D&D 4E Changing the Combat Parameters of 4th Edition

[darkbard]

I can understand that WotC have taken away negative numbers as the kids of today probably have not learnt simple math, but for us old-timers it might work well ;-)

While I appreciate the dig at "kids today," negative numbers haven't gone anywhere. From "Dying and Death," PHB 295, RC 260: "Death: When an adventurer takes damage that reduces his or her current hit points to his or her bloodied value expressed as a negative number, the adventurer dies. Example: Fargrim is a 6th-level dwarf fighter and has a maximum hit point total of 61. He’s bloodied at 30 hit points, so he dies if his hit point total drops to -30. In a fight with an umber hulk, Fargrim has been reduced to 28 hit points and is grabbed by the monster; he is now bloodied. The umber hulk then hits him with rending claws, dealing 40 damage and reducing Fargrim’s current hit points to -12. He’s now unconscious and dying, and 18 more damage will kill him."

 

[Myrhdraak]

In his home Dark Sun game, to reproduce the gritty and dangerous feel of the setting, former WotC staffer Greg Bilsland reduced PC surges to 1 or 2: "I’m limiting characters’ healing surges to one or two. If a character is a defender, or if he or she has a class feature based on the use of healing surges, such as the druid from Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, then a character has two healing surges. Otherwise, each character has only one healing surge."

https://gregbilsland.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/dark-sun-house-rules/

That's a great one. Remember having read it way back, but not been able to find it again. I like his ideas on maybe having design guides as to how many "non-combat" XP situations you should have in an adventure as well. In my home Campaign I am trying to keep it at 70-30, but could probably be more as well. Another thing that I remember having read in some forum (was it DMDavid as well?) who talked about the implementation of Action Points as a game mechnism that really kills boss fights (due to the players ability to potentially get two "rounds" of effects stacked on the monster before it get a chance to act at higher levels, but also dealing more damage than the monsters. Action Points chould be redefinied for other uses than getting an extra standard action. I think I have read ideas in other forums that suggests:

1. Reroll a failed attack, damage or skill roll.
2. Get back a used second wind or Encounter Power.
3. Get an extra HS
4. Get to use an extra move action

This would make the game more dangerous and reduce the damage the party can deal, to the benefit of the monsters, also leading to more HS used by the players - as the time it take to kill the boss monster will be longer (and prolong the nice strategic fight we want to keep in 4th Edition and make them even tougher).

 

[Myrhdraak]

So how should I build my encounters under these rules? Well, the format should allow you to build a traditional one single, tough and strategic encounter (4th edition style) - but also a number of encounters or “waves” as pemerton refer to them (more 5th editon style). I will still call them encounters, because I like to see encounter powers’ effect end at the end of them, rather than lasting through three “waves” within one encounter.

SINGLE Encounter
The single encounter is exatly that - one tough encounter the party faces before getting a chance to take a one hour Short Rest.
Level: Based on my calculations, it looks like the preferred challenge should be a monster of the player’s level + 1.
Length: The battle will last for 3 rounds at first level, 4 rounds at 5th and then 5-6 rounds at level 15-25 (see below).
HP: It is going to be a though fight with roughly 8% of the HP remaining after the battle (excluding any healing done during the battle).
Powers: Rougly one daily will be used and all encounter powers, and the players will have to use one At-Will power before finally finishing the battle and defeating the foe.



DOUBLE Encounter
If we instead look at running two encounters before the short rest and having them equally though we have to find a weaker opponent in each encounter.
Level: Based on my calculations, it looks like the preferred challenge should be a monster of the player’s level -2. (Alternatively running a 5 player encounter against 3 monsters of equal level to the PCs.)
Length: The battle is now shorter. It will last for 2 rounds at first level, and 4 rounds at 5th, 15th and 25th level (see below).
HP: It is going to be a simple fight with roughly 58% of the HP remaining after the battle (excluding any healing done during the battle).
Powers: Here we start to see the impact of the limited encounter resources. As these are simple fights, the party will most likely not use a daily. The graph below assumes the use of dailies as well as encounter powers, but as the total number of rounds is actually 2+2=4 at first level, and 4+4 = 8 rounds at the other levels, the encounter powers will not last. Most likely only 2 encounter powers will be used at higher level, and the rest will be At-Will powers. Conclusion is that we will have to recalculate the graph below to better reflect the encounter power used in the two battles.

 

[Myrhdraak]

DOUBLE Encounter
So if we instead take away the Daily Power damage and give our half of the encounter powers in each of the double encounters, we find another distribution
Length: The battle is not any shorter than the Single Encounter. It will last for 3 rounds at first level, and 5 rounds at 5th, 15th and 25th level (see below).
HP: It is going to be a simple fight with roughly 55% of the HP remaining after the battle (excluding any healing done during the battle).
Powers: Here resources run low and the PC will at level 5 and above have to use 2 encounter powers and 3 at-will powers to defeat the monsters.



So what have we actually achieved in this Double Encounter scenario? We have turned one 5 rounds 4th Edition battle into 2 battles, both lasting 5 rounds against more simple foes, but forcing the players into using At-Will powers rather than cool encounter powers.

Conclusion: Not a very good design.

We have turned a two hour battle into 2 two hour battles - not very effective. Is there any instance where this could be useful? Hard to find any example, were the benefits would outperfom the extra time needed. The PCs would have a hard time spotting the difference between a M+1 vs. M-2 level challenge, so it would be hard for them to judge if they should save their encounter powers or not. The risk is that you end up with a first encounter where the players use all their encounter powers, and then have to run a second encounter with only at-will powers. Not very fun game play. It might work better in the scenario where you use three monster of M+0 level, as it at least will be faster to run on the DM side of things.

If you still want to use it, I think it is important that the PC’s realize that there is a second threat looming, and if they fail to achieve something in the first encounter, the second group will arrive and prolong the battle - the “wave” concept Pemerton talked about - but it is going to be a very long battle.

If we introduce the mechanism of paying 1 HS to get an Encounter Power back, it would be very tempting (from a Player point of view) to buy back Encounter Powers, just for the purpose of finishing the battle faster, rather than being stuck only using At-Will Powers.

 

[Myrhdraak]

TRIPPLE Encounter
If we look at running three encounters before the short rest and having them equally though we have to find even weaker opponents in each encounter.
Level: Based on calculations of the average challenge, it looks like the preferred challenge should be a monster of the player’s level -4. (Alternatively running a 5 player encounter against 2 monsters of PCs’ level -1.)
Length: The battle is one round shorter at 5th Level compared to the Single Encounter, otherwise the same length for 1st, 15th and 25th level (see below), i.e. 3 rounds at 1st and 5th level, and 5 rounds at higher levels.
HP: It is going to be a simple fight with roughly 68% of the HP remaining after the battle (excluding any healing done during the battle).
Powers: Players will not use Daily Powers against these simple enemies, and probably only one Encounter Power in higher levels (if even that) resulting in up to 4 rounds of At-Will Powers at higher levels.



Conclusion: It is obvious that we will get stuck with long battles if we do not somehow decouple the ability to regain encounter powers with the ability to heal damage. If regaining Encounter Powers are tied to Short Rests, we are stuck with wave upon wave of simple monsters, were the only available power is At-Will Powers. Not a good design. It is not obvious that 4th Edition is build upon the foundation of one though encounter (preferably no waves of lesser enemies) and then a Short Rest.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Maybe you should run some of the same simulations with standard 4e rules and determine what your model tells you the ideal monster levels/numbers are for wave encounters in 4e. That may reveal some aspects of the design that haven't been considered. On the whole I'm thinking your tweaking isn't really an improvement over the stock game! You MAY have trimmed some higher level fights by a round or two, but I'm concerned about the swinginess of the fights too. Then again, ironically, your double and triple encounters don't actually seem to, on average, put the characters in much danger.

 

[Myrhdraak]

Maybe you should run some of the same simulations with standard 4e rules and determine what your model tells you the ideal monster levels/numbers are for wave encounters in 4e. That may reveal some aspects of the design that haven't been considered. On the whole I'm thinking your tweaking isn't really an improvement over the stock game! You MAY have trimmed some higher level fights by a round or two, but I'm concerned about the swinginess of the fights too. Then again, ironically, your double and triple encounters don't actually seem to, on average, put the characters in much danger.

No it hasn't. So far it has been an utter failure ;-) So it is back to the drawing board. We need to do other changes to achieve the design goals of the project. 4th Edition will not play as 5th Edition if we do not change some other fundamentals. Luckily I discovered this from running the numbers, rather than ruining my players fun at the game table!

As to using vanilla 4th Edition I have done that earlier and the results will not improve. I would get longer encounters, less danger (in an average encounter), I can use higher level of monster (M+4 or even M+5), and an even bigger use of At-Will Powers if I try to apply the "wave" encounter design due to the fact that the encounters on average becomes longer due to the higher HP.

 

[Myrhdraak]

I think it's slightly worse than that - given magic/warlord boosts a 4e PC can typically get to full with 3 surges, while a 5e PC is not guaranteed to get back to full from 0 even with all hit dice. Hence my thinking to divide 4e surge numbers by 3 rather than by 2 to get a 5e type effect.

The number of HS a character gets (at least for defenders) is quite dependent on the CON modifiers and Feats at higher levels, an option would be to rather than addressing the number of Healing Surges, you could reduce the VALUE of the HS. Rather than calculating it as Max HP/4, you could potentially divide it by 6 or even 8.

 

[Myrhdraak]

Learnings so Far
So what have we learnt from this analysis exercise?

1. If we look at the last graph in post #75, we see one interesting effect. As 4th Edition do not have any weaker monsters than 1st level monsters, we get a flat curve at lower levels (Level 1 and 5 in the graph). This prevents me from going under 3 rounds of combat, just becase the weakest moster is too tough. In 5th Edition WotC have introduced CR 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 0. Nothing prevents us to do something similar in 4th Edition to allow for lower level monsters that can create shorter combat lengths.
2. It was a mistake to try to reduce the ability to use encounter powers in each encounter, and tying its recovery to a Short Rest. We should probably approach the problem by having a one hour Short Rest only tied to healing, and a 5 minute “Catch your Breath” action to regain all your Encounter Powers between every encounter. Reducing the ability to do damage per Encounter only limit our ability to create short Encounters.
3. Breaking up a traditional 4th Edition encounter into a number of “waves” of weaker monsters are a bad move, as it only leads to longer combats with PC getting forced to using a lot of At-Will powers to defeat the foe.

Next step would be to look at the numbers if we address these issues.

 

[pemerton]

Breaking up a traditional 4th Edition encounter into a number of “waves” of weaker monsters are a bad move, as it only leads to longer combats with PC getting forced to using a lot of At-Will powers to defeat the foe.

In practice, I haven't necessarily found this to be an issue.

It depends a bit on the at-wills: in my game the Sorcerer's default attack is an at-will Blazing Starfall that is a burst 2 which has +40-something adds, and so is (damage wise) not very different from the same character's encounter powers; and the paladin is built around Enfeebling Strike as the default attack.

In my experience, it is the terrain element of framing that is much more significant than whether the PCs use at-wills, encounter powers, terrain/improve attacks, etc. That doesn't offer any sort of general guideline, of course - but it's one bit of anecdotal information.