Anyone else not feel "the grind"

[grickherder]

I intentionally tried to create a grind last session. An encounter of higher level soldiers. All the same monster. Level+2 encounter over the party.

No grind. Everyone had a blast and it went quickly.

 

[Bagpuss]

Way more often than "the grind" we have had "the oh my god we are all going to die, come on pull together we can do this, thank god we survived by working as a team." experience.

One memorable example springs to mind we were attacked on a bridge over a chasm, by flying creatures that could daze and blind us. At the end of the first round most of the party were either blind, dazed or both, the melee strikers and defenders looked like they would need to resort to harsh language. And we all thought a TPK was on the cards.

Yet by clever use of push, pull and slide powers we were able to get the some of the fliers in range of our melee guys, and by the end of round three we had hit all of them with powers that knocked them prone sending the flying creatures crashing to their deaths.

 

[Saeviomagy]

Once or twice, a battle against an elite solo has seem to drag on significantly once the solo was bloodied. By the time we'd bloodied it, we knew it's tricks, had dealt with it's allies and had burnt up our encounter and daily powers, so it came down to multiple rounds of everyone hits it, it hits someone.

I don't think this is actually every solo we meet: just once or twice.

 

[keterys]

I think too many solos don't have varied enough abilities. Elites, too, for that matter, but that's usually less of an issue.

 

[Keenath]

Grind depends on your players, quite honestly. Some people think it's "grind" if they have more than one battle in a session, while others love combat and will happily sit through a near-constant string of them.

My group tends towards the latter, but that said, the biggest grindy battle we had was my fault -- I screwed up the procedure of levelling down and solo-izing a monster, and accidentally created a solo with twice as much HP as it should've had. That really WAS a grind, and both I and the players were definitely getting tired of it. In fact, that sort of scared me away from incorporeal solos in general, despite the fact that I had made the mistake and it wasn't really the fault of being incorporeal.

The only other fight that got grindy for us was a thing I should've just thought through a little better, where they were up against waves and waves and waves of minions and I totally forgot that without our wizard player they had no controller... The minion sweeping just took forever, it just wasn't good.

In the end, I as DM take full responsibility for all the grindy battles we've had. They weren't a fault of the system so much as my fault for not realizing there was a problem ahead of time.

And that said, hey -- as the DM, feel free to change things if the game is getting painful. I could've had the minions flee once the three big monsters fell, but I didn't. (The adventure said they fight to the death, but hindsight is 20/20... I should've ignored that and had them run away for the sake of ending the fight.) I should've seen that the ghost was taking too long to die and cut its HP down. I'm the DM; it's my job to make the game fun, not stick fast to the rulebook... there's a reason we don't have a DM-o-tron 2000 sitting in my chair.

 

[Akaiku]

I really haven't been in many fights that weren't grinds.
I think it's because none of the player's at wills seem tactically interesting. Pushes and slides, unless you are in the room of grinding gears, tend to not matter much. I suppose if every encounter ever had some kind of mechanically and tactically interesting situation, that would be a bit better, but it tends to come off as contrived, generally.
That, coupled with the default assumption that encounters miss a little under half the time, and you get people weefing with their cool effect and being forced to just spam correct tactical at will B. Is there something as a player I'm/we're doing wrong? Is there something I can poke the gm about? The whole party takes differently useful powers, generally speaking a damage at will and and utility one. (Like reaping strike/cleave or howling strike/pressing strike. The only use for positioning is to get a +2 to hit for essentially every character in any game I was in (nobody plays rogues....). The problem is that flanking works both ways and generally one or more enemies gets the same bonus to someone because you are out of formation.

 

[Storminator]

I really haven't been in many fights that weren't grinds.
I think it's because none of the player's at wills seem tactically interesting. Pushes and slides, unless you are in the room of grinding gears, tend to not matter much. I suppose if every encounter ever had some kind of mechanically and tactically interesting situation, that would be a bit better, but it tends to come off as contrived, generally.
That, coupled with the default assumption that encounters miss a little under half the time, and you get people weefing with their cool effect and being forced to just spam correct tactical at will B. Is there something as a player I'm/we're doing wrong? Is there something I can poke the gm about? The whole party takes differently useful powers, generally speaking a damage at will and and utility one. (Like reaping strike/cleave or howling strike/pressing strike. The only use for positioning is to get a +2 to hit for essentially every character in any game I was in (nobody plays rogues....). The problem is that flanking works both ways and generally one or more enemies gets the same bonus to someone because you are out of formation.

Wow, is your experience different than mine. We use pushes and slides all the time. Bunch them up, hit 'em with an AoE, push 'em apart & flank one to death, push away anyone that flanks one of us... We use positioning to maintain a serious edge in combat advantage.

We also set up our big powers as much as possible. We have powers that give enemies defense penalties, powers that give ourselves attack bonuses, and use the previously mentioned positional advantage to stack a lot of hit probability before we throw out dailies and encounters.

We've been down to at-wills a few times, but it never felt grindy, because we never thought we'd live.

PS

 

[Akaiku]

Wow, is your experience different than mine. We use pushes and slides all the time. Bunch them up, hit 'em with an AoE, push 'em apart & flank one to death, push away anyone that flanks one of us... We use positioning to maintain a serious edge in combat advantage.

All games were 5 or 6 players. 1 or 2 could position enemies tops. Highest level was 7 ever, generally it was level 1-5 so not that many conditional modifiers. Usually, the game with the taclord, you just used action point and you hit. Other games? We didn't have conditional modifiers that could be leveraged at that rate, certainly not at the encounter level. Then enemies tend to rat pack players. Do gm's generally spread out baddies for you? Or does your wizard or aoe person make short work of the non-minions as well? Many of the players had 'get out of jail free' style abilities to help with that, but only one or so a piece. It then becomes "Oh crap. they used the same trick and that was an encounter."

 

[KarinsDad]

I don't necessarily feel the grind (yet, ask me again in 15 levels), but I have a player that did.

He was extremely bored using the same old At Will and Encounter powers over and over and over again. He liked playing 3E spellcasters or psionic-types with a lot of options.

He felt the repetitive grind so much that he quit our 4E group. A guy that I've been gaming with for about 7 years or so. He still plays Star Wars with us, but at least so far, he refuses to come back to 4E.

It's kind of bothersome that WotC's new model didn't take into account players like him and because of that, he is no longer at our table. We're hoping that when we get to higher level with more options (and we have added houserules for more options as well), that he'll come back.

 

[James McMurray]

Maybe Arcane Power plus a wizard with Expanded Spellbook will do the trick?