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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4198295" data-attributes="member: 40961">Alright.  Soapbox time!Robin D. Laws is an incredibly smart guy.  Go read his blog.You'll find posts that discuss being a DM.  His view tends to be that a DM should view his job sort of like being the director of an ad libbed movie.Then try to apply that to fight scenes.Because the real problem here isn't "we used up our per encounter abilities now we're just hammering away."  That doesn't have to necessarily happen, for one.  Many at will abilities involve maneuvering and an eb and flow to combat.  Imagine a fight where the fighter keeps trying to line up cleaves, while the bad guys do their best to catch the warlock as he keeps slipping away, and the warlord does his best to aid both of his allies in their goals.  That could be done using only at will abilities.The problem is a movie fight scene that's gone stale.  Its gone on for just a bit too long, and everyone's looking around waiting for it to be over.  This is fundamentally a problem of choreography, and if you're the DM, you're the choreographer.So try to go into fights knowing what to expect.  Have a goal.  Perhaps a fight exists to create "rising action" before an end of the night climactic fight scene.  If so, you want to accomplish certain things.  You want the players to win without major expenditure of resources.  You want to raise the tension level.  You want to advance the plot, perhaps by foreshadowing the climactic fight scene.In a different scene, you might have different goals.Thinking of a fight scene in this manner really helps.  I swear.  And with practice you can do it on the fly.The problem with the dragon fight dragging on has a lot to do with it being a fight where the "purpose" of the fight was for the players to lose.  Its hard to make that satisfying.  Either the bad guy does damage so fast that the players die before they get to do anything cool, or the bad guy absorbs damage so well that the players do all their coolest stuff, it doesn't help, and then they get killed.  Either way, no particular fun.</blockquote>

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