Hmm... a large part of it seems to be poor record keeping on your part
I definitely agree that this is part of the issue. That's one reason why I'm willing to chalk part of the time I've been spending on stuff recently up to a learning experience.
Printing multiple monsters on a sheet has been a problem, as they may then end up small enough that I have a hard time reading them. Usually I can get 2 not very complex creatures or 3 downright simple ones to work OK, but I had a small problem with minion stat block I had stuck on the sheet with the solo last session (not much of a problem because it was a minion and I knew how it was supposed to work, but reading the defenses was a pain). I've also been noting stuff that I need to remember with stars and arrows beside the stat block, but I tend to end up not looking at that stat block when they should be coming up...
I think I may have a solution (or at least a partial one) though; I'm going to make a single sheet with initiative, defenses, hit points, etc. for each monster, and I can put stuff that would come up on a hit on there. That gives me one sheet to keep in front of me on the players' turns, and then the individual stat blocks on the monsters' turns... I've also been trying to re-format stat blocks so that I can basically go down them in bullet-point form - so, basically, a list of recharges and other start-of-turn stuff, then list power sets (by action) in order of decision priority, instead of just always standards then moves, etc. The only problem with that is that it's taking even more time for prep...
I can fully understand your frustration - encounter organisation is something I too have struggled with, which has resulted in me implimenting all but the last of the above suggestions. And I still don't always get things right.
Now just to work on getting more descriptive elements into my games....
Yeah, I need to work on description too... The only one of us who really regularly adds fluff to his attacks is also more or less our resident 4e expert. So I think that may become easier with rules experience / competence. But I've also noticed that at least one of the players busts out all sort of cool stuff as soon as she doesn't have to worry about mechanical stuff at all. This is the sorceress' player, and the session before last she pulled off a cool mortal kombat-style fatality on one of the giants... And I think that happened more because, since it was KO'ed and the mini was being removed it no longer mattered if her power actually had a push or prone component, or how much damage getting impaled on the stalagmite did, etc. I think I can see that being an issue with me, as a lot of "extra stuff" that I would add in is stuff that 4e would tend to model mechanically, and therefore I don't feel like I should be just doing...
Additionally, you should really design your encounters with the PCs in your party in mind. For example, if you have a PC with high acrobatics/athletics who likes to do stunts, having things to swing/climb on might be a great thing to put in an encounter - however, if you have a group like mine that lacks such skills and/or inclinations, working such things in is basically wasted time and effort.
(snipped some stuff)
One of the things with this group is that they don't want me spouting mechanics at them, like they don't want me to announce skill challenges or declare exactly how terrain works, etc. Fair enough, except that it seems to be tripping me up. One of the things about 4e is that it takes a lot of mechanical stuff that I always thought was kind of a waste of time / concentration and actually makes it fun, like the battlemat... And so the issue with skill challenges and terrain and stuff is that without the players interacting with it in a mechanical way it really isn't interesting to me. I think this is sort of what you're talking about with it being as good as an encounter power... Anyway, without just coming out and saying what's up I don't feel very confident that I can convince the PCs that this stuff is worth messing with, and I'm worried about giving the wrong impression / miscommunicating...
I had this problem all the time when I played 4e, so I made this table. It shows the xp totals for parties from 2 to 10 pcs from levels 1 - 30 (after level 10 I only did the numbers for parties of 4, 5 and 6 PC's, so you will have to fill in those gaps). Using this table I could pretty easily spend a few minutes and adjust the number of enemies to fit the party size I had, hope this helps
Thank you for sharing that. Mostly I just forgot in this case. I was thinking that I kind of would want / need sets of monsters that added up to a given XP total, especially since there's that "skip" in the progression at level 14. But I think maybe I need to start trying to limit myself to both fewer different creatures in a fight and making them all the same level seems like it would be easier as well. I'm not sure though - would this make the encounters less interesting?
[MENTION=81104]Dr_Ruminahui[/MENTION]
Great advice. But I don't think it's fair to equate trouble remembering a monster's power with poor organization. New DMs, stressed or overworked DMs, narrative focused DMs, or DMs using complicated monsters in large numbers. All of those could explain this fairly common complaint about 4e combat.
That is true, but I think in this case organization is at least a part of my problem... I also have been a bit stressed at some sessions due to various out-of-game stuff, and I noticed last week (when I kind of managed to just run the game and put everything else out of my mind) that I had a better time of it. But I think it was a fair thing to point out...
Seriously go read that section of DMG2 about encouraging movement. What you describe I would expect in a stand up knock down fight against soldiers in an environment without hazards or desirable terrain. But this is NOT my experience of most fights I've run as DM. Especially if you had skirmishers this doesn't make sense based on what you shared so far.
See my comments above about skill challenges and terrain, I kind of think I'm just not selling the "attractive" part well enough. Add to that the fact that, with the whole group there, there has been a tendency towards a fairly static (except for the swordmage, kinda...) set of tactics, and since they work very well there's little incentive to change things. For instance, I have run what I think of (if I'm reading it right) as the "circular paths" thing, and it didn't really work because it didn't really matter if the monsters could get around behind the PCs because they really weren't doing much of anything, anyway (mind you, IIRC this was unedited MM1 / MM2 monsters, so it could just have been that their damage expressions where beneath notice...).
That's fine, most minions are supposed to die. The question is did they get to
Do their schtick before (or during) death?
Well, not really, but I think I'm ok with that. It was mainly because we had only 3 PCs and which 3 they where. With 5 I think that there would have been more minions popping up and therefore more likelihood that one might stick around long enough to do it's thing... And with the shaman and fighter likely to draw some it would have been more of a question of which ones to pop... But I basically had no time to re-jigger the encounter for 3 players vs. 4...
Get lengths of colored wire and from them into square templates in the size of the critter's aura (or zone) before game. If your Efreet has hellish flames engulfing him it makes sense to show that on the combat map. Hmm I'm assuming you game in person.
Yeah, we game in person. =] I've tried both pipecleaners and triangular markers for the corners of auras, and both have kind of gotten in the way of stuff. The players have complained about it, but I think you're right and I will probably end up going back to using the pipecleaner squares, it's just the lesser evil...
Make this easy on yourself. Your group sounds like it regularly fluctuates between 3 to 5 players so build your encounters to accept for that. Always include 2 standard monsters of the PC's level, that way if you have 1 or 2 players missing simply deduct those standard monsters from the fight. Solved.
Recently, yeah. It didn't used to be a problem, and I hope it will stop cropping up so much in the future... I was actually thinking about designing encounters for 3 PCs that I could then "bump up" to 4 or 5, as I think it's harder to get something that will work / be fun for 3. But given that I think that I'm going to try and figure out a companion character or something so that I can avoid actually doing the "for 3" thing at all...
I think also that maybe I've been trying too hard with some stuff...
Heres a question: what made these Skirmishers so much more dredging than those in the previous encounter? I'm assuming it was the amount of movement?
Well a lot of it, honestly, was that the sorceress when off-plan right off the bat and ran downfield. She was trying to get away from the skirmishers, which had a nasty damage bump if one of their allies was adjacent to the target... So they where pretty much taking turns standing next to here while the others would zip in for a hit and then back out... And the other two PCs where trying to focus-fire on one of the other two monsters. (The sorceress is kind of "immune" to focus fire. It's an interesting effect, imo; since she has no single-target powers and the vast majority of her damage comes from her big static bonus, she's basically free to hit whatever she wants and she can still also be pumping as much or more damage than any other PC except the fighter on a crit onto the main target...)
Sounds like you've been incorporating some interesting terrain into every fight!
I try. I've been mainly sticking to really obvious stuff, and things that have to be dealt with one way or another. I actually cheated with the cyclone-elevator things and just told the sorceress' player (storm sorceress...) that her character knew how they worked. The main player who's a stickler for that stuff also wasn't there, which helped.
That's pretty much what dungeons are, no fault in it. That and traps, puzzles, and treasure. There might be some cool mini RP opportunities but when the players enter the dungeon they expect to kick monster ass and take names.
Yeah, I did the dungeon because there had been a bunch of roleplay-heavy sessions, and the players wanted more action, and I wanted an excuse to actually string more encounters together (rather than "5-minute workdays"). But I think I kind of overdid it, and something a bit simpler might have been better. Because of skipped sessions, slow play, etc. they've been in this dungeon for over a month real-time, and I think they're starting to look forward to getting out. It's not dragging just yet, I think... And there's the whole cultists plot thing that, honestly, I really haven't thought all the way through... (I also need to come up with stats for them...)
30-45 minutes per monster?? That's crazy. Creating a new monster from scratch in 30 minutes? Yes. Picking one monster for an encounter in 30 minutes? No way. What the heck are you doing?
Well I put a lot of thought into stuff, maybe too much, idk. I do re-fluff almost everything, and I've been tweaking powers at least a bit... Maybe less so recently, idk if that's because I like the MM3 / MV monsters more as-is, or if I'm just generally more comfortable with stuff. But I have removed or changed powers that seemed redundant or a hassle to deal with in the past. I usually use the compendium to search for appropriate monsters, which means between a handful to a few dozen stat blocks to look through. Then I have been entering them into the (offline) monster builder for tweaking and re-leveling. The MB tends to randomly drop stuff, so I may have to re-edit it a time or two at that point... Once it seems right I copy it out of there into OpenOffice and make edits to the format (like moving powers around so that they're in a more useful order for me) and double-check stuff... Most of it's just organizational stuff, if I just had to pick a monster and re-level it it would be a lot quicker.
On page 63 of the DMG there's a section called "Building an Encounter Script" which seems to get overlooked. My version is to envision the encounter as a whole and concisely describe it in 200 words or less. Then I design everything around that. As long as I have the big picture and it's exciting to me I rarely forget stuff unless I'm having an off day.
I've seen it said that the players have a larger workload in 4e than the DM, but I'm not really seeing it (in a practical sense). Players have one character apiece, once they know what their stuff does that's what it does, and they can pretty much run everything off of a deck of self-contained power cards. I'm juggling at least a few sheets of paper (harder to flip through than cards) that change with each encounter and have a bunch of different stuff on each one. It also doesn't help that I ended up setting up this dungeon so that there are multiple paths the PCs could have taken, or that I've re-designed all of the encounters about four times apiece at this point... It would help if I could take some time and go over everything before each encounter, but we're already barely managing to keep up two encounters in a 4+ hour session...
But worrying about "how much we're accomplishing" may be part of the problem. I have noticed that if we go much over 4 hours some of the players get antsy, while others aren't really satisfied if we end too early. So there's an issue there in that if it takes like 3 hours for the first encounter I kind of have to fail to meet someone's expectations - either we break now (too early) or run another encounter and go too long... But aside from that I think that I'm the main person worried about how many encounters we get in. Part of that is bang-for-buck as far as prep goes, and the fact that I kind of want to run stuff while it's still a little bit fresh in my head...
But part of it's also that, I guess, I'm not 100% satisfied by 4e combats. That's also kind of what led to the "5-minute-workdays" early on, I think. I like 4e combat, it's fun, but if that's all we're going to do then I guess it doesn't quite feel like enough to warrant hours of prep and a hour each way bus ride to and from the game... (And I felt the same way when I was running a PC, really.) So I kind of want to get through the "merely-good-stuff" to the "better stuff", I guess... idk, that's kind of hap-hazard self-analyzing, and it doesn't seem like it's 100% on the mark, but it's something for me to think about...
Can you be more specific about what didn't work despite seeming awesome to you during prep? And what seemed to successfully 'pack a bit more punch'?
), I've attached a scan of one for an upcoming encounter - needless to say, any of my PCs shouldn't look at it.
