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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doctor Proctor" data-source="post: 5179432" data-attributes="member: 78547">I find that 90% of grind comes form either poor encounter building, or poor play on the part of the players (could be because of non-synergistic PC choices or not paying attention/being prepared for the game).Example: Recently, one of the regular players in our group decided to try his hand at DMing a one-shot.  It was rather disastrous in terms of level of grind, and there were two why.1) The Players: I had sent out an e-mail to the group informing them that I was playing a higher leveled version of a character that was a Fighter MC Cleric, while another player I knew was playing a higher level version of his Rogue MC Sorcerer.  I asked the other players to perhaps talk about what sorts of PC's they were bringing.  I did this both so we could try and create a synergistic and balanced party, but also because it would let me know if I should maybe tweak my build some (ie - add more Cleric feats to increase my Leader abilities, or add more damage).Instead, I never received any kind of a response and what we ended up with on the day of the game was 3 Defenders and 2 Strikers, all melee builds.  One of the Strikers was not-that-optimized Monk MC Cleric (it was Tiefling...pumping DEX and STR...do the math) that would've been okay in a more well balanced party...but 3 Defenders and 2 Strikers is not balanced.With no Controller to provide battlefield control and inflict status effects on enemies, and no Leader to buff allies and help deal with conditions and defensive battlefield control, this meant we just ended up all ganging up in melee and throwing all of our middling damage at the enemy.  Very grindy, and very boring if you ask me.2) The Encounter Design: The DM had never DM'd a game before, and rather than just following the DMG advice and making some straight up recommended encounters he wound up experimenting with a lot of stuff.The first encounter was with a solitary Solo Dragon that was under-leveled.  This meant two things: not only was it not a threat, it had a buttload of HP to grind through.  Add to this the fact that he had this fight in a sandstorm that didn't allow the dragon to fly, and you end up with a long fight where we just stood toe to toe with the Dragon at ground level and beat through it's prodigious HP.Oh, and there was also pretty much no terrain present in the fight.  With an all melee party, this meant that the Dragon was pretty much surrounded from round 1 until it died.After that fight, the next encounter again started with just a single enemy.  The Rogue MC Sorcerer almost ended this fight in a single round with a rather amazing sneak attack roll, leaving the enemy with only about 20 HP.  Since it survived the initial attack, the DM's "special" (read: custom designed, not from anything in the MM's or Dungeon) monster started up with his tricks.  Basically, he wanted the feel of a "summoner" monster, and so each round this thing would toss out a few enemies that we would have to deal with.  We eventually defeated it before it had even summoned all of the creatures it could, and without hardly breaking a sweat.  While this wasn't really a grind per se, it was quite boring.For one, there was again zero terrain on the map, which was how the Rogue closed so quickly. This meant that we were all able to close very quickly, and the entire fight took place pretty much within in a 5 square radius.Secondly, since none of the "summoned" monsters started in the fight they were never able to form any sort of a strategy.   We had all closed by the end of round 1, which meant that there was no sort of defensive line or interesting battle lines that would cause issues.  It was just one big clump.  One of the monster types even inflicted immobilize on a successful hit, but since they didn't come out until the party was already engaged, this was a mostly wasted ability.  Had they come out in the beginning, they almost would've acted as a sort of hindering terrain and changed the tactical situation drastically.  If there had been say, some kind of a pool of water in the middle of the map, with the immobilizing monsters on either side, it would've totally changed the fight.  Party members that could fly or were just highly mobile (Myself, the Rogue/Sorcerer or the Monk) could've bypassed them or gotten around behind them in some way, whereas the rest of the party would've had to slow down or go around the sides and deal with the immobilizing.  While it might've made the encounter longer, it would have made it more fun and therefore less of a grind.Lastly, the choice of monsters had some issues.  There was a nasty creature which lowered all my defenses by 5, and then followed that up with another attack that lowered my Will by 4 (which was overkill to throw on one player, especially one with a Will that could be hit on a 3 before it was lowered at all).  As cool as this monster was though, there was not a single creature in the encounter which could attack Will (amongst those that were summoned, but since we beat the summoner before he could summon everything he had, there might have been others), and I think only one other creature could attack anything other than AC, which meant that this power was mostly wasted.  What would've been an interesting and dangerous enemy ended up going down within a round of appearing because it was spawned within easy reach of the melee members of the party and had almost no effect on the battle because there was no one around to capitalize on the penalties it was dishing out.The last encounter was essentially a rehash of the second.  The summoning monster wasn't quite dead, and it suddenly came back and dominated one of the PC's (me, actually) to use him to help summon more monsters.  The dominating action was done as a sort of "surprise round" (I put it in quotes because it was more of a "cut scene" surprise round, in that it was written into the adventure with no way for the players to avoid it...which is always a bad idea), which meant that I started the encounter without really being able to act.  However, the creature got kinda shut down and never even got to summon another monster, and was quickly brought down by the combined might of the rest of the party (all surrounding it in melee).  I, however, was not involved because the dominate was a proximity ability, and (to go back to #1) we didn't have any Controllers or Leaders that could separate the two of us.So, the last fight ended up being, once again, very long and boring.  Daze effects kept the creature from summoning, and then it was just a matter of whittling HP while I sat and watched...unable to act.(Note: The summoning monster was a custom monster made up by the DM for his first time DMing.  This is not a good idea.  You shouldn't really tweak or create monsters until you have a lot of DMing experience, specifically so you can avoid some of the pitfalls he fell into)</blockquote>

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