Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5886116" data-attributes="member: 27160">I'm not at all sure that ambush is all that weak in 4e. Mechanically the advantage seems quite weak, I accept, but my experience is that, when they are "bounced", the party do pretty poorly, while they do far better when they gat surprise.In our last run we had two pretty big fights. In the first, after a "standard form skill challenge" that I'm making available on certain encounters, now, they not only avoided getting surprised and scouted the strength of the enemy (i.e. I laid out the monsters before they had to decide their entry point), they got surprise as well. The party seized the initiative with what they did in the surprise round and held onto it throughout - the result was an easy victory over a tough encounter. The second encounter they tried to use diplomacy (which had worked OK on a couple of occasions already) when the "target" had ample motivation to want a fight. They got 'bounced' and had a very tough battle to achieve their objective in full (the opponent had underestimated them, thanks to smart moves in an earlier negotiation, but they really wanted to stop the main opponent - who turned out to be a vampire lord - from escaping). Now, ideally, they would press on - but they are really a bit beaten up for that...Finally, to get back on topic after the self-indulgent ramble (sorry) - [MENTION=6668292]JamesonCourage[/MENTION]: I get how your system works in general, but if the party engage in combat against the town guards of their own volition (which was, I understand, the case), how do you justify them being "surprised"?</blockquote>

Verification