Not one simple cause
Glad it's not just me-- I've had the same experience when I sent a party of 4 11th-level characters against 2 elite Ettin Marauders (1000 XP each) and a venom-eye basilisk (500 XP), a level 11 encounter. The players were three veterans with limited 4e exposure and one very new player. The players won with no player deaths, but the combat took over 2 and a half hours. By the end, everyone was drained and soured on 4th edition.
For the people who think this isn't a problem, I'd really like to ask you if you have played a paragon-level combat.
There isn't one simple cause for this problem-- a number of different factors are at work. The DM, the players, and the game design all share some responsibility for the problem of drawn-out combats. Here are my suggestions:
For the DM:
1. Don't throw even 3.5 veterans headlong into a situation against multiple elite or a single solo monster and assume they will know what to do. Even if the characters, and the party, is optimized, the idea of "teamwork" is fairly foreign to my players. In my 3.5 game, the guy who plays the wizard usually takes some sadistic delight when he "has to" cast an area spell that will damage some party members. Stress the importance of teamwork and build up on it from level one.
2. Use elite or solo monsters very sparingly. The rules say that they are for boss monsters, so most battles should not have any elites or solos. When you use elites, one per encounter should be more than enough, and solos should, as their name implies, appear alone unless the party has shown they can handle a huge challenge.
3. Adjust the difficulty based on the players. House rule that solos and elites have fewer hit points (or adjust their levels down) until the players have shown what they can handle relatively quickly. Alternately, rule that solo monsters, like dragons, will not fight to the death and flee when they are reduced to 1/4 HP. Why give bosses their full HP if fighting them just becomes a chore? The game is supposed to be fun for the players.
For the Players:
1. The players need to work together in creating their characters and in using them. If your group sucks at teamwork, 4e will make you good at it, and if it can't, play 3.5. I'm starting a new 4e game because I don't think may current group can produce the required level of teamwork.
2. Each character needs to be optimized for his or her role as well if the characters are to be effective. As has been pointed out, the rules are pretty forgiving of mistakes in character development because of retraining, and a party working together from level one has an edge. A party of brand new 11th level characters will probably be like a sports all-star team: even though there are all these great players, they won't be the best they can be because they aren't used to playing together.
So, the striker should deal a lot of damage, the leader give everyone bonuses, etc, as effectively as they can.
Game Design:
1. I'd like to know if this was addressed in playtesting, and I wonder if part of the problem is that we just aren't looking at all of the rules yet. We know that many splatbooks are in the works, and anyone who has played Magic:The Gathering can tell you when there are more possiblities there are in an exceptions-based game, there are also many more possiblities for abuse. So there are certainly many powerful combinations we haven't seen and also powerful combinations in the current rules we haven't understood yet.
2. Does this mean that the math is broken as far as XP per encounter? Not really, just that it may have failed to fully control for the inexperience of the players, but mostly it is the responsibility of the DM to adjust the encounter in order to make it fun. The charts for building encounters in the DMG are excellent guidelines, but the DM needs to realize that elite and solo monsters have the power to stay in the fight long after other monsters have died and use them sparingly.
3. The game is really not very forgiving of small errors. Miss a point of damage here or there, lose the possiblility of a bonus to hit now and then. . . and it adds up pretty quickly. I think that the system is very unforgiving of errors either in character design or errors at the table. But because the characters are hard to kill, the punishment for these errors might just be having the stuffing kicked out of you for hours on end.
Anyway, these are some of my ideas. As I've said, I don't think there is one cause or solution for this problem, but I do think that this problem will get better as we get more options through splatbooks and players get better at using the rules to their advantage. Even so, solo encounters are going to be slugfests, and if you want them to be shorter, either give the monsters fewer HP, adjust their levels down, or have the monsters flee at some point long before they would have gone to 0 HP.
Glad it's not just me-- I've had the same experience when I sent a party of 4 11th-level characters against 2 elite Ettin Marauders (1000 XP each) and a venom-eye basilisk (500 XP), a level 11 encounter. The players were three veterans with limited 4e exposure and one very new player. The players won with no player deaths, but the combat took over 2 and a half hours. By the end, everyone was drained and soured on 4th edition.
For the people who think this isn't a problem, I'd really like to ask you if you have played a paragon-level combat.
There isn't one simple cause for this problem-- a number of different factors are at work. The DM, the players, and the game design all share some responsibility for the problem of drawn-out combats. Here are my suggestions:
For the DM:
1. Don't throw even 3.5 veterans headlong into a situation against multiple elite or a single solo monster and assume they will know what to do. Even if the characters, and the party, is optimized, the idea of "teamwork" is fairly foreign to my players. In my 3.5 game, the guy who plays the wizard usually takes some sadistic delight when he "has to" cast an area spell that will damage some party members. Stress the importance of teamwork and build up on it from level one.
2. Use elite or solo monsters very sparingly. The rules say that they are for boss monsters, so most battles should not have any elites or solos. When you use elites, one per encounter should be more than enough, and solos should, as their name implies, appear alone unless the party has shown they can handle a huge challenge.
3. Adjust the difficulty based on the players. House rule that solos and elites have fewer hit points (or adjust their levels down) until the players have shown what they can handle relatively quickly. Alternately, rule that solo monsters, like dragons, will not fight to the death and flee when they are reduced to 1/4 HP. Why give bosses their full HP if fighting them just becomes a chore? The game is supposed to be fun for the players.
For the Players:
1. The players need to work together in creating their characters and in using them. If your group sucks at teamwork, 4e will make you good at it, and if it can't, play 3.5. I'm starting a new 4e game because I don't think may current group can produce the required level of teamwork.
2. Each character needs to be optimized for his or her role as well if the characters are to be effective. As has been pointed out, the rules are pretty forgiving of mistakes in character development because of retraining, and a party working together from level one has an edge. A party of brand new 11th level characters will probably be like a sports all-star team: even though there are all these great players, they won't be the best they can be because they aren't used to playing together.
So, the striker should deal a lot of damage, the leader give everyone bonuses, etc, as effectively as they can.
Game Design:
1. I'd like to know if this was addressed in playtesting, and I wonder if part of the problem is that we just aren't looking at all of the rules yet. We know that many splatbooks are in the works, and anyone who has played Magic:The Gathering can tell you when there are more possiblities there are in an exceptions-based game, there are also many more possiblities for abuse. So there are certainly many powerful combinations we haven't seen and also powerful combinations in the current rules we haven't understood yet.
2. Does this mean that the math is broken as far as XP per encounter? Not really, just that it may have failed to fully control for the inexperience of the players, but mostly it is the responsibility of the DM to adjust the encounter in order to make it fun. The charts for building encounters in the DMG are excellent guidelines, but the DM needs to realize that elite and solo monsters have the power to stay in the fight long after other monsters have died and use them sparingly.
3. The game is really not very forgiving of small errors. Miss a point of damage here or there, lose the possiblility of a bonus to hit now and then. . . and it adds up pretty quickly. I think that the system is very unforgiving of errors either in character design or errors at the table. But because the characters are hard to kill, the punishment for these errors might just be having the stuffing kicked out of you for hours on end.
Anyway, these are some of my ideas. As I've said, I don't think there is one cause or solution for this problem, but I do think that this problem will get better as we get more options through splatbooks and players get better at using the rules to their advantage. Even so, solo encounters are going to be slugfests, and if you want them to be shorter, either give the monsters fewer HP, adjust their levels down, or have the monsters flee at some point long before they would have gone to 0 HP.
