Grind

[Stalker0]

Yup. I played from the blue book through 3.5, from levels 1 to 20, and I too once in a blue moon saw some of these issues. But, they weren't as common nor as catastrophic as some people claim and they could be handled by having a good character sheet with modifier columns on it.

4E condition handling is nearly every single round. Every single encounter.

No comparison.

Most monsters in 3.5 did not have Dispel Magic. The only time one ran into it is if the DM threw a spell caster at the group and it doesn't take much for the DM to realize that doing this if the group is buff heavy and does not have most of the buff spells pre-calculated on their character sheet is just as bad as throwing a bunch of 4E Stun monsters at the party.

The difference between 4E durations and 3.5 durations is that 4E durations are mostly dynamic from round to round. In 3.5, the players cast their long duration spells while the DM was going to the bathroom at the beginning of a game day and/or at the beginning of an encounter, marked them on their character sheets, and rarely changed them.

There were often more buffs in 3.5, especially once one got to level 7 or so, but smart players had the frequently used ones in their group already written on their character sheets.

I will echo's KarinsDad on these points.

I agree that when 3e's condition system got bad, it got really bad, and there's not a 4e comparison. But those situations were rare, and occured generally in two scenarios:

1) Big ultimate mage NPC.
2) High levels.

Meaning that for a good part of 3e, including the famous sweet spot, the condition issue didn't occur.


In 4e, you have multiple conditions to track from level 1 and in nearly every encounter.

So overall I will say 4e's bookkeeping overall is much more intense than 3e's, even if 3e had its moments.

 

[Argyle King]

One thing that I've found to cause grind in 4E -especially at higher levels- is that a lot of monsters just aren't dangerous enough to the PCs to actually make the fight feel like... well... like a fight. This is coming from the player side of the table; not the dm side. Often times I don't feel as though the monsters honestly have any chance. This leads to several rounds of the monsters being stomped and humiliated as the players wait for the enemy HP values to reach zero. There are and have been battles I've experienced which were an exception to this, but, generally speaking, this has been my 4E experience.


I understand that the mentality behind rpg games is that the heroes should move forward. I understand why the stereotypical killer dm is bad for the game. I also understand that 4E is designed in a way that is softer on the players. However, when I feel as though the monsters are little more than a sack of hit points, it makes a battle start to drag.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Is it? Always? Hmmm. Is that armchair of yours comfortable?

You think I don't DM? Or that I don't pull out just about every encounter from even something as well-written as War of the Burning Sky, check it for balance (goodbye Boneshards), check it for fun (goodbye Flaganus Mortus and other static solo beatdowns), check it for relevance (and once again the Boneshards fail) and if the whole thing fails, rip it out and put something in its place?

Actually, I knew that the encounter would become longer. I was expecting that. The encounter was supposed to be seriously challenging and something that "worried the players" because they just couldn't drop kick the encounter in 6 or fewer rounds like they do the vast majority of encounters.

Wrong way to make an encounter challenging. You don't make encounters worry players by taking a long time. You make them worry players by making the players think the PCs are going to die. More damage, not more hp.

The dragons quickly ran out of Encounter powers and did the same old attacks through most of the encounter. The PCs went through their repetoire of powers and then started using the same old At Will powers over and over. The first 6 rounds were interesting, but the latter rounds became a bore as players were no longer pulling out Dailies and were mostly out of Encounters.

And didn't make their At Wills interesting. (I don't think anyone would consider my current Warlord uninteresting in combat. Despite the fact his standard actions are all At Will powers). That said, most characters have four encounter powers - four rounds. One daily for the fight - five rounds. And an at will. 6 is a good length.

The game system is not designed to handle longer duration encounters, regardless of what causes it (Healing, many foes Stunned, Insubstantial, whatever). If the encounter goes over 8 rounds, it tends to become a slugfest. zzzzzzz

If a fight goes over 48 seconds, something weird is going on. And yes, Insubstantial in the MMI is bad.

My other issue with that encounter is that the game system is not well designed to handle monsters that heal because the monsters have too many hit points to begin with.

And once again you miss. Orcs can work with healing just fine. There are quite a few leaders who heal (or give temp hit points) and that doesn't cause problems. On the other hand there is not one single monster in the entire MMI and MMII combined that uses surge-based healing. And you've just discovered why.

The game system really doesn't take into account monster healing, but it should.

Yes it does. It just uses different mechanics to PC healing.

 

[KarinsDad]

BTW KarinsDad: I feel with you in the encounter with the healing dragons. You had a good idea - and in earlier editions it would have been fine, but as you discovered, giving healing to monsters isn't something you should do without much thinking

Thanks.

It actually turn out fine from an in character perspective.

The players acquired some information that they needed (Dragon bragging is a good thing), they felt like they were somewhat successful, even though they didn't kill the dragons, and I still have two dragons that might be showing up again in the future for which hopefully, the players will be better prepared (and the PCs will be higher level, so more capable) next time. But the PCs are about to go zooming across the continent (they've had a set of "portal tiles" since level 2 that they have been afraid to use, but they are stuck on a frozen island in the far north, are running out of wood to burn, and have no other way off), so they might not ever meet those particular Dragons again and that's ok too.

 

[KarinsDad]

Some good points there, although I don't agree with stunned, as you can't use any powers while stunned, so you still have them afterwards. In addition your turn goes really quickly when all you can do is roll a save.

Stunned can be grindy in two ways:

1) The player whose PC is stunned has a much longer wait before he or she can play again. Just rolling a saving throw once per round and not actually doing anything useful is annoying. I know for me personally, anything over 2 rounds of inactivity and I go nuts. So if the group has 10 minutes per turn (easily happens in our group of 6 PCs with 6 NPCs, but that's still only a one hour encounter with 6 rounds) and a player misses his save just once, he takes his turn (for example, at 2 PM round 1), he gets stunned, he misses his save (2:10 round 2), he makes his next save (2:20 round 3), and then he gets to take his turn again (2:30 round 4). That's 30 minutes from the last time he went until the time he gets to go again and that's missing the save once. Missing the save once and he lost two rounds worth of actions. If he misses the save multiple times, that adds 10 minutes each time he misses the save until he can go again.

That can be really grindy and slow for that player.

Granted, if it is not the Leader who is stunned and the Leader can hand out free saves, it might not be as bad. On the other hand, there are monsters that have Recharge Stun powers and I have seen a PC re-stunned by the same foe after he finally made his save. That was really grindy and annoying for that player, although probably not grindy for most of the rest of the players.

2) Using this same example, even though the player did not use up resources in the two rounds that he missed, that means that on average, 2 more "PC turns" must be spent after a normal 6 round encounter to still take out the foes (i.e. upping the encounter from 6 rounds to 6.4 rounds). There's also the 2 rounds in which foes are not getting attacked by the stunned PC, so the foes have 2 rounds of action economy advantage over the other PCs. The encounter will be slightly longer duration-wise (it still takes x successful hits to kill all of the monsters plus the time this player was rolling his saves), but the monsters will be at an advantage part of that time which means that the PCs will on average get damaged more, forcing them to use up more resources, etc. If two or more PCs get stunned or this PC fails to make his save for a long time, the slightly increased encounter problem multiples. It's not too bad if one PC gets stunned for a single round, but can become extremely problematic if multiple PCs get stunned for multiple rounds.

*Most systems has some kind of gotcha! 3.x had the multiple low-level fireball hurling sorcerer problem. For instance 32 level 6 sorcerers is only a level 11 encounter, but does around 336 damage a round if you made your save for half damage. Learning what the gotchas are and avoiding them is important for a good game.

Agreed. And, this is one of the reasons we talk about this kind of stuff.

 

[TerraDave]

I find it easier to have an interesting combat in 4E then in past editions (to the extent it depends on the edition). These do tend to take a good number of rounds...but if it is interesting, that is a bonus, right?

Fights could have a little more edge (ie relatively more hurt a round) and conditions can be a little anoying, but overall I still generally like them.

My main problem is that the default in terms of leveling or in the WotC adventures is just too many fights. Fewer, better fights are the way to go.

 

[brehobit]

Lots of issues here IMO.

When we first started it got really grindy really fast. Partly due to poor encounter planning, partly due to the elites and solos being a mess, partly due to poor character optimization, and partly due to everyone being slow.

As we've learned the system it mostly goes better, but it can still get grindy. We aren't _that_ experienced (we jump around to different game systems and play a lot of board games so maybe 100 hours total) so some of the same problems exist.

But there are problems inherent in the game's design too. For one, the "mopping up" part just doesn't matter 90% of the time. In previous editions hit point count and the end of the fight mattered (though with healing sticks, much less so in 3.5). This leads to people tuning out once the fight is obviously over. It also means that "easy" fights are fairly boring from the git-go.

Secondly, I find status effects to be tricky to follow. That said, I found it hard to run any game over 7th level in 3.5 and hard to play above about 13th level: again the status stuff got too hard for me. As others have noted this is both easier (fewer statuses to worry about for example) and harder (effects tend to come and go rapidly)

Thirdly, encounter design is hard. Not only do you need to create encounters that are challenging and interesting, but you need to watch your grind level. The early modules did a moderate job at this on the whole (though some were truly outstanding) so at the least the professionals struggle with this too. Avoiding grind while managing everything else is a bit tricky and it's easy to trade off one thing (interesting encounter that fits in with the plot) vs. grind. Neither trade is good...

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

Stunned can be grindy in two ways:

So if the group has 10 minutes per turn (easily happens in our group of 6 PCs with 6 NPCs ...

Well, if we are talking about reasons for grind, this seems like another one - adding additional DM characters will necessarily reduce player time and could well increase a player's sense of grind, even if the DM is relatively efficient in taking their actions - this is much in the same way as having a large number of players was pointed to as a source of grind.

 

[KarinsDad]

Well, if we are talking about reasons for grind, this seems like another one - adding additional DM characters will necessarily reduce player time and could well increase a player's sense of grind, even if the DM is relatively efficient in taking their actions - this is much in the same way as having a large number of players was pointed to as a source of grind.

I agree.

The problem is that of encounter challenge. The game is explicitly designed around 5v5. If one makes it 6 PCs vs. 4 NPCs to keep it at 10 miniatures on the board, the NPCs get slaughtered real fast and don't threaten at all. Upping the level of the NPCs can help, but at the same time, it can hinder as the PCs have a harder time hitting (on the other hand, we are talking considerably fewer hit points for 4 higher level NPCs than 6 same level NPCs).

The most reasonable challenge solution is to have 6 PCs vs. 6 NPCs (or vs. 4 NPCs and 1 Elite, etc.) to maintain normal game balance. One typically has to have the same relative bag of hit points (i.e. same relative total XP) in order to keep the encounter the same number of rounds length and challenge similar to the 5v5 case.

Also, since the NPCs typically have fewer options and fewer encounter type special powers than the PCs, a DM can typically run extra NPCs faster than a player can run his PC, but it's still time consuming.

 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

Ah - I misunderstood the post I had quoted - when you said NPCs, I thought you meant that you had a gang of 12 people (6 PCs, 6 NPCs) beating up on monsters, rather 6 PCs versus 6 NPCs.

Yeah, a 6 on 6 battle isn't inherently conducive to increased drag. Indeed, I often find that increased monster numbers reduce grind, as it makes battles more tactically interesting. And another reason to be wary of using solos.