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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pour" data-source="post: 6054302" data-attributes="member: 59411">Though I know this will really bother a lot of 4thers, throughout late Paragon and especially into Epic, I've found myself running combats with less and less emphasis on strict adherence to hp, damage, and conditions (they are tallied more as a guideline now than a hard rule) and more on the desired pace, tension, and difficulty. Just as we reflavor and tailor monsters and terrain to meet our given needs, taking a narrativist (am I using this word right?) approach, I think combats themselves can be run similarly. Consider it sort of a real-time design where we push and pull the flow of combat through the components of combat we have direct control of (monsters and terrain mostly).In my most recent Epic combat, I took some substantial liberties with Juiblex, representing him not as a token but as a massive hazard. Then I split him into five moving hazards. His condition combination was brutal. There was nothing specifically to target when attacking him, save one of these oceanic blobs. As combat went on, players bested and were thrwarted by this demon lord, and it became less about applying an attack bonus, then rolling damage and conditions, and much more about thinking outside the box, applying powers and skill creatively, and trying to figure out ways to address the very presence of the Faceless Lord. It was a superior encounter compared to the slog it could have been, and in the end it was the ingenuity of the player and the pacing of the combat, difficult, maybe close to impossible, until the right combination of creativity, ability, and player cooperation provided an opportunity for me to call the combat with Juiblex a success, challenging, dynamic, and ultimately quite memorable (though a few did despair for its unorthodox nature).I'm not advocating cheating player action or predetermining events, but I do tweak monster survivability, adjust terrain and effects, add powers (the best opportunity is when monsters are bloodied), and consider less and less the idea of remaining within the typified rules construct presented at level one. So long as I'm being fair, and so long as I adequately keep the pulse of the players and the combat weighed against how difficult or easy I believe it should be (Juiblex I judged as a hard encounter for level 23s), I'm willing to tailor quite a lot and depart quite severely in the service of making my Epic combats work the way I think they should.</blockquote>

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