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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saagael" data-source="post: 5951847" data-attributes="member: 84839">I've found that combat is best used sparsely in epic tier. Big flashy combats with lots of facets and interesting things going on are the focus, while lesser combats can be easily run as skill challenges, or even just a few checks. As I mentioned, I find the best way to keep things interesting is to add things to combats that make them different.For example I'll use my latest experiment: HP threshhold triggering skill challenges. What I did is make it so that when an enemy (a boss enemy, preferably solo, but  it should work in any combat) hits a certain hit point (2/3 total, 1/3 total, 0, etc), the players go into a "cut scene mode". All other combatants are ignored, and only the players act.At the start of this cut scene, the enemy/ies to something deadly. For my combat, I had a dragon pin and try to crush and eat a PC. The players have 1 round to solve this issue using skills, describing how they go about their actions. In my case, there were 6 PCs:* Sorcerer was pinned under the dragon. He used intimidate, trying to make the dragon think twice about eating him.* Warlock bluffed, telling the sorcerer to "Use your 'burrow flesh' ability!"* Warlord and Monk charged the dragon to throw him off balance, using athletics.* Swordmage tried to restrain the dragon's movement, using arcana.* The warden used endurance to play "tug of war" with the dragon's tail.They all succeeded, so they got the dragon off the sorcerer in time. Since they all succeeded (no failures), I gave them an extra standard action on their next turn (kind of OP, but for this combat it was okay). With the extra standard actions, they took the dragon from 2/3 HP to 0 in one round, triggering his last cut-scene event, which was similar, only it resulted in the dragon being knocked out.Results from this experiment are that its best used twice in a fight. Once when bloodied, once when at 0 hp, and only for big encounters. This could be adapted for any situation. The only requirement is that there be some metric for how much the players have "beat" an encounter.</blockquote>

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