Grind

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think solos should be quite rare. In fact I have trouble remembering using them. I think in 9 levels of play in the current campaign I'm running the PCs have run into a White Dragon, a custom solo demon, and maybe one other solo. I consider them to be the super significant plot monsters that you defeat at the end of a major story arc. Elites OTOH I'll use fairly often and players are likely to encounter one every couple of fights or at least once per adventuring day on average. Most plot significant NPCs tend to be elites for instance.

I agree with you KD, stun (save ends) is not wonderful. It can be OK once in a while as an encounter effect, but it definitely isn't something you want on your average monster or with a recharge rate. Obviously whoever wrote up the Runescribed Dracolich didn't get that...

As for the whole durations/tracking/effects thing I still think you underplay how totally tedious and annoying and complicated it could easily be in older editions. I think its also considerably less of an issue in 4e than some people make it out to be. It definitely adds book keeping and no argument it slows the game down, but lots of things slowed down the game in the past as well. There were plenty of 1e and 2e spells that could take half an eternity to figure out what the heck they did in any given situation, etc.

My solution for conditions in 4e is pretty simple. I make up a 3x5 index card for each one. That takes 30 seconds to do before the game and once you've done a few they don't change much and you just end up reusing them game after game. When someone gets a condition on them I just drop the card on their character sheet, now they know they have 'ongoing 5 damage and weakened (save ends).' and that's the end of the problem for PCs. The same works for the monsters pretty much. It would be nice if CB would print out condition cards. Given that 95% of conditions are either 'until end of your next turn' or 'save ends' it really isn't that complex in practice. The fact that conditions don't change any core math and have well defined rules that everyone knows by heart after a couple sessions means we hardly even notice tracking them.

The win button thing I don't miss. In fact there are still pretty easy ways to do it. Some of the higher level consumables definitely work. Honestly there are plenty of daily powers that work if the players are willing to use a resource. I mean at this point plain old level 1 daily Brute Strike that the GWF dwarf with the huge axe has will one-shot equal level monsters. Heck the other day that dwarf was holding off an elite controller, hit it once with some encounter power and then killed it outright with Brute Strike on the second round, did some incredible amount of damage. Admittedly a lot of dailies won't END a fight instantly, but most of the better ones will ensure that you WILL win if used at all cleverly.

What I've found is that a lot of the DMs that complain highly about grind also hate minions and won't use them, etc. I think its an issue that arises primarily when people just ignore the way the game was designed and go off in other directions or take a certain element to a great extreme like healing. Its not illegitimate to point it out as a potential flaw in the system but its a lot less of one than the problems we had in 1e and 2e. At this point in fact I would say our 4e encounters are averaging about the same speed as 2e encounters did. I think 1e was a bit faster at low levels but then again low level 1e was Russian roulette every combat.

 

[firesnakearies]

I don't mind long encounters, either in number of rounds or length of real time. In fact, any fight which is resolved quickly feels like a bit of a rip-off to me, as a player. If it was that easy, or that tactically simple that we were able to polish it off in just a few rounds, or a short amount of time, I figure it wasn't much of a fight. At which point, I ask, "Why'd we even have to have that encounter?" I'd rather every fight be big, scary, important, and tactically demanding.

To me, the fact that a fight lasts 20 rounds, or takes three hours of real time, doesn't mean it's "grind". Grind, to me, is a very rare experience. It's just when a fight is truly boring, and it drags on. But I don't find that many boring fights. In my experience, if a battle is boring, it's only boring because it's way too easy, in which case we finish it fast, anyway.

DMs should be making every encounter dynamic, interesting and fun, exciting and tactically complex. Add special terrain, multiple levels of elevation, traps, objects in the area that can be manipulated in various ways to affect the battle, triggered events that take place at later points in the fight (reinforcements arrive, or some enemies attempt to flee to a more advantageous area), creatures that move around a lot (taking cover, distancing themselves to snipe, hiding, maneuvering around to outflank, and so forth), and reasons for the PCs to move around a lot, too.

I find that if encounters are exciting, dangerous, and complex like this, then it doesn't matter much how long they take. It's fun, people stay on their toes, and stay invested, and it's not grind.

Sure, if you're just fighting a bunch of brutes standing around in a plain 30'x30' room, slugging it out with nothing changing from round-to-round, I can see where you'd experience grind.

I just don't think it's much of a problem, personally.

 

[KarinsDad]

As for the whole durations/tracking/effects thing I still think you underplay how totally tedious and annoying and complicated it could easily be in older editions. I think its also considerably less of an issue in 4e than some people make it out to be. It definitely adds book keeping and no argument it slows the game down, but lots of things slowed down the game in the past as well. There were plenty of 1e and 2e spells that could take half an eternity to figure out what the heck they did in any given situation, etc.

No doubt. Confusion for example. Grapple could take a heck of a lot of time in 3E, but then again, a player who wanted to do it a lot learned it and players who didn't, avoided it.

My solution for conditions in 4e is pretty simple. I make up a 3x5 index card for each one. That takes 30 seconds to do before the game and once you've done a few they don't change much and you just end up reusing them game after game. When someone gets a condition on them I just drop the card on their character sheet, now they know they have 'ongoing 5 damage and weakened (save ends).' and that's the end of the problem for PCs. The same works for the monsters pretty much. It would be nice if CB would print out condition cards. Given that 95% of conditions are either 'until end of your next turn' or 'save ends' it really isn't that complex in practice.

I'll have to try the Index card for the adverse effects on PCs thing out. It should be faster for them than what we are using.


How do you handle the monsters though so that all of the players know what is going on at all times?

In our 16th level game, we easily have 2 to 4 or more adverse effects / conditions / statuses of some sort on every single monster most rounds.

Without using a single Daily power, the following adverse "take up most of a round, so it has to be remembered or have bookkeeping" effects against the monsters can occur in an Encounter in our game:

Hunter's Quarry, Oath of Emnity, multiple Marks from multiple PCs with multiple different effects if the foe ignores the mark, Bloodied, Combat Advantage (in so many ways with different durations or situations in which it does or does not occur that I won't even bother to count them), target cannot benefit from invisibility or concealment (TENT), the target takes 10 damage the first time it uses an attack other than a basic attack (TENT), multiple Dazed (TSNT), multiple Slowed (TENT), use Fire Hawk attack (TSNT), Stun (TENT), Immobilized (TENT), -2 to all defenses (TENT), first time ally hits foe, ally can spend a healing surge (TENT), next PC who hits target can make it a critical (TENT), -3 AC (TENT), -5 AC (TENT), takes 1d6+1 damage if foe moves away (till end of foe's next turn).

There are also about two dozen effects or more (mostly buffs) that this group has that help a given PC for a round (and sometimes longer than a round). This, of course, can be handled by PC to PC 3x5 cards, but it still adds to the list.

There are also about 20 more of these hinder enemies or help PC effects if we throw in the Dailies (including items).

These are all different effects, conditions, and/or statuses that can and many of which do happen in every encounter in our current game that the players need to be aware of at a glance without asking "What exactly does Dire Wolf #3 have on it again?".


Then there are the PC conditional specials. For example, just one of our 6 PCs has:

+2 bonus to damage rolls against your oath of enmity target for each ally adjacent to that target

+5 damage against a bloodied foe that grants combat advantage

when an ally hits your oath of enmity target, you gain temporary hit points equal to 3 + 3 per ally adjacent to that target

when you spend an action point to use an at-will attack power, that attack deals 2d10 extra damage

when you miss your oath of enmity target with an encounter attack power, the attack deals damage to the target equal to your Dexterity modifier

when you miss your oath of enmity target with an at-will attack power, the attack deals damage to the target equal to your Dexterity modifier


Sure, the player is supposed to help with this, but I do have players with a boatload of conditional specials where they can forget. Every single player has at least 3 of these. It's doubly hard if a player cannot make the session and someone else is running his or her PC. And it's not just conditional specials for the PCs, there is a lot for each player to keep track of.


This is not as simple to keep track of as some people claim.

There are tons of things to keep track of here. Sure, the players help with this, but it is not as easy as some people make it out to be.

There are literally dozens of things to keep track of, all at the same time, and all of them have to be observable with a glance by both the DM and the players so that they can make informed decisions.

The fact that conditions don't change any core math and have well defined rules that everyone knows by heart after a couple sessions means we hardly even notice tracking them.

Maybe you have a bunch of Kim Peeks playing in your game, but we don't. We remember the ones that happen a lot, but nobody has them all memorized.

Honestly there are plenty of daily powers that work if the players are willing to use a resource. I mean at this point plain old level 1 daily Brute Strike that the GWF dwarf with the huge axe has will one-shot equal level monsters. Heck the other day that dwarf was holding off an elite controller, hit it once with some encounter power and then killed it outright with Brute Strike on the second round, did some incredible amount of damage. Admittedly a lot of dailies won't END a fight instantly, but most of the better ones will ensure that you WILL win if used at all cleverly.

I'd like to see some numbers on this. This doesn't make sense.

What I've found is that a lot of the DMs that complain highly about grind also hate minions and won't use them, etc. I think its an issue that arises primarily when people just ignore the way the game was designed and go off in other directions or take a certain element to a great extreme like healing.

I think you have to back this up with some data.

For example, do you seriously use Minions in more than one fight in four or five? If not, then you are only mitigating the grind by using them < 25% of the time.

And is using Minions a lot of fun for your players? The novelty of it was fun the first few times for our group, but cardboard cutout foes got real old real quick. If foes aren't a challenge at all, they're really not worth our game time.

This is especially true at higher levels when a single large burst area effect can one shot half or more of the minions. They're just too easy to overcome for it to be fun. YMMV, but meh. Minions are boring. They're like dog poop on your shoe. You have to scrap it off, but you don't want to bother wasting the effort. Practically everything else in the game system is more exciting than minions. My players would rather enter water (the bane of fantasy roleplaying) than fight minions.

 

[Argyle King]

I've founding keeping track of things in 4E to be fairly easy. Encourage people to keep track of their own effects instead of relying on the DM to remember everything; that helps. Also, if you have an effect going on which helps your allies, remind them of that during play.

Personally, I tend to be the guy who keeps track of initiative during play. I don't use any sort of crazy gadget or $800 ipad. I simply use paper and a pencil which cost me roughly a dollar. If someone has a condition imposed upon their character, I write that to the side of their character name and mark if it is save ends or something else (abbreviations help.) At the beginning of someone's turn, I remind them, "You are currently slowed and dazed."

If you write lightly and erase, the same piece of paper will last a while before you need a new one. Still, I might upgrade to a small dry erase board. I have noticed the local WalMart has a small tablet sized one which is around $8.

Overall, I find 4E to be fairly simple to keep track of. For younger players or players who aren't as experienced with the game, things are a little more difficult. Sometimes boredom can be a factor too; paying more attention to texting on your phone than what's going on in the game (possibly due to grind) can lead to not knowing what is going on. In turn, this might lead to more grind.

 

[Doctor Proctor]

How do you handle the monsters though so that all of the players know what is going on at all times?

In our 16th level game, we easily have 2 to 4 or more adverse effects / conditions / statuses of some sort on every single monster most rounds.
There are tons of things to keep track of here. Sure, the players help with this, but it is not as easy as some people make it out to be.

There are literally dozens of things to keep track of, all at the same time, and all of them have to be observable with a glance by both the DM and the players so that they can make informed decisions.

Maybe you have a bunch of Kim Peeks playing in your game, but we don't. We remember the ones that happen a lot, but nobody has them all memorized.

One of the ways that I handled this with my group is to buy some multi-colored index cards (each card is one of five different colors) and then cut them into little one inch squares (I used a punch from my ex's scrapbooking stuff). I then organized the little squares by color and labeled them with different conditions. Red squares became our "bloodied" markers, while yellow indicates ongoing damage and save ends effects. Blue squares were used for marks, and then orange and green were various different status effects (things like deaf and blind, or slow and immobilize, were placed on opposite sides of the same square). This way, you can glance at the color and tell if an enemy was under the effects of a mark, bloodied, a save ends effect or just something for a single round (till the end of target's next turn, or player's next turn, etc...). That was usually enough to remind us of the specific condition, but if we just couldn't remember, then we would just look at the little index card squares to see the exact conditions.

Another thing that's worked well since then is to use beer caps for marks. One of our players is a Warden, and I was playing a Fighter, but we both drank different brands of beer. So my marks were always indicated by a gold Miller Light cap, while the Warden's were indicated by a red cap for whatever beer it is that he drinks. They're the perfect size to go under either the round bases of the D&D minis, or under the little glass stones that the DM uses for more generic monsters. After a couple sessions we had more than enough to cover even the most gratuitous marking scenarios.

For example, do you seriously use Minions in more than one fight in four or five? If not, then you are only mitigating the grind by using them < 25% of the time.

And is using Minions a lot of fun for your players? The novelty of it was fun the first few times for our group, but cardboard cutout foes got real old real quick. If foes aren't a challenge at all, they're really not worth our game time.

This is especially true at higher levels when a single large burst area effect can one shot half or more of the minions. They're just too easy to overcome for it to be fun. YMMV, but meh. Minions are boring. They're like dog poop on your shoe. You have to scrap it off, but you don't want to bother wasting the effort. Practically everything else in the game system is more exciting than minions. My players would rather enter water (the bane of fantasy roleplaying) than fight minions.

Minions can actually be rather fun. For one, fights with something like a 6 on 6 ratio are rather boring, since it's pretty easy to end up with guys pairing off one on one. Why not go with something more exciting and threatening, like 6 on 12, or 6 on 18? The end of the D&D/Robot Chicken videos had an awesome combat where Chris Perkins used like a dozen minions and a ton stirges to fight the party. They were easily outnumbered by at least 4 or 5 to 1, and it really made the combat look interesting and exciting.

If you find that your PC's are tearing through minions too easily, there's a couple things you can do to mitigate that.

1) Don't line up the cannon fodder. Seriously. There's no reason for the minions to all be melee monsters that come at the PC's in nice little 3x3 formations, just waiting for that well placed Fireball to wipe them all out. Use ranged artillery minions to backup your regular monsters, or just space them out all over the battlefield. The players can still have fun using AoE's to take out a couple of minions while laying some damage on a normal enemy, but you can avoid losing ALL of them simultaneously to a single attack.

2) Don't throw all of them out at once. There's a great encounter in KotS where our Rogue opened up the wrong door and our Wizard got swarmed by 8 minions. At the time, we didn't know these were minions and it created a lot of tension. He threw up Shield to avoid all of their attacks, and then my Dragonborn Fighter had to peel off from the main fight to use an enlarged Dragonbreath plus a Cleave to clear all of them out. Having them show up a couple rounds into the fight was very scary and exciting, and even though they died quick it still burned up a lot of actions and powers...in addition to be just a crowning moment of awesome for my character.

Secondly, reserving some enemies for showing up later in the fight can allow you to slip reinforcements behind the PC's and keep them guessing. By using minions you'll usually keep from totally unbalancing the fight while still presenting them with more enemies to contend with. Plus, with them showing up later in the fight the PC's might have already blown some of their big AoE's, thus keeping them from blowing all the minions over in one attack.

3) Minions can be a monster type, as well as just a neat concept. If you find that your players just wipe the floor with normal minions, feel free to toughen them up a bit. Using under leveled monsters with lower hit points can still present a threat, while not being as vulnerable to burst and blasts. Or you can even just take appropriately leveled monsters or minions and just tweak their HP total to be something that a PC could take down in one or two solid hits. The key here is to just increase the number of monsters in the fight, not just increase the number of HP's that the PC's have to slog through. You could take a normal monster, cut it's HP down to 1/4 and then give them half the XP for it. It will be a credible threat, but easy to take down, and a helluva lot of fun.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Of course I use minions! In about three quarters of encounters. (Much of the time that hit doesn't kill minions, it just gets them to run away). And the trick to using minions is to make sure they are seldom in a position to be blasted in a group - but are being obnoxious little buggers (either making sure the brutes hit or are plinking away and doing more damage than equivalent XP of monsters would).

And I can't remember ever running a 1 on 1 fight.

 

[KarinsDad]

Of course I use minions! In about three quarters of encounters. (Much of the time that hit doesn't kill minions, it just gets them to run away).

shudder

I guess it all boils down to what people get used to. Maybe I'm old school where for 28 years, we did not have minions, but this feels too much like video games like Halo where some monsters are one shot from a blaster and others require a beat down. It's like taking on enemy villagers instead of enemy combatants. It's one thing to have an occasional mook, but 3 encounters out of 4? Yikes! Way too lackluster and uninspiring. It's like being an adult bully and fighting kids instead of adults. Not a threat, not a challenge.

 

[renau1g]

Well, KD you've played in my PbP game and I have yet to use minions (for the most part) there for the same reason as you mention. They're ok for certain scenarios, Helm's Deep-style adventure as an example, to give the PC's the feeling that they're actually doing something epic to turn the tide of a major battle. After all, Aragorn and co. were probably paragon tier around that time and orc mooks were slew by the dozens, but there were still so many.

Oh, great comment about the adult bully fighting kids, you made me laugh...

I just used some minions with a saving throw to avoid the damage 1/encounter (some sort of Far Realm tentacle monster) that helped a bit, but still, at best the monster took 2 shots to kill. Heck even the melee guys can just toss a javelin and take them out I look at them (esp. in PbP) as extra xp to help the PC's along.

Oh we also used minions in a one-shot I ran, "Night of the Living Dead" where individually the zombies are weak, but they got numbers and if they grabbed you, man you were in trouble. It was fun for a bit, but yeah special circumstances and all that.

 

[Blackbrrd]

I changed just about all my minions into "underlings" - they take two hits or a crit to kill. Works out a lot better.

 

[Neonchameleon]

"Not a threat, not a challenge"?

You mean my players don't feel threatened or challenged by encounters where several of them have been reduced to negative hit points? (The only two combat encounters I've run where no one hit negatives, one was ended through diplomacy and the other didn't have any minions).

You mean that there shouldn't be pets and half-involved bystanders or trainees that are easily driven off while the core of thugs is solid? Or that the Necromancer's skeleton horde should all be almost as tough as the necromancer himself? Rather than a horde - with a dozen or so skeletons, a couple of zombies, and the necromancer in one fight. You mean that I shouldn't run a lynch mob stirred up by agents - but with the would be lynchers breaking when they take a solid blow?

Or did you think I ran any encounters where the opposition only consisted of minions? I normally run three different types of bad guy at once (with multiple instances).