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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4421871" data-attributes="member: 58197">Last session I put my party of four 4th-level characters up against a black dragon (4th-level solo), and it was not at all tedious.Terrain was a key part of that, as was the dragon using all of its special abilities aggressively.  The battle took place in an ancient dwarf ruin where the dragon's acids had eaten away a lot of the stonework; as a result, the eight pillars holding up the ceiling were just about ready to collapse, and there were pits in the floor that hampered the PCs' movement.  The exits included a fifteen-foot-wide "grand stairway," a twenty-foot-wide unstable corridor, and a five-foot-wide door into a room where bodiless life-sucking demons were trapped.The PCs started out by moving to surround the dragon, as you'd expect - basic smart tactics.  The dragon then blasted acid over two PCs and four pillars.  The PCs saw the acid eating into the pillars and realized that there was a real danger this fight could bring the mountain down on their heads.  So they dodged back around the dragon and ran for the stairs, hoping to draw its fire in a direction that wouldn't lead to "rocks fall, everyone dies."Of course, by this point the dragon had busted out its cloud of darkness, so they also had to draw it out of the darkness to where they could see it... and being on the stairs meant they were bunched up and vulnerable to the dragon's breath weapon.  The party was teetering on the edge of collapse by the time they finally slew the beast.If the fight had taken place on a flat plain with no interesting terrain features going on, it probably would have been a lot less fun.  (It also helped that the PCs had been through the wringer in several previous encounters and were low on healing surges - the fighter started with only one surge left and the rogue was flat out.)This sums it up pretty well, I think.  If the group is confident in its ability to survive, or if the monster doesn't make aggressive use of its bag of nasty tricks (like the dragon's darkness ability), then yes, solo fights will get tedious.  The excitement in a solo battle comes from the PCs trying to keep themselves alive against a monster which is lashing out at all of them with horrendous damage, round after round, and just will not freakin' die.And smart use of encounter and daily abilities is also key, as is cooperation among the PCs.  4E combat is very much a team sport.  The fight above would have been a TPK if not for some well-timed dailies and everybody working together.</blockquote>

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