Monsters - How to best run them?

[Nebulous]

Just keep them fighting on and after three or four encounters you'll find that suddenly they're running out of healing surges and daily powers. THAT'S when the paranoia and worry starts to set in, and when the players start feeling afraid for their lives.

Making each encounter harder just means that they'll end up taking extending rests more often, and approaching each fight at full strength. Which is, to my mind, a bit dull.

I think Mearls mentioned this somewhere: 4e is about the slow burn, unlike 3.x. Now, the PCs are worn down over time, leading toward a finale where they are much more liable to be terrified because their resources have been slowly depleted.

 

[Mengu]

DM'ing for a swordmage can be pretty annoying. They have a lot of interrupts, and leave you high and dry abilities. But that's why you build redundancy into your encounters. Fighters can sometimes do similar lock downs too. And that just means they are doing their jobs. I find it's usually best to suffer the consequences of whatever it is those defenders are doing, and make your best move.

If it means the Swordmage gets to teleport out of the trap, fine, the trap might have failed anyway. If you take a combat challenge attack from the fighter to shift to a position where you can blast the whole party, just suffer the attack. So the monster takes a bit of damage. Monsters have nice pools of hit points precisely for this reason.

If a monster needs to take an opportunity attack from the rogue so it can go flank the rogue, make it happen. Taking some damage is well worth a +2 to hit. Dealing flanking skirmisher damage on a rogue and maybe knocking them down or dazing them is well worth the 8-10 points you took from the free attack.

Monster tactics are quite a bit different than PC tactics because they have different resources, the biggest one of which is their HP's. So I try to use that resource to press the PC's into difficult positions, where even if the outcome of the battle highly favors the PC's, they feel like they are in a tight spot and must use encounter/daily powers to get themselves out of the jam they are in.

Monsters have one major goal, to wear the PC's down before their next fight. So sometimes an intelligent nemesis, might observe the party warlord was severely wounded in a fight, and send an assassin/lurker after the warlord. This might be a quick fight for the party as they speedily dispatch the assassin, but if it does some serious damage to the warlord before it goes down, running him out of surges, the party will have to be very careful not to expose their leader in future fights, so the warlord may no longer be as effective.

There are lots of ways to keep players threatened. You just have to come to terms with the fact that the first encounter of the day, is not likely to be the one that sends the party running home, unless you seriously increase the threat level.

 

[Night]

Wearing the PCs down is really the key to 4th ed play: a party can handle pretty much any sane (even "very hard" XP-wise) encounter without too much trouble, they're built in with a lot of different tools for the task.

This gets harder when they have to do three, four, or five in a row without an extended rest. if you're having trouble knocking them down, try to rebalance things into multiple encounters; use early ones to coax healing surges and dailies out of the party, and just keep hitting them.

They probably still win in the end -- and that is, after all, the point -- but making it a test of their endurance makes for a much harder-fought victory.

 

[Zaukrie]

Thanks to the last three posters. Interestingly, that is how it plays out in our games. I'm just so used to 2E and 3E that it is probably my expectations that need to be adjusted, not the monsters' tactics.

 

[Victim]

If you can spare the time, try to build monster groups to have the same sort of teamwork and synergy between abilities that a PC group can have. If some monsters do extra damage with CA or some other condition, throw in some other guys who inflict that condition (or things that can easily grant CA) to give them some help. If you have lots of ranged guys, give them a buddy who can slow, immobilize, inflict difficult terrain, forced movement, etc so that they don't get rushed and beat down.

 

[SlyFlourish]

I feel your pain. I run a game with six regulars - two defenders - and getting around them to beat on the softies is always a trick. Our ranger (my wife) is particularly hard to hit since she can shift away as an interrupt on either a strike or when a creature moves adjacent.

Here are three things that might help:

1. Prevent them from taking more than one extended rest every five battles. We were going two to three battles with an extended rest and thats a lot of action points and dailies getting thrown around. Also, healing surges should matter. If your fighter isn't complaining about too few surges, you're not burning them enough.

2. Remember that an even leveled battle is going to be pretty easy for the party. The DMG recommends that three encounters out of eight be +1 level above the party and that one of them is 3 levels above the party. A challenging fight should be three levels above the party.

3. When you have more than five players, you need MORE than just one extra monster. Re-calculate the experience budget keeping the level of the encounter in mind. It might end up being two more creatures of equal level to the party if the encounter is supposed to be three levels higher than the party.

And as other mentioned, use terrain to challenge things a bit, but I am not nearly as good as my players at strategy so unless my monsters are immune, they end up getting crushed by my own terrain.

All in all, though, my group is having fun so I'm happy.

 

[Zaukrie]

That last part is true, my group does seem to be happy and having fun, which is what matters most.

 

[CharlesRyan]

In my experience another key point is to force the defenders to choose which creatures to lock down. If there's one really obvious choice about which creature needs to be locked down, you can bet your defender will be all over it, and that creature will have nothing to do in the fight except work down your defender.

On the flip side, if there are two obvious choices (or a number of choices equal to your number of defenders plus one), things are a bit more interesting, especially if the creatures are pretty mobile.

Mengu is right that hp is an important resource for monsters that should help define their tactics. In 4E, their number is another such resource.