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I keep bottle-necking the heroes (advice)
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7578790" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>While I think a lot of the discussion in your "Changing the Combat Parameters..." thread, in this case the OP is reporting about a combat that occurred at 2nd level when the math shouldn't in fact be broken. Again, I think this goes back to the fact that the Soldier template (and especially the elite Soldier) is well known to lead to grindy long duration fights.</p><p></p><p>Your suggestions while some of them might work, go back onto the problem that I called out with all metagame solutions to this problem - at some level your asking the DM to deliberately override the simulated reality to produce a desirable game result either by ignoring the rules or else by ignoring what is reasonable for the fiction.</p><p></p><p>While those essays on dungeon design are worth reading, interwoven and branching dungeon layouts won't resolve the issue in the thread, because those threads address dungeon design at a large scale strategic or narrative level (multiple story paths) and not at a small scale tactical level. You can't Jaquay the problem away once an encounter has already begun, and even a well Jaquayed dungeon will still have chokepoints to exploit (and which rationally the defenders of the dungeon might want to exploit). I'd also like to say that Jaquaying a dungeon tends to be more useful in terms of replayability or tournament play (when different team choices lead to measurably different outcomes) than it does in terms of making for a fun game. This is particularly true because people no longer need a tabletop RPG to experience exploratory play - "roguelike" games are a dime a dozen these days. </p><p></p><p>Any terrain features you add that actually help evade bottle necks have to be rationalized as something that someone would actually build, otherwise they will be transparent elements designed to favor the PCs. And this isn't even to get into the problem that most terrain features you add would tend to make bottle necking easier, not less easier. I suspect this suggestion falls into 'far easier said than done'.</p><p></p><p>While your suggestion to house rule improvised combat maneuvers that allow for forced movement or evasion might have some merit in some systems, in the case of 4e it violates the entire spirit of the game to let players improvise stunts that give them forced movement options since 4e explicitly silos maneuvers as centrally important CharGen building resources. I can think of few game systems were stunts break the underlying game system to a larger degree than they would in 4e. Fixing this problem would I think be extremely challenging, as you'd need to come up with a balance that made such stunts worthwhile without making them ubiquitously attempted actions. </p><p></p><p>In short, to me this still most easily falls under the DM rule, "Don't let one bad dice roll ruin the fun." If the fight would have been a lot more fun if the PCs won the initiative, next time let the players think they won the initiative.</p><p></p><p>Beyond that, you'll have to get into fixes to the math that make 4e less grindy.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7578790, member: 4937"] While I think a lot of the discussion in your "Changing the Combat Parameters..." thread, in this case the OP is reporting about a combat that occurred at 2nd level when the math shouldn't in fact be broken. Again, I think this goes back to the fact that the Soldier template (and especially the elite Soldier) is well known to lead to grindy long duration fights. Your suggestions while some of them might work, go back onto the problem that I called out with all metagame solutions to this problem - at some level your asking the DM to deliberately override the simulated reality to produce a desirable game result either by ignoring the rules or else by ignoring what is reasonable for the fiction. While those essays on dungeon design are worth reading, interwoven and branching dungeon layouts won't resolve the issue in the thread, because those threads address dungeon design at a large scale strategic or narrative level (multiple story paths) and not at a small scale tactical level. You can't Jaquay the problem away once an encounter has already begun, and even a well Jaquayed dungeon will still have chokepoints to exploit (and which rationally the defenders of the dungeon might want to exploit). I'd also like to say that Jaquaying a dungeon tends to be more useful in terms of replayability or tournament play (when different team choices lead to measurably different outcomes) than it does in terms of making for a fun game. This is particularly true because people no longer need a tabletop RPG to experience exploratory play - "roguelike" games are a dime a dozen these days. Any terrain features you add that actually help evade bottle necks have to be rationalized as something that someone would actually build, otherwise they will be transparent elements designed to favor the PCs. And this isn't even to get into the problem that most terrain features you add would tend to make bottle necking easier, not less easier. I suspect this suggestion falls into 'far easier said than done'. While your suggestion to house rule improvised combat maneuvers that allow for forced movement or evasion might have some merit in some systems, in the case of 4e it violates the entire spirit of the game to let players improvise stunts that give them forced movement options since 4e explicitly silos maneuvers as centrally important CharGen building resources. I can think of few game systems were stunts break the underlying game system to a larger degree than they would in 4e. Fixing this problem would I think be extremely challenging, as you'd need to come up with a balance that made such stunts worthwhile without making them ubiquitously attempted actions. In short, to me this still most easily falls under the DM rule, "Don't let one bad dice roll ruin the fun." If the fight would have been a lot more fun if the PCs won the initiative, next time let the players think they won the initiative. Beyond that, you'll have to get into fixes to the math that make 4e less grindy. [/QUOTE]
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