D&D 4E 4E combat and non-combat timing

[Rughat]

First, I really like this thread. I had been thinking about a similar problem for an adventure I was creating, and this thread has given me lots of great ideas.

I guess a highpoint of the scenario is transparency. Already from the beginning the party can see where enemy guards are located, and can start guessing their responses (and response time). The adventure designer commits to his reinforcements, not bringing them out of a hat. The intervals the reinforcements arrive at become a function of the castle layout and the PC's cleverness, rather than some arbitrary measure of "dramatic appropriateness".

I think I see. I think I was trying to address the wrong issue before. I think what you are trying to do is give a player who is interested in strategic planning a larger canvas to plan on than just one encounter. Right now, 4e supports planners thinking out how to work inside of an encounter: "I'm going to move over here, take the OA, so I can set up the flank and pin down the artillery." What it doesn't support as well is strategic planning across encounters: "If we take out the guards quickly, we can rush into the castle before the defenses are ready, take out the boss, and escape without getting tied down." In 4e, all of those encounters are generally pre-planned. Sure, the DM can change that, but the lack of transparency that you mentioned means that the players don't know if that change will happen, or what the change will be. If taking a risk in trying to take out the guards doesn't get me any advantage later on, why should I do it if I don't have to?

So how do you link encounters strategicly, and let the players see that, and how the players can affect those links? Is this (something like) the core issue you are seeing? If so, I've got an idea, but I need to kick it around some more before I'm ready to post it.

 

[LittleFuzzy]

Plenty of other good suggestions here. It sounds like you're trying to convert an older adventure and are trying to do it without too much redesigning. That's unfortunate. I've been working on a conversion myself to finish out a particular campaign and it's seemed to me that getting the same feel from it with 4e required a lot of redesigning. It was certainly possible, 4e has lots of flexibility, but it required a number of changes that I was at first relunctant to make.

One idea I haven't seen mentioned here that might work as a "quick fix" for you with your adventure, make the guards "tough" minions. Not ones that go down with a single hit. I've seen a number of suggestions on how to implement that sort of thing bandied about on this board since 4e came out. Minions that actually take two hits, minions that are auto-killed by a crit, two normal hits, or three damage-on-miss effects, etc. Prevents the wizard from just clearing everything, and also potentially allows players to deal with guards coming in to support their solo captain. The players would have to divert some resources to taking out these minion-plus guards while also trying to handle the solo. You communicate the weakness/toughness of the enemies your players will face to them *so they can make their plans with it in mind* by setting up an opportunity for them to fight some guards earleir.

I do suspect that making the guard captain a solo just isn't going to create the sort of effect you want. As has been said, a solo is designed as a bit of grind-ish fight. As much as you don't want to do it, it might be better off to make the guard captain an elite or normal Leader, backed up by some other guards, possibly the same minion-plus types, or tougher sergeants or something. If you want to add a hard time-limit, you can also have sergeants organizing a group of elite guards to rush the interlopers and take them out, or even just lots of minions to grab, restrain, and overwhelm the party.

 

[Blackbrrd]

The best suggestion so far seems to be about how the fort is manned. If they aren't waiting for an attack, at most 1/3 of the guards will be on duty at any time except guard change.

In an ordinary situation you wouldn't have more than maybe 1/6 to 1/12 of the guards awake at the middle of the night. Even if the party starts a fight somewhere, an alarm won't necessarily go off immidiatly.

A round in 4th edition is 6 seconds. A sleeping guard would probably take 1-2 minutes to get out of the room he is in, if he isn't immidiatly attacked. That is 10-20 rounds.

The PC's should be able to close doors behind them, start a fire or whatnought to disperse, divide and confuse the guards. Setting fire to the stables for instance would create major mayhem.

Let us say you have a fort with 40 guards. Make 20 of them minions and 20 of them about the same levels as the party (+/- one level). Let 6 of the minions be the night-guards + one regular "sergeant".

The party has to attack at the dead of night:
Break in to the main part of the fort and take out nearly all the night watch people.
Create diversions to keep the rest of the fort of their back
Take out a small force who rallys to give the leader some time to get awake
Take out the leader
Escape before the rest of the garrison takes them out.

You might want to allow them one "strategic" short break, or maybe two for taking objectives, like taking out the night guards and creating the diversions.

 

[CapnZapp]

Wow! This thread really turned up some really good suggestions after all!

Thanks all.

Regards,
Zapp

 

[CapnZapp]

Right now, 4e supports planners thinking out how to work inside of an encounter: "I'm going to move over here, take the OA, so I can set up the flank and pin down the artillery." What it doesn't support as well is strategic planning across encounters: "If we take out the guards quickly, we can rush into the castle before the defenses are ready, take out the boss, and escape without getting tied down."

Exactly right!

I'm not a minis gamer. I'm interested in telling stories, sharing experiences. Combat is an integral part of that, but it's far from the only element.

Exact square-by-square optimizations, area effect placements, whether this or that monster should be pushed one square bore me. Yawn.

In a rpg, that is. I like boardgames too, and I'm sure I have played a good boardgame at least once that included decision-making like this.

In 4e, all of those encounters are generally pre-planned.

You mean spoon-fed.

This I associate with newbie-friendliness. And old-school-ness. Back in the day, we were all newbs.

I cannot wait until the day Wizards moves out of the simplistic-dungeons-with-encounters-that-doesn't-interact model.

Again. I really thought we'd be free of that. Boy was I wrong.

 

[LittleFuzzy]

I cannot wait until the day Wizards moves out of the simplistic-dungeons-with-encounters-that-doesn't-interact model.

Again. I really thought we'd be free of that. Boy was I wrong.

Hardly fair. There are numerous ways to do it, and you'd even mentioned a few yourself. You didn't like any of them because you decided to treat some other arbitrary rule as inviolate and you couldn't get the results you wanted treating them that way. You also made it quite clear that one of your primary obstacles is your players decision-making.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

Problem is, with 4E, reinforcements will have plenty of time to arrive before each squad of guards have been killed off. That is, compared to, say, 3E, you can move much longer in the same timeframe it takes to kill a creature.

Surely this is down to you, the DM? You seem to be insisting that these other guards will have "plenty of time" to arrive - but this is only the case if you decide it to be so. You're the DM, you're running the game, and those reinforcements turn up as and when you want them to and at no other time.

If it bugs you, then how about having the guard commander yell something like "I'll handle these puny wretches, you guards check to see if there are any more of them!" or similar.

 

[Mathew_Freeman]

You mean spoon-fed.

This I associate with newbie-friendliness. And old-school-ness. Back in the day, we were all newbs.

I cannot wait until the day Wizards moves out of the simplistic-dungeons-with-encounters-that-doesn't-interact model.

Again. I really thought we'd be free of that. Boy was I wrong.

Hang on, I'm fairly sure he means pre-planned, as that was what he said.

I'm not sure I understand what your alternative is to "pre-planned" encounters, then. Can you explain?

To me, a pre-planned encounter means an encounter that the DM has thought out ahead of time to be a suitable challenge for the party. In some sandbox games, such an encounter might be deliberately too hard for the PC's to handle, but in most D&D games, AFAIK, this sort of work is pretty standard.

 

[Rughat]

Exactly right!

I'm not a minis gamer. I'm interested in telling stories, sharing experiences. Combat is an integral part of that, but it's far from the only element.

Cool - I wasn't quite sure if that was your goal. Though, it sounds like this is less because you have a tactical player who wants this, and instead you feel that a set of pre-planned encounters isn't a story...

You mean spoon-fed.

This I associate with newbie-friendliness. And old-school-ness. Back in the day, we were all newbs.

I cannot wait until the day Wizards moves out of the simplistic-dungeons-with-encounters-that-doesn't-interact model.

Again. I really thought we'd be free of that. Boy was I wrong.

Hold up - keep in mind, that statement sounds pretty negative and insulting to those of us who like this style of game. I'm sure you didn't mean that, but it is hard to get nuance in forum posts.

Also, this sounds like a different concern. Ensuring that the encounters change based upon the story means that the encounters change based upon the choice the players make. Giving the players tactical control means that you need to change what the encounters are based on the choices the players make, and the players need to know mechanically how thier choices affect those changes. Tactical play doesn't always create a good story - great tactics mean that the good guys win without excitement or risk. Which of these do you want - encounters changing due to the tactical decisions players make, or the story decisions players make?

Pre-planned encounters can still be a story. Look at the encounter driven adventure listed in the DMG. Or, if you want a more free-flowing adventure, create a bunch of pre-planned encounters and then pick one of those encounters occur whenever it seems apropriate. If I have planned out encounters for chasing a thief, fighting some guards, sneaking into somewhere, and a non-combat encounter for swaying a small group of people, then I'm ready for the players to take out the head of the Theives Guild, regardless of if they choose to 1) catch him unawares without his guards, 2) take out his guards while he is out in the streets, 3) assassinate him in his bead, or 4) instigate political change by having the ranking Guild members kick him out.

Yes, D&D 4e requires you to pre-plan those encounters, but if you are comfortable with flexability (and it sounds like you are) then you should be comfortable with swapping things on the fly.

I've got some other thoughts, but I'm going to wait until I have more time to refine them.

 

[timbannock]

You mean spoon-fed.

This I associate with newbie-friendliness. And old-school-ness. Back in the day, we were all newbs.

I cannot wait until the day Wizards moves out of the simplistic-dungeons-with-encounters-that-doesn't-interact model.

Again. I really thought we'd be free of that. Boy was I wrong.

Not sure if you'll even read another post quoting this line you wrote, but here goes:

I've run several 4e encounters that were completely off-the-cuff, during my group's playtest of the 4e rules. What was amazing about 4e was how easy I could pull up 2-4 monster stat blocks, peruse them for about a minute total (if that), and feel comfortable to run through a fight.

Often with special terrain and other effects going on.

Again, that was during my playtest...I barely knew the rules at all.

In 3.5e (and 3.0, and 2nd Edition), I ran several dozen (probably much more, in fact) off-the-cuff encounters. I found only 2e to be nearly as easy 4e, and those were a lot LESS interesting fights.

To further illustrate, a vast majority of the encounters in the published 4e adventures from WOTC and Goodman Games include encounters that "interact" in a lot of ways: interactive terrain, several encounters that can trigger each other due to vicinity, encounters that can be avoided with skill challenges, roleplaying or other means, etc.

In fact, once again, 4e seems quite a bit more advanced in encounter design that pretty much any edition before it. Partly due to the pre-planning of the published adventures, and partly due to the copious amounts of advice for winging it in the DMG.

Therefore, I feel that your comment is either being misinterpreted by myself (in which case I apologize), or it is not taking into account the actual information that is available...perhaps you don't have access to this information? If not, I'd suggest checking out the DMG, because it's pretty amazing how much encounter building advice is in there!



Edit - worth noting that, like you, I am much more story-oriented than minis and rules-lawyering. But the point of a lot of 4e rules is to know when to use them to help propel the story, and when to wing it.