtesting the third adventure (these are all Moving Shadows adventures for our Echoes of Heaven line). Those often go an hour and a half when we have all nine players show up, or when they set off an alarm and play three encounters in a row without a break.

 

[Mengu]

At 10th level, with very conservative estimates, non-strikers should do around 7 DPR, strikers should do around 10 DPR. A party of 5 with 1 striker should do around 38 DPR. A solo fight against a monster with around 400 HP's should take 10 rounds or less, if the party uses a daily here and an action point there. If every player and the monster take 1 minute to resolve their action, a 10 round fight will go for 60 minutes. If every player and the monster take 2 minutes, the fight will go for 120 minutes. In my experience it's not so much the number of rounds it takes to kill a monster that's the problem, it's more the speed with which players act.

 

[Jack99]

So far, my group's had a lot of trouble getting one more combat in a five-hour session. Everything other than a minion takes a metric ton of damage to bring down, and things get much worse if an elite comes into the fray.

I have 7 players and I easily get 3-4 fights into a 5 hour slot. Either you roleplay a lot (and then why care about the combat) or you (or your players) are very slow at executing combat. How many hours have you played? Maybe they are still unfamiliar with their characters abilities? Maybe they are poorly build. There are a lot of possibilities, aside from a problem in the system.

My last encounter was three 10th-level characters pitted against a galeb duhr and a bulette. It was only a 1400 XP encounter (not quite even 10th level) but the party still wound up giving up on the bulette and leaving. They weren't too badly hurt, they were just bored with trying to deal 204 points of damage after having exhausted the galeb duhr's 111. Once they ran out of encounter powers, they were blowing dailies just to have an alternative to the monotony of mashing at-will hotkeys.

An average encounter for 3 players at level 10 is 1500 xp. At level 9 it would be 1200 xp, so 1400 is actually a level 10 encounter. When that is said, it does sound like your group is either poorly built for damage, or something. Wizard, cleric and paladin sounds realistic enough. If this is not the case, maybe it is about their choice of powers or something.

 

[timbannock]

The white dragon in the DMG adventure. Basically, all PCs blew their daily and encounter powers in the 1st round, then spent the remaining 14 rounds using their at-wills.

Can't find the link at the moment, but I added some of those comments by Mike Mearls from the "making solos more fun" article to the White Dragon at the end of the DMG adventure: icy stalactites that the dragon or the players could knock down onto someone, ice pillars that could be smashed, a lip around the outer edge of the arena.

All-in-all, it was 12 or 13 rounds of pure awesome. 2 PCs, each running 2 characters, plus a fifth character being NPC'd -- warlock, wizard, paladin, warlord and rogue. It was a blast. The PCs could interact with the terrain, could find the terrain used against them, and the dragon's relentless pounding after he went bloodied was nasty. Two players went down, but BOTH ROLLED NATURAL 20s on their recovery rolls, allowing them to healing surge immediately. That turned the tide and sent Szartharrax to his grave, though the PCs were pretty busted up for their troubles ;-)

 

[Gort]

Your group needs more strikers, my friend.

When I was DMing for a party of a fighter, warlord, cleric and wizard, fights were slow and safe.

Now that I'm DMing for a party of a paladin, cleric, rogue, ranger and wizard, I worry about the monster living long enough to use all of its cool powers! Seriously, going from a party where everyone does D8+4 damage a turn to one with a couple of players doing double that will certainly reduce the "grindyness" of the fights.

But to be honest, if you want to stick with the same party, simply increase monster damage by 20% and reduce their hitpoints by 20%. That'll give your players trouble and make fights faster all round.

 

[Goonalan]

My 5 players (Pal, Cl, Rog, Rgr, Wiz) nailed the White Dragon in the Kobold Hall in 3 rounds, I changed the stats to match those in the MM fearing a TPK, after reading accounts of the fight here. They managed three crits in the third round, and did a total of 120 HP damage on the thing- it left them bemused somewhat- is that it, a dragon dead in three rounds, at first level.

They have more problems in densely populated combats, particularly in confined spaces, especially when the enemy leader is at the back and cannot be effectively targeted, doubly so when the defenders (Cl & Pal) usually are being swamped.

That said my next solo is going to be much harder, I hope.

 

[Ander00]

Our longest solo fight so far, which did end up as a rather long grind, was three 18th level PCs (warlord, paladin, wizard) versus an elder blue dragon (which wasn't played very aggressively). Things definitely go faster if you have a striker or two, which shouldn't come as a surprise.


cheers

 

[Iron Sky]

We've had 2 "solo" fights, though the first one was vs an elite otoyugh(when we were level 2) and the second against a white dragon(when we were at level 3). The Otoyugh lasted two or three rounds, no daillies used. The dragon took full daily/encounter spam and lasted 3 rounds.

Party: Dragonborn healing/melee cleric, elven bastard sword/longbow ranger, halfling dagger rogue, half-elf fey warlock.

 

[Hawke]

I've found that elite and solo monsters work best when paired with an interesting locations. Doesn't necessarily mean it has to be particularly dangerous or evil to the characters... just enough to make things dynamic with lots of movement, blocked views, positioning, and even better if there may be some options to use the environment against the boss (see icicles from a post or two above).

If it gets grindy with the dailies and encounters gone, let the characters develop their own skill challenge on how to take the monster down through nonstandard means. It ends up having a movie cinematic feel to it that you may not want when fighting a bunch of low level guys but seems really cool to see a larger foe come down that way.

We're striker heavy, though, so our solos and brutes are being eaten alive pretty quickly and have only run into a "well, crap... now what..." a few times.