Obryn
Hero
It's any Rest - including a Short Rest.
(Still, that'd be another way to dramatically increase lethality, so long as you're running more than 1 encounter per day!)
-O
Players dissatisfied with level of danger in 4e
- Thread starter SWAT
- Start date
(Still, that'd be another way to dramatically increase lethality, so long as you're running more than 1 encounter per day!)
-O
Fanaelialae
Legend
The Compendium has the following to say:
It says "a rest" (as in "any rest, short or extended"). I'm aware that not everyone agrees with that. I don't even dispute that for some groups the extended only method works better, as it certainly increases the potential lethality of death save considerably. However, per a strict reading of the RAW, a short rest is sufficient to reset your death saves.
Scholar & Brutalman
First Post
If the DM is going to a lot of trouble to make encounters as deadly as possible, I guess not. But I expect he'll have to make encounters increasingly higher than the party level as you get into paragon.
thecasualoblivion
First Post
I have some observations based on playing 4E multiple times per week since launch:
1. Its easier to kill the party than it is to kill a character. As a PC, barring a serious accident(like some of what has been described in this thread), you are unlikely to die in combat while your friends survive. I've killed vastly more PCs in TPKs than singly.
2. If you are fighting only once per day, PCs are virtually invincible. Encounters are balanced around having multiple encounters per day, and only having one combat with unlimited access to healing surges and dailies makes a level appropriate encounter almost impossible to create.
3. While I rarely kill PCs, I regularly threaten death. I call these "oh s#$^" moments. I define these as situations where absent immediate and decisive action somebody(or everybody) is going to die. You let them taste death, and then you let them take action to prevent it, and I find it provides the same excitement and suspense as actually being able to die. You don't have to die to fear death.
4. There are a number of tactics useable to kill people, some from a roleplaying standpoint. A habit I have developed, and one my players have come to fear is when I actually have the monsters try to kill somebody who goes unconscious, or as it has come to be called "imping" somebody. This nickname comes from the first time I almost successfully did this, where I had as part of the encounter strategy an assassin imp whose mission it was to try to kill one of the PCs with no regard for the lives of his allies, and then escape. During this fight, it went as normal until one of the PCs went down, and then this imp who had been popping in and out of sight on the sidelines jumps on the helpless PC and starts ripping them apart. This caused an "oh s&#$" moment, and the party's healer and damage dealers had to drop everything they were doing to stop that imp before it killed their friend, which they only succeeded in doing thanks to the dice cooperating, it was that close. I've used this tactic again, and in different forms in addition to having an escaping assassin. Sometimes, I'll have a cowardly or weak willed enemy decide that its more interesting to try to finish somebody off than worry about enemies who are fighting back. Sometimes a well disciplined and outmatched force will decide its time to "take one of them with us" while going out in a blaze of glory. I've had a dragon roll a grab on an unconsicous PC, move+AP to move again to escape and neither PC nor Dragon was ever seen again. I don't do this often, but I do it enough to instill the fear of god in PCs.
1. Its easier to kill the party than it is to kill a character. As a PC, barring a serious accident(like some of what has been described in this thread), you are unlikely to die in combat while your friends survive. I've killed vastly more PCs in TPKs than singly.
2. If you are fighting only once per day, PCs are virtually invincible. Encounters are balanced around having multiple encounters per day, and only having one combat with unlimited access to healing surges and dailies makes a level appropriate encounter almost impossible to create.
3. While I rarely kill PCs, I regularly threaten death. I call these "oh s#$^" moments. I define these as situations where absent immediate and decisive action somebody(or everybody) is going to die. You let them taste death, and then you let them take action to prevent it, and I find it provides the same excitement and suspense as actually being able to die. You don't have to die to fear death.
4. There are a number of tactics useable to kill people, some from a roleplaying standpoint. A habit I have developed, and one my players have come to fear is when I actually have the monsters try to kill somebody who goes unconscious, or as it has come to be called "imping" somebody. This nickname comes from the first time I almost successfully did this, where I had as part of the encounter strategy an assassin imp whose mission it was to try to kill one of the PCs with no regard for the lives of his allies, and then escape. During this fight, it went as normal until one of the PCs went down, and then this imp who had been popping in and out of sight on the sidelines jumps on the helpless PC and starts ripping them apart. This caused an "oh s&#$" moment, and the party's healer and damage dealers had to drop everything they were doing to stop that imp before it killed their friend, which they only succeeded in doing thanks to the dice cooperating, it was that close. I've used this tactic again, and in different forms in addition to having an escaping assassin. Sometimes, I'll have a cowardly or weak willed enemy decide that its more interesting to try to finish somebody off than worry about enemies who are fighting back. Sometimes a well disciplined and outmatched force will decide its time to "take one of them with us" while going out in a blaze of glory. I've had a dragon roll a grab on an unconsicous PC, move+AP to move again to escape and neither PC nor Dragon was ever seen again. I don't do this often, but I do it enough to instill the fear of god in PCs.
Lancelot
Adventurer
I keep a running tally of PC deaths on a piece of notepaper; one line per PC death.
I'm about to start my third page since the release of 4e. That's over 50 dead.
We play weekly; fairly long sessions. There is some degree of DM fudging, but most of the time we let the dice fall where they may. Monsters occasionally go for the coup, but not always (not even most of the time). Bleeding out (3 failed death saves) remains the leading cause of fatalities. Having said that, two greenscale lizardfolk killed a 1st level PC outright (negative bloodied) from max hp in a single round last week.
I had the same concerns about 4e not being lethal enough at first, but have since realized that it doesn't play out that way. I've seen more TPKs in 4e than 3e, to date. I think part of the reason is in the mathematics of the system. If a PC goes down in 4e, especially early in the combat, the party will begin to struggle. They really need to maintain "damage per round" output. Whereas in 3e, it doesn't really matter if the entire front line gets pasted... as long as the wizard still gets off that big save-or-die spell, or the druid finishes buffing and wipes out whatever is left in uber-wildshape form.
And as previously mentioned, there are certain factors that make 4e combat deceptively dangerous. Death saves are persistent; if you go down for a couple of rounds in a fight and kick up, you're that much closer to death if you go down again. Creatures with auras or ongoing damage can be very nasty. Anything which gives a penalty to saves (which includes death saves) can be downright terrifying.
I'm about to start my third page since the release of 4e. That's over 50 dead.
We play weekly; fairly long sessions. There is some degree of DM fudging, but most of the time we let the dice fall where they may. Monsters occasionally go for the coup, but not always (not even most of the time). Bleeding out (3 failed death saves) remains the leading cause of fatalities. Having said that, two greenscale lizardfolk killed a 1st level PC outright (negative bloodied) from max hp in a single round last week.
I had the same concerns about 4e not being lethal enough at first, but have since realized that it doesn't play out that way. I've seen more TPKs in 4e than 3e, to date. I think part of the reason is in the mathematics of the system. If a PC goes down in 4e, especially early in the combat, the party will begin to struggle. They really need to maintain "damage per round" output. Whereas in 3e, it doesn't really matter if the entire front line gets pasted... as long as the wizard still gets off that big save-or-die spell, or the druid finishes buffing and wipes out whatever is left in uber-wildshape form.
And as previously mentioned, there are certain factors that make 4e combat deceptively dangerous. Death saves are persistent; if you go down for a couple of rounds in a fight and kick up, you're that much closer to death if you go down again. Creatures with auras or ongoing damage can be very nasty. Anything which gives a penalty to saves (which includes death saves) can be downright terrifying.
Iron Sky
Procedurally Generated
In the game I ran up to level 11 (now on hiatus) we had 7 PC deaths.
This was with 5 power-gamers of various degrees and everything pretty much by-the-books. By the end the only house-rule we had was that characters could change anything about their character except class, race, and equipment between sessions (so, even more power-gamer friendly).
The first PC "death" was plot(ish)-related; epic-level monsters with permanent invisibility and powers over storm that came in and snatched one of the players at random out of the basement they were hiding in.
The next was when the beast/charge druid boosted his speed up to 11 and charged off ahead of the group into the middle of a demon-summoning ritual and a ring of Abyssal rifts and got dropped in the first round, then proceeded to fail all three death saves before the party could get to him(since they were up to their eyeballs in demonlings).
The next four deaths were a near-TPK as the PCs were trying to stop changeling infiltrators from opening an ancient forgotten door into a dwarven fortress-mountain to let the besieging hobgoblin army in. The party had to split up to take on the two groups of infiltrators, the Barbarian took on one group, everyone else took on the other group. The Barbarian lived, everyone else died.
The last death was when the PCs were trying to steal a flying transport ship and a rocket-powered warforged dropped a bomb on some PCs that sent two of them flying off the cliff. A blazeworm they tamed managed to save one PC (unfortunately the one that could have survived the fall) and the other fell to his death.
So, even with a group of power-gamers allowed to use anything in any of the books and mostly 1-per-day fights, they still have been plenty challenged...
This was with 5 power-gamers of various degrees and everything pretty much by-the-books. By the end the only house-rule we had was that characters could change anything about their character except class, race, and equipment between sessions (so, even more power-gamer friendly).
The first PC "death" was plot(ish)-related; epic-level monsters with permanent invisibility and powers over storm that came in and snatched one of the players at random out of the basement they were hiding in.
The next was when the beast/charge druid boosted his speed up to 11 and charged off ahead of the group into the middle of a demon-summoning ritual and a ring of Abyssal rifts and got dropped in the first round, then proceeded to fail all three death saves before the party could get to him(since they were up to their eyeballs in demonlings).
The next four deaths were a near-TPK as the PCs were trying to stop changeling infiltrators from opening an ancient forgotten door into a dwarven fortress-mountain to let the besieging hobgoblin army in. The party had to split up to take on the two groups of infiltrators, the Barbarian took on one group, everyone else took on the other group. The Barbarian lived, everyone else died.
The last death was when the PCs were trying to steal a flying transport ship and a rocket-powered warforged dropped a bomb on some PCs that sent two of them flying off the cliff. A blazeworm they tamed managed to save one PC (unfortunately the one that could have survived the fall) and the other fell to his death.
So, even with a group of power-gamers allowed to use anything in any of the books and mostly 1-per-day fights, they still have been plenty challenged...
AngryMojo
First Post
PC's also fear monsters more if they take advantage of Coup de Grace attacks. Even if it doesn't kill a character outright, it will put the fear of death in them. If you've seen an orc take a swing at a fallen ally once, you heal your wounded, regardless of how many or few encounters you've had today.
Thanks for all the feedback everyone! Now, to answer some of the questions and comments I remember reading...
We've been applying the death saving throw rules correctly, so it was never that that was affecting the danger.
While I play a dedicated healer when someone else DMs, that hasn't been the case recently, and wasn't an issue when the discussion was sparked. The party's healing capabilities come entirely from second wind, healing potions, and the few healing powers that the druid (multiclass shaman) has. Healing potions have been used more than anything else to revive unconscious allies, but limiting them, especially given the low cost of the weakest type, would be impossible to explain in-game and not my favorite solution out-of-game.
As for death saving throws continuing throughout the fight, what usually happens is that by the time the first PC goes down, monster resources are now low enough, and even lower when the PC is healed, that bringing them back down to 0 is hard to accomplish. In other words, no PC usually goes down until near the end of the fight.
So, often only having one fight per day seems to be the culprit that many of you have identified. It happens that way because we only have two three-hour sessions a month, so I tend to condense combat so a single adventure doesn't take months to resolve. For the same reason, we automatically level-up ever two sessions instead of counting experience points, because we'd like to level-up more than three-four times a year.
But, I'm definitely going to try only allowing the benefits of an extended rest at my discretion. By bringing back resource management and allowing me to vary encounter difficulty, the game should get closer to the baseline design, and likely involve slightly more risk. Mixed with, say, death at 2 failed death saving throws, and death at negative surge value, and this will certainly be closer to what my players are looking for, though perhaps too deadly.
We've been applying the death saving throw rules correctly, so it was never that that was affecting the danger.
While I play a dedicated healer when someone else DMs, that hasn't been the case recently, and wasn't an issue when the discussion was sparked. The party's healing capabilities come entirely from second wind, healing potions, and the few healing powers that the druid (multiclass shaman) has. Healing potions have been used more than anything else to revive unconscious allies, but limiting them, especially given the low cost of the weakest type, would be impossible to explain in-game and not my favorite solution out-of-game.
As for death saving throws continuing throughout the fight, what usually happens is that by the time the first PC goes down, monster resources are now low enough, and even lower when the PC is healed, that bringing them back down to 0 is hard to accomplish. In other words, no PC usually goes down until near the end of the fight.
So, often only having one fight per day seems to be the culprit that many of you have identified. It happens that way because we only have two three-hour sessions a month, so I tend to condense combat so a single adventure doesn't take months to resolve. For the same reason, we automatically level-up ever two sessions instead of counting experience points, because we'd like to level-up more than three-four times a year.
But, I'm definitely going to try only allowing the benefits of an extended rest at my discretion. By bringing back resource management and allowing me to vary encounter difficulty, the game should get closer to the baseline design, and likely involve slightly more risk. Mixed with, say, death at 2 failed death saving throws, and death at negative surge value, and this will certainly be closer to what my players are looking for, though perhaps too deadly.
It may more to do with in-game plot. They're likely not kicking in the door of a dungeon, fighting one room and leaving. It's more likely "We go to see the king, and there's an assassination attempt. Once it's dealt with, we rest. The next day we go out on a caravan and the caravan is attacked - once. Then we rest for the night. Etc."
In my games there's been a lot of "one combat per day" because of the in-game pacing of the adventure - there's no one else to FIGHT that day.
thecasualoblivion
First Post
I would say you are right in saying that the 1(maybe 2) encounters between rest periods is your main culprit. Its an issue of internal game balance. In my experience, playing 2-3 times per week since launch, an encounter of the party's level+4 can with good coordination and the forgiveness of the dice gods, be dealt with by spending 1 daily power per PC with a comfortable balance of threat and safety. A balanced(tactically) encounter with a mix of melee/ranged/control using some of the nastier monsters of a given level can be downright scary, and probably would consume more. That same encounter, with the party firing off every Daily or whatever power in their arsenal because they know there isn't going to be another one after can be fairly trivial. It isn't really possible to scale encounters far beyond that. Going further beyond level+4 encounters goes into the territory of PCs rarely hitting and being almost auto-hit in return in the case of higher level monsters, faced with a greater number of same level monsters than they can manage or have the resources to deal with, or a fight that just frustratingly takes forever to complete.
Firing all guns in 4E doesn't work the same as it did in previous editions. In most cases, it isn't a supernova effect, but a resilience effect. You the DM have a vastly superior force, and you're facing an inferior force of PCs with three times the resources you have. Daily powers don't kill so much as turn the tables in favor of the PC, and it goes back in forth between more powerful monsters beating down the PCs and the PCs turning the tables time and time again until the monsters run out of hp(which usually happens before the PCs run out of Action Points/Dailies/Healing). Its a long fight where the PCs simply outlast the enemies, who don't have the firepower to overcome the resilience of the PCs.
Firing all guns in 4E doesn't work the same as it did in previous editions. In most cases, it isn't a supernova effect, but a resilience effect. You the DM have a vastly superior force, and you're facing an inferior force of PCs with three times the resources you have. Daily powers don't kill so much as turn the tables in favor of the PC, and it goes back in forth between more powerful monsters beating down the PCs and the PCs turning the tables time and time again until the monsters run out of hp(which usually happens before the PCs run out of Action Points/Dailies/Healing). Its a long fight where the PCs simply outlast the enemies, who don't have the firepower to overcome the resilience of the PCs.
Similar Threads
