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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Vayden" data-source="post: 4598219" data-attributes="member: 57791">That's a little bit harsher than I would say it, but it does basically sum up my next tip:Tip #7) Don't enter 4e encounter design with a 3e mindset Combat in 4e is designed to be fast, fluid, dangerous, and yes, unrealistic. While a 3e combat in a 5x5 featureless room, or at a range of 100s of feet, or against monsters who don't really present a threat, could be fun, 4e isn't really designed for that. 7a) One of the subtle pleasures of 3e was the game of resource management - players had to assess the threat level of fights and decide whether to burn precious resources (high level spells, potions, wands, scrolls etc) or whether to save them for later. In this way, even a non-threatening fight could be interesting, because the players would handicap themselves and make a game of trying to win without wasting resources. I myself don't find that playstyle very enjoyable, but the key take-away here is that 4e was designed to mostly eliminate that style of gaming. You have it to a limited extent with daily powers/magic items, but the majority of the groups resources can be spent freely in any fight. Because of that, non-threatening encounters are even more boring than they were before. Therefore, if you build encounters designed only to wear out your player's resources (level-appropriate or lower) you're basically wasting everyone's gaming time. I think this paradigm shift was something the game designers themselves didn't fully understand, since they advise you to frequently use level-appropriate encounters. I, on the other, advise you to almost never use those. Use level+1 as your "easy", resource-grinding fights. Only use level-appropriate if you have a severely un-optimized group or have come up with a great setting for the fight. 7b) Similarly, try to avoid designing dungeons with choke-points - while it may occasionally be fun for the party to find one and dominate, leaving chokepoints everywhere drops your fights into boring territory. Always have multiple approaches available for both sides - have a side room that the monsters can detour through to hit the back-line, have multiple paths through the pile of rocks, etc. Or, if you're going to give your characters a nice defensible chokepoint, take that into account in the challenge rating and throw a hideously unfair encounter group at them. It can even be fun in this case to allow them several hours sometimes to set up there defense - however nasty the traps they have laid are, just set them off with filler monsters and bring the real heat behind - if they only actually fight a level-appropriate fight, but their traps/chokepoints have cinematically killed 4-5 encounters worth of monsters, they'll feel like the kings of the world. 7c) Minions are your friends. Ignore the 1/4 xp budget for them, especially if you have a wizard in the party. I'd treat them more like 1/16 of a monster, especially if they're melee minions. In 3e, every monster was a monster - I tend to use minions more as mobile, somewhat dangerous terrain than monsters once you get your players past levels 3-4. Anyone else have some good paradigm switches to apply?</blockquote>

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