D&D 4E What 5E needs to learn from 4E

[slobo777]

Not being a 4e player I'm curious; what about 4e boss fights makes them exciting? Last I heard (before reading this thread), they were considered a slog.

I think the OP is basically talking about 4E's highly detailed dynamic combats, and how they add a huge amount of colour to a combat scene. Typically PCs and monsters are knocked around the board, need to maneuver carefully, and suffer then throw off various short-term disadvantages. You don't necessarily want that detail all the time (or even most of the time). But a climactic combat encounter would be a good point to break them out.

I think the much-trailed tactical combat module will be a big deal towards this. It should hopefully be possible to play a mix of quick TotM mapless encounters and bigger more detailed set pieces. That would definitely suit my group. What would spoil it is needing to build PCs that play well in one or other combat style (e.g. if tactical combat was linked to feats, which would encourage games to either use it all the time or not at all).

Edit: So you could replace "boss battle" in the OP with "final climactic battle" and not get too worried about solos versus other monster types. The point is the 4E includes lots of game elements that mean the tactical skirmish game rarely disappoints (as a skirmish game), but that an unwanted side effect of this is takes so long to play it squeezes out other fun things players like to have in a D&D game.

 

[Mercurius]

Not being a 4e player I'm curious; what about 4e boss fights makes them exciting? Last I heard (before reading this thread), they were considered a slog.

I'm sure someone will answer better than I, but for me it is options and variety and the tactical nature of movement, which is largely due to powers and the battle grid. The problem with 4E in general, though, is that all of its strengths are the other side of its weaknesses. For example, the options in 4E combat largely come from having powers, and from the monsters having a ton of options but no useless ones; the other side of this is the potential for the grind, and of course the condition-heavy powers that RangerWickett mentions that are game breakers. And of course the downside of the battle grid is for attention to be fused to the table and thus lose the spark of imagination.


5E needs to learn both what to do and what not to do from 4E: options are good, the slog and grind are not. Tactical combat and the battlemap is good, but having to use it for every encounter is not.

However, another way to look at this is to examine the narrative sequence of combat then figure out what sort of rules best accommodate it. In my opinion a good combat usually follows this sequence:

1) Combat starts, PCs are scared and think they're all going to die (in some variation or degree; they could be cocky and then quickly realize the fight won't be a walk in the park).
2) Combat goes back and forth and no one is sure how it will turn out.
3) PCs, through heroic effort and/or a critical hit or three, take the upper hand.
4) PCs enjoy a period of "piling on" and then winning the combat.

The problem with 4E is that #4 is often (usually, even) waaaaaay too long. IMO it should be maybe a round and that's it, to give everyone a parting shot, but sometimes it takes rounds (and an hour or more) to finish a combat even when the result is known. This has been addressed by increasing monster damage and decreasing monster HP - I've often addressed it by DM Fiat, just reducing monster HP or giving a PC a killing blow even when they don't really kill the creature (for example, if a 400 HP monster is reduced to 70 HP and then a PC gets a crit and does 60 HP of damage, I end the combat, whether by saying the monster dies - is decapitated or somesuch dramatic effect - or have it fall and be dying, and the PCs can coup de grace it, or have mercy on it and feed it sweetmeats or whatever they want).

Anyhow, I'm guessing the proper HP balance will be built into 5E, or at least they are just scaling everything back to begin with. It is also sometimes addressed by monsters having a special power, or allies joining the fray, but even then there is always a point when the result is known and it becomes routine to just finish the beastie off. Again, a short period of this is enjoyable - but it really should just be a round (IMO).

 

[Tony Vargas]

Not being a 4e player I'm curious; what about 4e boss fights makes them exciting? Last I heard (before reading this thread), they were considered a slog.

Nothing particularly makes them /more/ exciting than a good battle against other monster types (except, perhaps, the barely-tenable all-minion encounter). MM3 and latter Solos are pretty well-designed to be a good and interesting challenge. They'll have a fairly large number of powers, some particularly brutal ones on infrequent recharge, and some 'action preservation' traits or powers that let them keep fighting in the face of attempted 'lockdowns.' Put together, it can make for a battle in which the Solo opens strong, establishing that it's a bad ass, and doesn't go down easily, with at least some tactics or meaningful player choices or surprises of one sort or another happening in the mean time.

But, an Elite also has some of that, and some variety provided by a few other monsters, and a 'standard' encounter has that variety, with movement, positioning, terrain, and tactics (including very simple tactics like focus fire) becoming correspondingly more important as the number of enemies increases. Minion fights, OTOH, are pretty blah, with every hit killing a minion and the minions not putting out variable damage (nor even significant damage, unless they're some ranged minions concentrating fire or something).

5e, so far, has monsters two kinds of monsters, AFAICT, they have 'boss' monsters that are essential leaders, synergizing with lesser monsters in some way, and regular monsters that are various size blocks of hit points with a distinctive ability of some sort. With bounded accuracy and with damage scaling more dramatically, a monster can take on a whole party at low level and be little more than a mook at high level, with the same stats. That's unlikely to deliver the kind of solo fights 4e does, so there'd have to be something more added to get there.

Though, I'm not sure why the OP wants only solo battles to be interesting...

 

[SLOTHmaster]

The problem with 4E is that [URL=http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=4]#4 [/URL] is often (usually, even) waaaaaay too long.

That's what I'd heard.

 

[RangerWickett]

In 4e's conversion of War of the Burning Sky, a lot of quick battles we had beforehand became chunky 'epic battles of epicness,' because that's what 4e does. 4e wasn't really built to let you sneak up on a couple of goblin sentries and kill them, then sneak up on a room full of 5 goblins and take them out in 2 rounds, and so on until you clear out the whole warren.

4e does dramatic fights well. It doesn't handle dungeon crawling as well, though, because you want to get fights over in a couple minutes.

Now, because 4e did not give a damn about justifying how NPCs and monsters get their powers, you could design really nice, dynamic combats. Bosses could do stuff like weave through the party attacking everyone once, then creating a wall of fire in the path they ran, splitting the party in two. You didn't have to create a chain of 10 feats or a special spell to do that. You just came up with something that seemed interesting, looked at a table to gauge about how much damage it should do and with what attack bonus (lower the damage if you want it to not be a threat, raise the damage if the enemy is more powerful than the PCs), and voila. Unique villain, designed in less than an hour.

I made a Four Winds Dragon that, whenever he lost 20% of his HP, would split into four smaller dragons with different powers, to harass the party. Each had a small amount of HP, and when they were all destroyed, the big dragon would reform and switch tactics with new tricks and magic. The battle was epic and fun.

Likewise, with novel design of smaller monsters, you could have an 'evil adventuring party' without going overboard with the prep. The final fight against the goblin chieftain and his bodyguards might involve a goblin witch doctor who has a few spells, two scoundrels who scamper around and are hard to corner, the chieftain himself, his pet warg, and a dozen minion goblins who die in one hit. The other foes would require 3 or 4 hits to take down, and would have a nice mix of tactics, but you could fit everyone's stats on one page, and they'd require much less brain processing power than a fully-fleshed-out NPC using player character rules.

 

[Scylla]

The problem with 4E is that [URL=http://www.enworld.org/forum/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=4]#4 [/URL] is often (usually, even) waaaaaay too long. IMO it should be maybe a round and that's it, to give everyone a parting shot, but sometimes it takes rounds (and an hour or more) to finish a combat even when the result is known.

Absolutely. It's gotten to the point where I'm sorely tempted in the current 4e campaign I'm running to simply declare combats finished when the outcome is obvious, rather than waste another (precious to my meet-once-a-month group) half hour.

My pet theory is that inflated monster HPs are in no small part to blame. PC criticals and some powers, especially Dailies, can do a lot of damage and the designers didn't want the critters dying in a single blow, so they jacked up the hit points. The result however slowed most combat to a tedious whittle-fest.

A fellow 4e DM and I recently compared notes are we agreed that 2 or 3 combats per 5-hour session is about right, and a 4th combat is icing on the cake. Recent experiments with 1e yielded something like 12 combats per 5-hour session—we need to head back in that direction.

 

[Blackwarder]

I don't think it's a matter of 4e being awesome as much as it a matter of 4e having good monster design for it system, and that somthing 5e should try to keep.

Warder

 

[Raith5]

I agree that solos were done well in 4th and that monsters generally had interesting abilities - including out of turn abilities. And sure there was a downside in 4 th because sometimes the fights can drag on.

However I think big boss battles were also interesting in4th because of what pcs were able to do. Encounter and daily abilities, action points, second wind, out of turn abilities all added a level of strategic choice and granularity I have not seen in any previous edition of d and d. Sure this choice can slow things down but these choices really shine in the big boss battles.

 

[Abraxas]

OK, I have to disagree. Solo boss fights in 4E was one of the things I disliked (probably the thing I disliked most). Perhaps my players were unusual, but solo boss fights were the thing that contributed most to novaing. It was all about doing as much damage as possible as fast as possible and making sure the critter was stunned when it went bloodied so it couldn't trigger it's "when bloodied X happens" powers. The "fixes" in later MMs only aggravated this problem. In our epic levels the boss fights were just downers and most times we just wanted the game to be over - we didn't care if we won or lost - it was just so boring and frustrating.

What 5E should take from 4E is guidelines for general monster design. The combats that we found most entertaining were with groups of monsters - perhaps with an elite or two thrown in - with abilities that worked well together but required different tactics to overcome. If it were up to me the 4E solo type monsters would be an add on module and not the norm.

 

[Tony Vargas]

In 4e's conversion of War of the Burning Sky, a lot of quick battles we had beforehand became chunky 'epic battles of epicness,' because that's what 4e does. 4e wasn't really built to let you sneak up on a couple of goblin sentries and kill them, then sneak up on a room full of 5 goblins and take them out in 2 rounds, and so on until you clear out the whole warren.

4e's encounter guidelines are for at least modestly challenging or meaningful encounters. Nothing stops the system from being used for trivial encounters, though. A couple of minions at a guard post, a few more in a room - exactly what you're looking for. I've done such things before by incorporating several such trivial encounters into a single ongoing skill challenge. Each failure presents you with a small minion encounter that you must silence ASAP or the enemy is alerted and stiffer opposition will come looking for you. It can supplement or substitute for more traditional dungeon-crawling with a mapper & caller and so forth.