Hey folks, I dunno how many of you have done numerous encounters using the 4E rules in PbP... but from what little I've seen, I'm wondering whether encounters might be a little too long using 4E? Because of all the shifting of players/monsters each phase during initiative, the question of whether additional attack bonuses are active due to power use etc... all of which require the PbP DM to post results more frequently during a round of combat than he did in 3E... I have a suspicion that running a 4E encounter in PbP might be longer than is truly interesting for the players.
Does anyone have any opinions on this, and their previous 4E PbP encounter experience?
And just so you are all aware... if we were to decide that combat per encounter was too long, here is precisely what I would use as the house-rule (so you can all take that into account when making your decision). All hit points for monsters *and* players would be cut in half (along with the resultant halving of bloodied and surge values as well).
What this does is make individual weapon swings and spell attacks more important, because they will be taking off a higher proportion of a monster/player's hit points. A critical hit might easily be very critical, as you could conceivably drop someone to bloodied on a single swing (or a bloodied character to unconscious). It will make healing more important, plus it will really put players healing surges to full use.
The most important thing though is that it is the most simple solution (only changing at most three numbers - hit point value, bloodied value, surge value), and which will cut down encounter length by perhaps 50 percent. And as this particular module we are running has a goodly number of combat encounters lined up in a row... speeding the encounters up I believe would be a good thing.
So please let us know your experiences thus far in 4E PbP combat and whether you think we should speed things up. If you are unsure, I am also quite happy to run the first encounter you guys hit as a regular one with standard HP totals, and then we can make a determination after it completes whether or not we want to halve HPs to speed up subsequent ones. It all depends on ease-of-play and what makes for most interesting combat. Thanx guys!
Does anyone have any opinions on this, and their previous 4E PbP encounter experience?
And just so you are all aware... if we were to decide that combat per encounter was too long, here is precisely what I would use as the house-rule (so you can all take that into account when making your decision). All hit points for monsters *and* players would be cut in half (along with the resultant halving of bloodied and surge values as well).
What this does is make individual weapon swings and spell attacks more important, because they will be taking off a higher proportion of a monster/player's hit points. A critical hit might easily be very critical, as you could conceivably drop someone to bloodied on a single swing (or a bloodied character to unconscious). It will make healing more important, plus it will really put players healing surges to full use.
The most important thing though is that it is the most simple solution (only changing at most three numbers - hit point value, bloodied value, surge value), and which will cut down encounter length by perhaps 50 percent. And as this particular module we are running has a goodly number of combat encounters lined up in a row... speeding the encounters up I believe would be a good thing.
So please let us know your experiences thus far in 4E PbP combat and whether you think we should speed things up. If you are unsure, I am also quite happy to run the first encounter you guys hit as a regular one with standard HP totals, and then we can make a determination after it completes whether or not we want to halve HPs to speed up subsequent ones. It all depends on ease-of-play and what makes for most interesting combat. Thanx guys!
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