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<blockquote data-quote="CapnZapp" data-source="post: 4606855" data-attributes="member: 12731">My specific example is this:There's a fort. A square thing with four guard towers in the corners. If somebody calls for help in one tower, this will alert the guards in all the rest. (This is not your ordinary room-by-room dungeon)My initial idea would be that the party successfully sneaks in or bluff their way. Then they attempt to take out guard post after guard post. Sooner or later, other guards will catch on. Then it becomes a matter of dispatching guards faster than reinforcements have a chance to appear. (That, and trying to play a cat-and-mouse game of hide-and-seek)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.If I follow the design guidelines and make the guard commander a Solo, then it becomes effectively impossible to &quot;take out the commander, then escape into the sewers&quot; or whatever. Before the party manages to mow down those hundreds and hundreds of hit points, all the soldiers of the entire fort will have had time to rush to the scene. In other words, a strategy that sounds almost-reasonable in most other rpgs will in 4E become a TPK.Solutions such as &quot;double the size of the fort&quot; briefly went through my head... but only briefly... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue&nbsp; &nbsp; :p"&nbsp; data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />It would seem natural for the DMG to discuss how defeating a Solo doesn't necessarily take a long time. But apparently not.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="CapnZapp, post: 4606855, member: 12731"] My specific example is this: There's a fort. A square thing with four guard towers in the corners. If somebody calls for help in one tower, this will alert the guards in all the rest. (This is not your ordinary room-by-room dungeon) My initial idea would be that the party successfully sneaks in or bluff their way. Then they attempt to take out guard post after guard post. Sooner or later, other guards will catch on. Then it becomes a matter of dispatching guards faster than reinforcements have a chance to appear. (That, and trying to play a cat-and-mouse game of hide-and-seek) [B]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.[/B] If I follow the design guidelines and make the guard commander a Solo, then it becomes effectively impossible to "take out the commander, then escape into the sewers" or whatever. Before the party manages to mow down those hundreds and hundreds of hit points, all the soldiers of the entire fort will have had time to rush to the scene. In other words, a strategy that sounds almost-reasonable in most other rpgs will in 4E become a TPK. Solutions such as "double the size of the fort" briefly went through my head... but only briefly... :p It would seem natural for the DMG to discuss how defeating a Solo doesn't necessarily take a long time. But apparently not. [/QUOTE]

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