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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zinovia" data-source="post: 4602804" data-attributes="member: 57373">This has been a great thread with a lot of useful advice in it.  Thank you! I am currently running a 4E game and have found the combats I've run to be too easy so far.  My group seems to be both fairly well balanced as well as making sound use of tactics.  They only just hit 2nd level, so I plan on stepping up the foes a notch and seeing if I can put some fear into the PC's (and get them to actually *use* more of their healing surges!).  Some of what has made the fights too easy is that I've had too few opponents in some encounters, or else the fight was by its nature staged in waves (reinforcements joining up after a couple rounds).  It's clear to me that I need to pay more attention to the "economy of actions" by using more lower level opponents rather than fewer high level ones.  I also need to make sure the foes have some good tactical options themselves.  The PC's are good at working together and can probably outthink me when it comes to straight tactics.  I need to use my DM powers to set things up with an advantage to the NPC's to start to make up for that, but so far haven't been very effective at it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" />  The next big encounter will be an ambush while they are inside a house in a remote area.  I want to have a mix of foes - one big cleric dude who can heal his allies, some henchmen he hired, maybe a skirmisher/rogue type, and a couple guard drakes.  I love guard drakes.  Since they will be in a house, I want there to be 2 doors that the bad guys will bust into simultaneously.  One door leads from the outside to the pantry, with a trap door to the root cellar in that room.  The PC's could open up the trap door if they want to create an obstacle (pit) and something to push people into.  I'll have the usual large fieldstone fireplace in the main room/kitchen area, but it's pretty much just a house, so terrain can't be *too* interesting.  I suppose if I have a pot of rendering fat over the fire, that could be spilled all over the floor to create a slippery area of difficult terrain.  There will be 2 innocent bystanders present - one of whom can sort of defend himself, the other cannot.  Hopefully the group will protect them and not simply allow them to be slain by the bad guys.  The PC's are:  A human 2-handed weapon fighter, a genasi assault swordmage, an eladrin taclord, a halfling rogue, and a halfling feylock (all level 2).  The taclord is very good at battlefield tactics, and is using his fey step to good advantage in most fights.  He's setting up the rogue and fighter with some great flanking and bonuses.  The swordmage is *not* very tactically oriented, and will often make suboptimal choices, but my objective is to keep her having fun with her character. I want to make this a challenging fight where they need to think on their feet and pull out all the stops.  Any recommendations?</blockquote>

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