Solo Monsters and the Risk of Boredom

[Jhaelen]

Enraging at a certain HP %age: In 4e, many many monsters have a specific "when first bloodied" power.

While this works well in general I think this is a bit problematic for solo monsters (and to a lesser degree elites):
Since solo monsters have five times the hit points of a standard monster I've been wondering if they shouldn't also get five times as many thresholds at which special effects might kick in.

Similarly for Elite monsters two thresholds might be more appropriate.

Conversely I'd like to see some mechanism for player characters that allows for a low chance to recover encounter powers in combat.

 

[Jack99]

Can anyone else not access the article?

Works fine here. Since it is a post and not an article, I assume it is okay to post in it's entirety.

I think of everything in the game, solos have the most potential for a frustrating fight. It's important that a solo fight take place in an environment that encourages movement and interesting choices. Otherwise, you end up with the party standing around, trading blows with one monster. Ideally, solos are designed themselves to encourage movement, but that isn't always possible or plausible.

For example, let's take the dragon fight I designed for the Kobold Hall adventure. Were I to do it again, I'd add the following to make the fight more interesting:

* An icy ledge around the edge of the chamber that a character can climb up to snipe at the dragon, but the dragon can smash the ice and send the PC tumbling to the floor if he doesn't keep moving.

* Pillars of ice that provide cover, but that can be destroyed with attacks to cause minor cave-ins.

* Pools of water that flash freeze when the dragon breathes on them, trapping PCs for a round. However, the dragon tends to stand so that the pools are the best places for flanks, and the dragon can also be forzen in place with cold attacks.

* A visible treasure on the opposite side of the room, partially frozen in the ice, that includes a weapon or implement that would be useful against the dragon.

* A thick snow drift that a PC can dive into, hide within, and then spring out of to attack the dragon.

* Icicles hanging from the ceiling that a character can knock down to impale the dragon.

I think that when you have a solo fight, you should look for terrain and other features that:

1. Encourages movement.

2. Rewards risk taking (standing here might be a bad idea, but it gives a real advantage for at least a short time).

3. Gives benefits for doing something other than attacking (spend a round to get that nifty +2 sword).

4. Gives the characters "virtual powers", set pieces that you can use to attack so that the characters aren't just grinding through the same sequence. You can also create these to do some damage on a miss, to doubly reward PCs (they had a good idea, and even on a miss that pays off).

5. Find uses for powers that the solo might shut down, like the freezing water example above. Your ray of frost might not hurt the dragon, but you can still freeze it in place.

In many ways, think of your terrain as filling all the gaps, and roadblocking any potential lame-ness, that might come up in play.

 

[MadMaligor]

Slugfest boredom is a DM/PC issue, not a system design issue in this case. Mearls is only mentioning a few examples to "spice things up". There are a number of roleplay and tactical uses of skills that also can come into play, I would say should come into play.

Thats not even mentioning the whacky things players can come up with mid combat.

If you let the combat boil down to a face off that just trades blows, you seriously need to re-examine the way you approach the game from either side, DM and Player alike.

MM

 

[MadMaligor]

....Conversely I'd like to see some mechanism for player characters that allows for a low chance to recover encounter powers in combat.

Heroic Tier Feat (Generic) - Bag of Tricks
Prerequisites - Int 13
"The crafty adventurer had more tricks up his sleeves than a rogue has daggers."

Benefit - At the beginning of each round roll a die 12. If you roll a 12 you can regain a used encounter power of your choice. This feat can be taken up to three times, each time improving the chance by 1. For example, taking this feat twice would allow you to regain an encounter power on a roll of 11 or 12.


*edit* I just made that up btw...as an example of something you could put in your campaign. When I reread what I wrote it looked like I was stating it was already in game. I used d12 because it is offset from the monster d6 and balances out percentage wise for longer solo encounters. Allow more or less times it can be taken as a feat at your discretion to accomodate for any playtesting balance issues.

 

[Mort_Q]

Can anyone else not access the article?

http://mearls.livejournal.com/152268.html

 

[arscott]

Having run a white dragon fight several different times, I'm of the impression that:

A)The White dragon doesn't actually have enough cool attacks to deserve Solo status--He either attacks a single character, or (every so often) uses his breath weapon. Contrast that to the stronger dragons that get stuff like tail slap, etc.

B)Even then, the thing that really makes the fight a slog is the fact that it's 2 levels higher than the party. Those levels give it increased durability and nothing else. Without anything cool to do, increased durability translates into Slogfest (if the dragon's lucky, a dangerous slogfest. But his attacks aren't actually that powerful).

 

[Zerakon]

re: Mearls
Er, looking at Iron Heroes, I get the distinct impression Mearls has ALWAYS designed his fights more like an action movie where the environment plays as big a part as does the actual combatants.

If he's always designed his fights like that, why didn't he in this case? My takeaway is that the Kobold Hall dungeon in the DMG was not given a sufficient amount of design, development, and editing time.

Frankly, I'm surprised that he even referred to the dragon fight as something that "[he] designed" as there's not much design there other than a slab of ice on the floor and some walls.

Other things that really bug me about the last chapter of the DMG:

* Typos.

* The armorer/weaponsmith having THREE different names (Ironhews, Irontooth, Goldcap) in various places.

* The fact that the Kobold Hall is so linear. That they state up front that it's "thin on plot" doesn't excuse the fact that they could have presented a much better sample adventure for beginning DMs.

* The design of the second room of Kobold Hall is laughable. It's designed to have the PCs chase the kobolds across the room to trigger traps but the kobolds aren't given ranged weapons. My party just blasted them from a distance -- no reason to close.

To reiterate, I'm not jumping on Mearls for bad design, but rather the D&D project development team in general.

I do hope that more design and development time was given to Thunderspire Labyrinth which Mearls is credited with. I'd like to see his work when it's not sloppily managed.

 

[Pelenor]

I ran the White Dragon encounter in Kobold hall just the other day. I had six players and used the stats out of the MM instead of in the adventure. I had 6 players instead of 5. It seems that the players seemed to enjoy it. It took us an hour or so real time to run it but we tend to run 4e combats a bit slower as we are still figureing out the nuances of the system. We all had fun and I think in our case the biggest contribution to interesting tactics on the players part were the presence of two tanks ( a paladin and a fighter). The saving grace for the players though came from two things. First, I took it a little easy on them and didn't use the most optimal tactics as I could have easily turned into a TPK because of some good dice rolls on my part and bad ones on theirs. Second, the cleric pulled the fighter and Pally's behinds out of death more than once because she did the smart thing and used becon of hope at the earliest possible oppurtunity which allowed her to get that additional bonus to heals the rest of the fight.

I think as long the DM can make keep the fight from being just a slug fest that solo monsters won't be that boring even if the fights are long.

My players lived in constant fear of that breath weapon recharging just because I used the suggested tactics and used the breath weapon and popped an action point to get the aura off in the first round. The rogue pretty much spent the whole encounter using deft strike to pop out from around the corner and fire and then go back so he could avoid the breath weapon. This fight wasn't a slugfest for us and certainly wasn't boring.

I think that's the key to make solo encounteres interesting is good tactics and the solo monster being able to do something besides just basic attacks.

 

[Regicide]

Mearls is a good chunk of the reason why 4E is so enjoyable.

What joy that is left in 4E comes from whats left over from before he joined. Changing all the classes into the same class with the same play, removing choice in skills, healing surges, all the garbage that has happened with 4E has done a good job killing the enjoyment of previous editions.

He really understands the nuts and bolts of game systems (similar to Skip Williams), AND ALSO knows how to make them more fun and cinematic.

The nuts and bolts, like the completely broken skill challenges? The undefined basic mechanics like stealth and the definition of attack? Give me a break. 4E is a train wreck.

I'll take fun & cinematic any day.

Me too, which is why we've tossed our 4E books on the shelf and are using other game systems.

 

[keterys]

Me too, which is why we've tossed our 4E books on the shelf and are using other game systems.

At the point that you've made that decision, you may want to consider also not eating up the time of fellow gamers and insulting respected game designers on boards for a game you don't like.

I mean, it's your time, but it doesn't seem to make sense as a use of your time or ours.