Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="ArcaneSpringboard" data-source="post: 5209726" data-attributes="member: 87400">One of the problems with 4e is that while it does the dramatic set-piece battle extremely well (and by far is the best at it out of all the versions), it has a tendency to try to make all combats dramatic.Unfortunately this has the effect of lessening the impact of the epic fights and making the 'lesser' encounters take quite a long time to run.  It also makes it more difficult to run introductory encounters of similar monsters before the big fight.For example, in the past when attacking a lair of a certain creature (say goblins), you'd go through several encounters of lesser monsters before fighting in the main chamber.  Part of the appeal of this is to introduce the different types of monsters to allow the PCs to get used to their abilities ahead of the big epic battle.But when each combat can take 90 minutes at Paragon, this just isn't feasible.What we need, like Torg, is some way to differentiate the standard encounters from the dramatic ones.  I've gone through a few on my blog, but wanted to start a thread for brainstorming other ideas how to do this.This is admittedly accepting that the PCs will pretty much roll through the encounter, but I can accept this if there is a reason for the encounter (if only to introduce the different types of monsters).I'm not really looking for a pro-con discussion yet...just throw ideas out no matter how wacky they are.- cut hp by half - start the encounter with fewer creatures (like 3 instead of 5)- one or two standard creatures and minions (or an elite and minions)- all minions- free action point for all PCs this encounter- PC's get +2 or +4 to all attack rolls this encounter- monsters make 'fear save' when bloodied to run back to main area.</blockquote>

Verification