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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Unwise" data-source="post: 5772402" data-attributes="member: 98008">In a campaign I DMed, there is a red moon. When it is higher in the sky than the blue moon, all NPCs have their HP halved and damage doubled. This way we sometimes play that way and sometimes do not, but it feels consistent and the players can decide for themselves sometimes, by waiting until the moon is high before launching their attack.What I find by playing that way though is that controllers felt considerably less worthwhile. My players feel there is little point controlling something when you could kill it in two shots.I am a big fan on damaging terrain and realistic NPC reactions. I often make encounters near lava flows etc so that one way or another the fights are over more quickly. I like to give controllers their time to shine once every few encounters. I am also a fan of surprise rounds, which make the fights feel much quicker. The PCs can get ambushed by lurkers, take a lot of damage, then quickly dispatch them.Having realistic reactions from guards is important too. If a guard is deep in a linear dungeon, surely they are going to realize that if this group of 5 guys is here, they have probably just slaughtered everyone else and he better run. Most monsters run away well before their HP fall too low.I also use a morale system. Each enemy that falls, cool bit of intimidate roleplay, or particularly nasty critical etc erodes the enemies morale. When it gets low, the players can trade in a few healing surges to hand-wave them cleaning up the rest of the survivors. As the morale gets lower, this drops down to only 1 healing surge to clean up the rest.I did an unusual thing once, the PCs were up against an army of hobgoblins who always used a set patrol pattern and set squads. They fought one of these squads, I told them before hand that this would be taken as an example of how they fight more of these squads "off-screen" and they should avoid using daily powers. It was pretty cool, it ended up with most people losing 1 surge, but the avenger and fighter losing 2.Each time they failed to avoid a patrol from that point on, or chose to ambush one, they would take the same losses and get some random treasure. Fighting these patrols was not the point of the adventure, so it was a good way to move past them and continue.In the same adventure, I set up an encounter that took place half way through an 'off screen' encounter. I set up the map with lots of hobgoblin bodies laying around, assigned 8d20 damage they could share out between themselves as they wanted eg. mage takes 1 dice, fighter takes 3 etc. To reflect the state of the current fight they were in. There were still a fair few goblins around, but nothing that would have stressed them at all, or had to be played through. That is when the BBEG's right hand man suddenly made am appearance though. It played really well, coming in half way through a mundane fight rather than playing through it.</blockquote>

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