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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 4448291" data-attributes="member: 5834">The zombies and ghouls were part of a preset encounter. Just about any dungeon allows players to dig in. You can't force them not to use hallways and such to their advantage. The same thing was done in 3E save that caster mobs had more options to handle that than controller mobs do in 4E. I often hear the wizard complained about by players, but an enemy wizard was just as potent against the players in 3E.The solo was Sinruth from the Rivenroar adventure from Dungeon magazine. I have heard it is poorly designed, but most solos I've seen are designed in a similar fashion.Even with an extra attack, five people beating on you with encounter powers and action points makes a rather lopsided fight. Remember that a party has one second wind per character, usually two minor healings, and many utility powers provide a healing surge or some kind of temporary hit points.Solos are often outgunned. Maybe your players don't use everything at their disposal, but mine do and make shrewd power choices that often give extra healing surges or temporary hit points. That leaves a solo often outgunned in hit points with all the healing the party has. On top of that five attacks per round is vicious and when the party spend an action point, that is double their normal number of attacks and that is really vicious.I'll wait and see how the next solo fares against my party. If that solo goes down easy, then 4E truly is pathetically easy.Yep. Every edition I've had to do the same.I've run Rescue at Rivenroar, an orc horde encounter I made up, and Heathen. Two from Dungeon and one I have made up. We are also going to Keep on the Shadowfell and so far we are crushing it. My friend had to modify all the encounters to give us somewhat of a challenge.Well, to be honest we have had years of experience creating challenging encounters for 3E. So that is a big part of it.The 4E system is fairly new to us. And all the editions of D&D out of the box our players have crushed. I have to admit they are a fairly clever lot of players. They know how to synergize abilities with the best of them and love to pour over the books looking for cool combinations and ways to use their power.And we're all very picky and superstitious about our dice. Every single one of us buys dice until we find a set that gives us good rolls (and no they are not loaded). We just wait until we find our "lucky" dice. I hope I am not alone with that insanity. I know statisticians and the very practical minded don't believe in the hocus pocus of lucky or hot dice, but my friends swear by it. One guy has a set of dice he has been using for over twenty years. Another guy has five or six d20s sitting by his character and he rolls them until he finds the hot one. Another guy and myself bought a bunch of dice sets until we found the proper color to fit our character as well as a rolling nice average rolls with occasional high rolls. Maybe we go to far, but the extra time taken to find those perfect dice makes us feel better.But it's probably a combination of good tactics and a lack of familiarity with the system combined with a lowered level of lethality that make 4E feel less challenging than 3E. Once we learn to buff creatures, we can beef encounters up though I am already doubling just about every encounter (except for shadow hounds, never double the number of shadow hounds...they are too tough). I'm sure we'll get the hang of it.The thing that bothers me even more than the lack of challenge though is that with me doubling the encounters as I used to do in 3E, the combats take a huge amount of time even at low level. The mobs have so many hit points and you do so little damage that though you aren't in peril, it still takes you forever to kill things. But I'm sure my DM will get the hang of things as far as encounter design goes. He is starting to design his own monsters and play with the system. So far he is keeping it light so as not to kill us. This particular DM has killed multiple (Four I can count off the top of my head) campaigns with excessive encounters he thought we could handle. So I think he is being careful this time around. This is just a prefered style of play for our group, but we like the game to be lethal and feel like we are in backs to the wall, you are dead and so is the world if you lose types of encounters that leave us exhausted, spent, and near dead. It takes a while to get that kind of a feel with a system. Took us a bit in 3E, I'm sure we'll get it down for 4E. But 4E definitely isn't that way out of the box. Out of the box the advantage is strongly with the players. I guess that is how they wanted it.</blockquote>

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