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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ashockney" data-source="post: 5257908" data-attributes="member: 1363">Love the topic and love the idea of compiling and sharing some best practices about pacing.I wrote a blog about pacing, in particular with 4e.  I was honestly SURPRISED at my inability to get more than 4 encounters into 4 hours.  Since then, I've been experimenting with some ways to influence this, and the thing I did most recently had success.  I noticed that in 1e and 2e the villians have really few hit points, but they're a deadly threat at all times.  Catoblepas - save or die.  Bodak - save or die.  Orcus rod - save or die.  Sometimes, the threat doesn't allow a save, just die...power word, kill.  This is awful for character development and investent, but removing it has really affected pacing for D&D.  Same is true for 3e, but in my experience, 3e had the advantage of "layered" defenses to prevent and prolong some of the "insta-kill" effects.  So, then I continued to experiment with minions.  One of the things I love about 4e is the convention of minion, elite, and solo villians.  Awesome.  So, what if these "minions" could provide a threat, that wasn't just an insta-kill effect.  A threat to an npc.  A threat to a PC's weapon.  A threat by "exploding" if destroyed.  A threat by conveying a "disease".  Combine these encounters with some great "skill challenge" or "environmental threat" such as a trap, and you have an interesting encounter, and it won't take an hour.  I tried this, and it worked.  There were also two standard combats, with elites, which took about an hour, and were very fun, and fulfilling tactical combats, that tested the limits of their resources.  The final battle was a three-stage solo boss encounter, along the lines of an MMORPG raid fight.   This was Queen of the Demonweb Pits, and it was for 22nd level characters.  7 encounters, 4 hours.  What a blast!The other thing I wanted to call out for the purposes of pacing are rules-lawyering, and roleplaying.  I've seen both of these take the train entirely off the rails in a game.  I think the skill challenge rules system did an excellent job of preventing what I would call the "rope bridge" effect.  In the past, I've seen a game session go completely off the rails because no PC had the "in-game" resources to deal with an environmental threat.  So, one of the questions is how do you put a similiar "in game" resources to give the PC's the ability to deal with rules discrepancies and roleplaying.</blockquote>

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