D&D 4E Changing the Combat Parameters of 4th Edition

[Myrhdraak]

Now, if you create a port of some 5e module into 4e, then the question might be more like how much is it reliant on skilled play and how much is a story-based adventure? I'd guess that most of the 5e adventures are pretty close to 4e in that sense, and not so much like 1e. I base this on the number of character options you get at start in 5e and the way 5e's rules generally work. Its not a game where you'd want to die from a stray arrow and roll a new character.

When 4th Edition hit the shelves I started playing it straight as written in published adventures (with some story changes and monster upgrades to the higher Damage output levels), and I must say that the party has been near death much fewer times than in my old 1st to 3.5 Edition game play. Yet we love the strategic battles, don't get me wrong - but I feel that I might not want to turn every battle into strategic combat - and I want to see that fear of death in my players eyes a little more often.

So when I tried to return to my old campaign and upgrade it to 4th Edition I started looking into what aspects of the game I could tweak in order to make it play a little different.
- Reduced combat length (solved with less monster and PC HP)
- Make it a little dealier (Reduced HP increases impact of chance)
- Allow me to mix strategic battles (2 hours sessions) with small skirmish battles (½ hour session) that still had some tangible impact on following battles

I really like the new adventure arcs that are coming our from WotC (wish they had done it from the start in 4th Edition as well), but I am interested in being able to more easily take 5th Edition material and add it to my old campaign without major rework. I am also interested in trying out bounded accuracy just to see what flexibility it allows me as a DM when building encounters.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

When 4th Edition hit the shelves I started playing it straight as written in published adventures (with some story changes and monster upgrades to the higher Damage output levels), and I must say that the party has been near death much fewer times than in my old 1st to 3.5 Edition game play. Yet we love the strategic battles, don't get me wrong - but I feel that I might not want to turn every battle into strategic combat - and I want to see that fear of death in my players eyes a little more often.

So when I tried to return to my old campaign and upgrade it to 4th Edition I started looking into what aspects of the game I could tweak in order to make it play a little different.
- Reduced combat length (solved with less monster and PC HP)
- Make it a little dealier (Reduced HP increases impact of chance)
- Allow me to mix strategic battles (2 hours sessions) with small skirmish battles (½ hour session) that still had some tangible impact on following battles

I really like the new adventure arcs that are coming our from WotC (wish they had done it from the start in 4th Edition as well), but I am interested in being able to more easily take 5th Edition material and add it to my old campaign without major rework. I am also interested in trying out bounded accuracy just to see what flexibility it allows me as a DM when building encounters.

Yeah, I think the idea in 4e, being story-oriented is that character death is more of a CHOICE than a random event. You might be pushed to that choice by various misfortunes, but its basically an upping of the stakes, or an actual plot choice of the player to achieve his character's goals by self-sacrifice. This isn't something that came up much in older editions of the game. 5e I think can play the same way, though honestly I'm not overly familiar with 5e official adventures. We played through the first module, Phandelver, pretty straight. It definitely has some plot elements you could use, though it seemed like it could also be played as a fairly straight crawl with several locations to tackle.

Anyway, a 4e game COULD thus involve a lot less character death, if the players are really into taking their PCs all the way to 30 and there aren't any group changes or new characters coming in. 4e DOES differ from AD&D in that it doesn't rely on any level of troop play at all, any new PC would be expected to join at-level, not come in as a level 1 character, which is what 1e certainly seems to expect by RAW (or you start with a henchman if you want to not be level 1 again). So, it IS different. Not explicitly less lethal though. I did kill plenty of 4e characters in my games. Honestly I don't think I killed 1e characters left and right either though, so it was probably roughly equal in my play.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I am interested in being able to more easily take 5th Edition material and add it to my old campaign without major rework.

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but there's really not much of value to be gleaned from 5e. Lift Adv/Dis mechanics, perhaps, or adapting downtime rules somehow, for instance. 5e adventures are necessarily designed around attrition - you can run them in 4e, but you'll have these rather trivial-feeling challenges.

If you want to take up TotM, for another instance, you'd be better off looking at 13A or Wrecan's SARN-FU for ideas.

I am also interested in trying out bounded accuracy just to see what flexibility it allows me as a DM when building encounters.

BA is just the treadmill with smaller numbers. Tweaking monsters to conform to that is easy enough, but no easier than just tweaking them to within the workable +/- 4 levels of the party would have been (nor does doing so give quite as good results as shifting secondary role to bring them into that range, IMHO).

 

[Myrhdraak]

Here is my calculations on the Fighter - Defender role. As you can see the remaining HP after a combat with a monster of equal level is roughly 27% (which is lower than the Rogue). The reason is that the rogue deals more damage an manages to finish the battle faster. However, as the Fighter have much more Healing Surges than the Rogue, he only consumes 17% of his total HS resources (HS+4). This is equal to 5,88 encounters, i.e. much more than the four we saw with the Rogue. So in an average party I would guess that the average number of encounters before the party need to take an extended rest is most likely something like 5 encounters (4+6)/2 = 5, as you have a distribution of different roles in the adventuring group.



So if we from this concludes that 4th Edition was most likely built from a 5 encounter model before an extended rest, with plenty of 5 minutes short rests in between every encounter, what would the impact be for the Fighter and the Rogue if these 5 encounters was instead divided in 3 blocks with two 1 hour short rests in between?

 

[The Fighter-Cricket]

Hey guys, thank you for all of your good ideas. I took notes on how to structure encounters without them being single fights but rather "waves" with time between them. This is something that I will definitely try out in my next sessions. I love the tactical battles of 4E and like to do fights that really matter. But sometimes it just feels right that the PCs stumble upon a rabble band of unwashed orc to do some quick stabbing and getting stabbed. Maybe this approach will do the trick.

 

[Myrhdraak]

If we now combines the Rogue + Fighter and let them combine their HPs and Healing Surges, in order to be able to simulate a party where the Defender tries to get the attacks directed towards him/her as a defender, we can start to emulate what would happen in this combined "party" when we force five 4th Edition encounters on this party, but only allow them to have 2 Short Rests. The result is shown in the diagram below. The red line show the HP remaining (expressed in HS value, 4 HS represents 100% of Max HP) for the "average" party member after having faced off 5/3=1.66 encounters of level equal challenge. The blue line shows the remaining HP just before the extended rest, having faced three 1.66 encounters with two one hour short rest in between. As can be seen, has the healing surges not been enough to heal all the damage taken during the three tough encounters at some levels.



I have not taken into account temp HP, some magic items, external healing (above the use of healing surges), etc. that might have benefitted the party, but most likely this looks like a little too tough challenge - at least to be used as a base line. I have also taken away 2 HS for each player to regain encounter powers during the Short Rests, so that impacts the results as well (which would not have been the case under normal 4th Edition rules).

If I instead try to adjust to this later fact and instead emulates that I run four normal 4th Edition level equal encounters during three periods with two Short Rests in between, i.e. 4/3=1.33 encounters of level equal challenge, I get another result:



Here the blue line is hidden beneath the red line as the Healing Surges is enough to recover all the damages after the two Short Rests, so the result becomes the same before the Extended Rest. As can bee seen this is most likely a more stable encounter design to use as a base line for encounter design.

 

[Ameoboid]

So really the only problem that I see and can't work through with the idea of "No Recovering Encounter Powers Until Short Rest" wave mechanic is at the low-level range when PCs only have 2-3 at a time. Now say that they are running through a 4 room dungeon, Short Rests take and hour and we are running this area as a full encounter in waves progression. Party of 3, each blows an encounter power in room 1, none in 2, each one in room 3. That leaves one guy with an encounter power and each with their daily for the "Boss" room. Works out fine there but any extra rooms/encounters tacked on before the short rest leave them with only At-Wills (which aren't bad to only have I know, it just doesn't give the feeling of 'Oomph' from Encounter Powers).

This isn't an issue per say, just an observation. I really like the idea itself, I am just trying to think of how to implement it at the very beginning so the players become used to it right off the bat, and letting them still feel capable, rather than switching down the line. (New group is starting up, running 4E for a bunch that have never played the edition)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So really the only problem that I see and can't work through with the idea of "No Recovering Encounter Powers Until Short Rest" wave mechanic is at the low-level range when PCs only have 2-3 at a time. Now say that they are running through a 4 room dungeon, Short Rests take and hour and we are running this area as a full encounter in waves progression. Party of 3, each blows an encounter power in room 1, none in 2, each one in room 3. That leaves one guy with an encounter power and each with their daily for the "Boss" room. Works out fine there but any extra rooms/encounters tacked on before the short rest leave them with only At-Wills (which aren't bad to only have I know, it just doesn't give the feeling of 'Oomph' from Encounter Powers).

This isn't an issue per say, just an observation. I really like the idea itself, I am just trying to think of how to implement it at the very beginning so the players become used to it right off the bat, and letting them still feel capable, rather than switching down the line. (New group is starting up, running 4E for a bunch that have never played the edition)

I'm not sure I follow. Presumably the PCs have encounter powers, and then they refresh those at the short rest, right? So anything that happened before that has no impact on that part of their economy. As long as they didn't chew up a lot of HS, AP, or use daily powers, they should be fine. If they DID, well, that's the resource game! They will have to muddle through, or back off and suffer whatever plot consequence might be levied for giving the monsters a chance to react.

I think you can also safely have a couple minions, some fairly innocuous traps, etc as a sort of 'front porch' to the main wave encounter. These are probably more atmospheric than challenging, but a few hit points of damage to a low level PC can ratchet up the tension a little bit.

 

[Ameoboid]

I'm not sure I follow. Presumably the PCs have encounter powers, and then they refresh those at the short rest, right? So anything that happened before that has no impact on that part of their economy. As long as they didn't chew up a lot of HS, AP, or use daily powers, they should be fine. If they DID, well, that's the resource game! They will have to muddle through, or back off and suffer whatever plot consequence might be levied for giving the monsters a chance to react.

I think you can also safely have a couple minions, some fairly innocuous traps, etc as a sort of 'front porch' to the main wave encounter. These are probably more atmospheric than challenging, but a few hit points of damage to a low level PC can ratchet up the tension a little bit.

Should have specified increasing the time of a short rest to an hour as many have suggested.

Looking at it again, I think it's more of a disconnect in my thought process on it. I'm not giving the party enough credit for handling things on their own, and trying to give them an ideal situation or such. Let 'em struggle says I.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Should have specified increasing the time of a short rest to an hour as many have suggested.

Looking at it again, I think it's more of a disconnect in my thought process on it. I'm not giving the party enough credit for handling things on their own, and trying to give them an ideal situation or such. Let 'em struggle says I.

Suffering builds character!