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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morgan_Scott82" data-source="post: 4752821" data-attributes="member: 79594">I've been using my action ratio inspired design philosophy for just a few weeks now and only run one actual encounter for my party, and two independent playtests I've run for myself, but so far my experience hasn't shown them to be too powerful. I believe MM solos suffer in two ways that makes them a problem at the gaming table. 1.) They're boring2.) They're not a challenge The second is basically a subset of the first. They just don't do enough to be interesting or a challenge, this is what gives people the impression that solo encounters are uninteresting "grinds" that everyone wants to be over as soon as possible. They're a lot like the 3.5 edition fighter focused exclusively on getting the highest AC possible, sure he's hard to kill but he's about as threatening as a tortoise. In a word: Boring. Some people have proposed reducing this feeling of "grind" by reducing solo hp, and while that will reduce the feeling of "grind" it doesn't make the solo any more interesting it just reduces the amount of time the solo has to be boring. That's a compounding one bad design with another, essentially diluting the solo making him less potent, and therefore even less challenging or interesting. I instead propose the opposite: concentrate the solo, make him more effective, give him more to do. Of course its possible to go overboard in this regard and make the solo too powerful, however I actually think that's hard to do. 4e has such an elasticity of challenge, PCs are resilient, resourceful and have powers enough to last themselves through the challenge. For example when I ran Jaxia, the solo I discussed in the other thread, she had an action ratio of 5:3, she could actually do more than the PC party in a given round, but at no point did I think we were in danger of a TPK. I thought I did a good job challenging my party. I take the position that a majority of daily powers are written to be better against a solo than regular monster. This contributes to my players expending them only during the various challenging encounters, especially solos. At 7th level where my PCs were when this encounter took place each PC had three encounter powers and two dailies, not even a full compliment of powers compared to the higher tiers and yet the encounter was over in four rounds, a few dailies were spent and most people were just expending their last encounters when the solo was put down.  While I think that outs are important, as we continue this discussion I'm leaning more towards saying they're not required, and especially advocating against any universal power for all solos, if for no other reason than a lack of variety leads to boring encounters, with cookie cutter monsters.</blockquote>

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