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I think you're right and that's the way to go. That said... PCs actually make Endurance checks to fight diseases? :-) My players just go straight for the Cure Disease ritual.

And it took six months of weekly gaming to gain a level. And we LIKED it! :-)

My latest 4e blog post: Arcane Springboard: 4e Combat is Too Damned Long (Part 2): Lessons from Torg

I hear you. I addressed this a bit in a recent blog post: Arcane Springboard: 4e Combat is Too Damned Long - What We're Doing About it. I'm also planning to add to that soon. In the mean time, one suggestion from Mike Mearls is to halve monster hp, but give them a damage bonus equal to...

Correct. However, dazed (save ends) is not the same as dazed and weakened (save ends).

I certainly feel like some people are thinking I kill babies or something. Perhaps I should have used a different example on how to scare the players. One of my beefs with 4e is that there is no 'fear' in D&D anymore. The non-swingyness of the combat (a subject for another blog post), plus...

Don't get me wrong...by posting this, I'm not saying that Level Draining like this should be put back into 4e. However, I'm doing it to illustrate that it theoretically is possible to do so, and without too much difficulty. Using the Disease Track is a good idea, although I think that Remove...

My latest Monster of the Week entry on my blog: Arcane Springboard: Monsters of the Week: Death Wight and Deathterror Wight It reintroduces the concept of level draining to 4e. One new way to scare the crap out of your players.

I wonder if this is the elephant in the room. How often has the result NOT been in question...even from the beginning of the combat? The PCs are going to win an equal level encounter. They're going to win a Level +3 encounter. It might just take them longer. It might take them some more...

The problem is that glancing at the War of the Burning Sky, which I'm very tempted to run, would still take a long time to do, just because there still are lots of encounters. The problem is that even if you have just 'important' encounters, the time spent on those will still dominate the time...

Merric's thread actually gave me an epiphany over what has been bugging me the last six months playing 4e. We're going to try doing mini-less combat now.

We've decided that we're going to dump miniatures. Ulimately I think that the consequences of using them in 4e is what is causing the issue with long combats: Arcane Springboard: 4e Combat is Too Damned Long - What We're Doing About it.

I think you're right, as long as there is a good variety of monsters. However, there is another issue: Combat time. It's one thing to have three rapid encounters with a variety of kobolds...but if each battle is taking 60-90 minutes, I don't want to spend the majority of two 3 hour sessions...

The issue isn't just making them harder. The issue is making them harder without having a substantial increase in combat length. You can easily throw more monsters at the party, or making them all higher level, but that also is going to substantially increase the amount of time needed to...

I think you're going through some really intense contortions to say that 'rest' doesn't mean 'extended rest' or 'short rest'. If they'd intended it to be Extended rest, it should have been in the errata.

Another issue is that the threat against players drops dramatically in Paragon. I've read that it recovers somewhat in Epic, but I'm not sure why.

To me, this is the big thing. It's like hockey. It's not lots of goals that's important...it's lots of scoring _chances_. You want the players to get to the edge of dying, but then using their Awesomeness to avoid it. But you do need to get to the edge.

It does. I've found it does skew things towards the PCs, because that first monster goes down quicker, to the point that it might only get off one action. This is especially true for Artillery monsters, which I found the strikers could actually bloody with one blow. This results in a very...

This too. I'm just reading Labyrinth of Madness (from 2e) for converting it to 4e. I don't see anything even _remotely_ like it in 4e. Puzzles have been completely missing from 4e as far as I can tell. As it is, I'm spending some of my time and money on an old 2e adventure that WotC doesn't...

This. I've become very disillusioned with Dungeon over the past year. I'm just getting less and less use out of it. In fact, if it weren't for the Monster Builder I'd probably dump my DDI sub. I loved the Eberron conversion article for Keep on the Shadowfell, and was very disappointed when...