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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Quickleaf" data-source="post: 5505017" data-attributes="member: 20323">[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.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.That's fine, most minions are supposed to die. The question is did they get toDo their schtick before (or during) death?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.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.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?Haha that's what know-it-all players get <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Sounds like you've been incorporating some interesting terrain into every fight!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.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?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.</blockquote>

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