A line from the assassin design diary caught my eye:
"With D&D combat, the tension is highest at the beginning of the fight (when players and monsters have a full array of resources) and lowest near the end (when players are out of resources and monsters are dwindling)."
Other than this new death strike ability (which seems like it would be very un-smooth in play until you've properly trained your DM: "23 damage! Or 33, from a certain point of view...") there are only a few abilities that try to directly address this known problem. (Which consist of just a few powers that can only be used on, or are more effective against, bloodied enemies, or when you're bloodied.)
My question is: if this is a known issue, why aren't there more powers like this?
Someone on these forums had a house rule, something along the lines of "you can't attack a creature with an encounter power until you've attacked it a few times with an at-will," or something like that, which also seeks to smooth out the tension from it's current front-loaded position. And obviously DMs can always throw reinforcements in to a fight to keep it interesting (or use monsters with strong "when bloodied" powers). But it would be nice to see more instances of resources which the PCs--and monsters--only get access to later in a fight (or even, later in the adventuring day). WotC acknowledges it, so maybe it's something we can expect more of in the future.
What do you think? What do you do, as a DM or even as a player, to keep tension high throughout?
"With D&D combat, the tension is highest at the beginning of the fight (when players and monsters have a full array of resources) and lowest near the end (when players are out of resources and monsters are dwindling)."
Other than this new death strike ability (which seems like it would be very un-smooth in play until you've properly trained your DM: "23 damage! Or 33, from a certain point of view...") there are only a few abilities that try to directly address this known problem. (Which consist of just a few powers that can only be used on, or are more effective against, bloodied enemies, or when you're bloodied.)
My question is: if this is a known issue, why aren't there more powers like this?
Someone on these forums had a house rule, something along the lines of "you can't attack a creature with an encounter power until you've attacked it a few times with an at-will," or something like that, which also seeks to smooth out the tension from it's current front-loaded position. And obviously DMs can always throw reinforcements in to a fight to keep it interesting (or use monsters with strong "when bloodied" powers). But it would be nice to see more instances of resources which the PCs--and monsters--only get access to later in a fight (or even, later in the adventuring day). WotC acknowledges it, so maybe it's something we can expect more of in the future.
What do you think? What do you do, as a DM or even as a player, to keep tension high throughout?