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Message: <blockquote data-quote="helium3" data-source="post: 4583195" data-attributes="member: 31301">I really need to get my blog set-up. This post is way too long for an ENWorld thread. Oh well.I've been running a 4E game since late May and started significantly modding 3E to be more like 4E around March. The "grindyness" of actual 4E (didn't see this problem with my modded version of 3E for some reason) was apparent right from the get-go.At the time, the general response to the length of combat was to chalk it up to players not being familiar with the system. Since then, my groups been playing 4E and I've had a chance to explore "grindspace" a fair bit. Here's my observations:(1) No encounter is guaranteed to be a member of "grindspace."(2) Any encounter can be a member of "grindspace."(3) The higher the difficulty level of the encounter, the more likely it is to be a member of "grindspace."(4) The higher the average AC of the monsters in the encounter, the more likely it is to be a member of "grindspace."(5) If the players aren't good at finding the "syngergies" of 4E or don't have characters that create said synergies, the chance of an encounter being a member of "grindspace" increases.So is the problem that monsters have a hitpoint to AC ratio that's too high or is it something else? Personally, my bet is on "mostly something else but maybe a bit of the former." Contrary to what some people have said, the game is actually rather swingy, just not in a way that results in character death.4E PC's are HARD to kill but pretty easy to drop. The first couple of times I dropped PC's I was pretty freaked out, but I quickly learned that this wasn't usually going to end in death unless the PC was out of healing surges, the party made some really stupid choices or was so sorely pressed that they simply couldn't spare the time to assist their fallen comrade. So how is the 4E system swingy? Our group has talked extensively about this and the best we can come up with is "the game design assumes stochastic behavior that simply doesn't reflect reality."What do I mean by this? Simply put, when you roll a d20 repeatedly and track the numbers you've generated you will over time generate a flat probability distribution. Each outcome of rolling a d20 has a roughly five percent chance of being rolled (with very minor variations from the d20 not being "perfect").The seductive siren song of game design then says "You can define your system such that rolling a 11 or better is a hit and use that design rule to generate hit-points, AC, damage and attack modifiers for both characters and monsters. If you then give your PC's a smidge of an edge against the monsters through the ability to regain lost hitpoints and opportunities to gain bonuses to attack you've got a system that's automatically balanced with no thought required!!"Only, there's one potential flaw in the ointment here. The flat distribution of d20 rolls exists over only a very large number of rolls. One of these days I'll get around to generating a computer program that calculates the actual distribution. For now, I know from personal experience that the average d20 roll in a given encounter tends to bunch up on one side of the divide or the other far more than the game system seems to acknowledge.This isn't a problem when the "skew" favors the players, it just means that the encounter progresses normally and maybe even ends more quickly than expected. On the other hand, if the "skew" favors the monsters it doesn't mean that the players are going to die. It simply means that the encounter is definitely a member of "grindspace."How to fix this? There are a couple of approaches. You could impose an across the board reduction of monster hit points or AC. You could run easier encounters. You could find ways to give players a greater chance to hit or increase the amount of damage when they do hit.I've got a solution that I'm going to start trying at the beginning of my next game. All PC's will now have access to an encounter power that I'll call "Heroic Stand" or something. When they use "Heroic Stand" they burn an action point and every PC gains a +1 bonus to attack for the remainder of the encounter. It'd be an interesting house-rule to try and I could see it working pretty well for solving the grind problem. The nice thing about it is that it's entirely in the hands of the players and I don't have to do any extra mucking about with the encounters.</blockquote>

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