Players dissatisfied with level of danger in 4e

[JohnSnow]

If you're going to condense combats to a single encounter in one day, you need to drastically inflate the CR. Try something 3-4 levels above the party - maybe more.

Try throwing in some traps and terrain that do damage and separate the group. My group ran thru the first two Scales of War encounters yesterday, and we had a PC go from full health to -hp with 1 hit.

Since he was the cleric, that was bad news.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

There are three primary differences with player mortality in 4th Edition when compared to 3rd Edition.

1) Low level characters are a great deal more durable.
2) Within combat there is a great deal more healing and temp hp available to the players.
3) Damage does not carry over as directly from one encounter to the next.

The first element is pretty much a wash by the time you hit about 5th to 7th level, but it does have a huge affect on the initial adventures.

For the second element, I would say it is a bit harder for me to decide how much that affect scales. At low levels, it is huge. Assuming a single leader, you have 1 healing surge per player as a given, plus 2 more from the leader, and probably a few more lingering around from other abilities. A high level cleric in D&D can do a great deal of healing, but with 4th edition you can start a round with every player either bloodied or dying, and end the round with everyone standing with some significant amount of HP restored. Against a solo creature, that is huge.

The third element is the most telling though. If you end an encounter with everyone between 2 and 7 hp, you can take a short rest, and burn 4 healing surges each and suddenly everyone is back in top form.

I will still disagree that there is not much risk of death in 4th Edition. The games I have played in have actually had enough close calls and had enough people in danger of death that I cannot claim to see the lack of danger in games I have played. What I will say is that how and when that risk shows up is different.

Within a single combat, you need to have monsters capable of consistently hitting the players, and either have the fight last a while. If you are using creatures a few levels below the PC's, or only a few at equal level, you simply will not inflict enough damage. If the PC's can clear all the monsters fast, you have the same problem. But it is absolutely possible to push the players to the brink of death and into death saves with level approprite combatants. Encounters built around single opponents wont do it, but a good mix of Minions and typical opponents can do it.

If you want to do the job across multiple encounters, then it is not about the HP you burn up, but how many healing surges you can force them to use, and whether or not you can justify hitting them before they can take a short or long rest.

Without mechanical adjustments, here are what I will suggest you try.

1) Do not get too hung up on the Defender. Getting marked is inconvenient, but you are seriously better off having a bad guy eat an opportunity attack and the -2 penalty as long as you can get around the Defender and go after the back ranks.

2) Work the situational bonus. If you do have to go after a defender, you need to dogpile the hell out of him with flanking, and hopefully have him dazed or marked or whatever else you can manage. When your creating an encounter look for potential combo's. If you have a Skirmisher who gets extra damage with combat advantage, then why not throw in a other combatants who can Daze or Stun someone.

3) Do some match making. If you have lots of minions, have them dogpile the striker. If you need to go after the defender in melee, that is where you put your Soldiers or Brutes. Put your artilery on their controllers. Put your skirmishers on someone not wearing plate armour. And put a melee guy next to the Controllers. Use your push / pull / slide to put the rogue where he cannot get combat advantage via a flank.

In general, the DM cannot count on dropping a target in 1 or 2 rounds from a single combatant. The DM will need to be able to sustain pressure for a bit longer then you would under 3rd edition.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[thecasualoblivion]

In general, the DM cannot count on dropping a target in 1 or 2 rounds from a single combatant. The DM will need to be able to sustain pressure for a bit longer then you would under 3rd edition.

END COMMUNICATION

This is another edge the PCs tend to have in 4E. PCs tend to have more abilities to facilitate sustaining pressure on a single enemy, and they have infinitely more abilities to escape or prevent being dogpiled by the enemies.

Still, monsters have enough to scare the bejesus out of them if you go for their throats. One of the things I love about this game is being able to create an encounter within the parameters set out in the core rules, fight to kill with every bit of aggression and strategy I can muster(and I'm the guy who always wins at Risk, Axis and Allies, or whatever strategy game, and I've traumatized DMs as a 4E PC), and without any fudging force them to scrape for their lives.


Its one of the best pieces of advice I can give a DM. Do your best to kill them. Within the stated guidelines of encounter building, monsters are strong enough to kill the PCs unless they wisely use their superior resources from doing so. Playing to win forces them to prevent them from doing so, and puts them in situations where they feel they are in mortal peril, which I find is even better than killing them, because you can do it over and over again. I often found in earlier editions I had to play the enemies with kid gloves, and not spam disintegrate every turn. In 4E, if you treat the PCs with kid gloves they walk all over you.

 

[S'mon]

Advice to the OP on killing PCs:

The time I killed 4/6 PCs, it was with a tribe of orcs, the party attacked their lair and the orcs responded vigorously. The orcs were level-appropriate, but there were lots of them - 34 drudges, 4 raiders, 1 berserker for the chief and 1 half-orc death mage shaman (halved hp). It was a level+7 encounter, PCs were Striker heavy (3) with 1 Bard, 1 Invoker and a Fighter who charged into the thick of the orcs. The party Invoker killed huge numbers of drudges but they weren't ready when the death mage & berserker came in after a few rounds, his fly-swarm attack really chewed them up.

My advice then for killing PCs - use *lots* of monsters, a good mix of minions and standards, plus 1 or more controllers.

Lots of monsters are generally more deadly than higher-level monsters - this is different from prior editions, where offense went up faster than defense. In 4e, if the party are missing on a '15' they're likely to retreat. If they're ploughing through swathes of enemies they're much less likely to flee, but large numbers of same-level enemies can inflict lots of damage on them.

Secondly, use waves of monsters within the same encounter - the party will be out of position dealing with the first lot, when the second wave comes in. A few more minions don't make much difference, but the death mage controller in the second wave was really bad because it further disrupted the PCs.

The gnoll/grell fight in DD4 works the same - the PCs pile in thinking the gnoll demonic scourge is the BBEG, so they're unprepared when the real threat emerges. My group then spent several rounds trying and failing to take down the grell while the gnoll huntmasters poured arrows into them.

 

[S'mon]

If your PCs drop and then stand up again, it's sensible for intelligent monsters to start shoving the unconscious ones off cliffs and into pits, or just laying the boot in.

Yeah - predator monsters may well focus on killing and dragging off a PC anyway. And if PCs start popping up again after going down - something the monsters presumably aren't used to - then all but the least intelligent will begin CDGing.

Play your monsters like they *want* to win. And use the occasional fight above EL+4.

 

[S'mon]

So, often only having one fight per day seems to be the culprit that many of you have identified. It happens that way because we only have two three-hour sessions a month, so I tend to condense combat so a single adventure doesn't take months to resolve. For the same reason, we automatically level-up ever two sessions instead of counting experience points, because we'd like to level-up more than three-four times a year.

Hmm, this doesn't follow. The Dungeon Delves are designed to give you 3 consecutive fights in a 3-hour session. You could run one of them in your available time.

I run fortnightly 4 hour sessions, 3 months on/3 off, 12 games/year, so actually less gaming than you. But I often run 1 Delve plus additional roleplay and a 4th unrelated fight in 1 session. And the PCs naturally level around once every 3 sessions from the listed XP.

You could have a lot more encounters. As it is you have deliberately made your game far easier than the default expectation.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

You could have multiple encounters per day, even if you have only one encounter per session. It requires tracking healing surge and daily power uses, of course.

You don't have to have multiple encounters per day to make it more challenging or deadly. Tougher encounters work just as well. Start wit a Party Level +4 encounter, and if you find it's not enough, add more monsters.

One "trick" might be to have two waves of enemies. Say, the PCs enter a dungeon, and they fight their first enemies. One of them runs away, and alerts another group. The party can try to stop him. If they don't a second wave of enemies arrives in 3 rounds. If they do, a second wave of enemies arrives in 6 rounds (they still hear the noise, but it takes them longer to get what is going on and where they need to go.)

This way, you can reduce the impact of the very difficult encounter - staggering the enemies advance means effectively improving the action economy to the party's benefit. But at the same time, it makes it more important for the party to use their resources wisely, and they cannot benefit from some "tricks" - like using area effects to affect all enemies, while others become more effective - like powers with encounter long durations, sustainable powers, stances, rages.

 

[Jack99]

@OP

As you have figured, your decision to only run one fight per day is what causes your issue along with the fact that you are throwing n+3 encounters at them. If you want to create deadly combats for a fully rested party, you need to push the combats to n+4, n+5, possibly even n+6 depending on level and skill of your group.

Another way to threaten them more is to have monsters focus on one character at a time (within reason of course). Preferably not the defender.

 

[Neonchameleon]

I ran that fight yesterday! 7 PCs level 3-4 vs EL 7 (for 5 PC encounter), only they didn't rest after the last fight - they heard gnolls chanting and thought they were opening a portal, not calling Grell for his dinner! So I nearly TPK'd them - again. A player didn't like having his stunned, grabbed PC dropped into the well and said it should have had to make a STR check vs Fort, same as if he wasn't stunned. The author's intent seemed clear; I compromised and said it could only move stunned PCs 1 square, more than that required a STR roll, and grells have poor STR. His PC was on the lip of the well so he went in, but it helped the other PCs survive - just.

To clarify, what I didn't like was to have my stunned PC dropped into the well with a move action and with no roll - i.e. essentially for free as far as the action economy and any other form of resources were concerned. If you'd action pointed and used that to drop Hoka down the well I wouldn't have minded anything like as much. If you'd spread it out over two turns that wouldn't have been half as annoying (i.e. grabbed and stunned Hoka turn 1, and pulled him in turn 2 giving him a chance to save or escape) that would have been better. If you'd done it in one turn using an action point, hell, it's an action point - they should be scary.

But the way you had it set up was esentially roll to hit on standard, roll to hit on minor, automatic kill on move - all within the space of one turn and as SOP from a monster very unlikely to miss (higher levelled elite soldier IIRC). It was like the old 3.5 Save or Die spells in a game set up to deliberately avoid Save or Dies (OK, so it was two easy rolls rather than one hard one to almost entirely neutralise a PC for the remainder of the encounter - and kill him if we lost).

I dunno, I must be a killer DM - 6 PC kills in 10 sessions of 4e so far, 1 raised + 5 permanent.

And four of them in one encounter facing 33(?) orcs. To be fair, I enjoy the higher difficulty level as long as I think there's something I can do about it.

 

[Narfellus]

Try increasing monster damage by 5 pts per tier, and reducing monster hit points to about 75% their normal amount. Then have monsters who are willing to deliver a death blow once a character is down and unconscious. You may be really pleased with the result.

That's basically what i've done too. It works great and the players really like the speeded up combat. They LIKE that monsters can hurt them, badly too, in a single round, but the monsters dropped faster.

I've killed 4 PCs in 4th edition, and usually it is a combination of traps and monsters. Try using that tactic. Anything that separates a PC from his allies is also very dangerous, like a dropping wall. We also had a character die from the death saving throw, so it can happen but not often. And never forget the deadliness of ongoing damage, those 10 hp of autodamage a round can quickly bring an injured PC to death's door. So while dying is certainly much harder in 4e than prior editions, it is possible.