The Lethality of 4E

[Mindseye]

Long time lurker de-lurking for a question.

I've seen a lot of speculation/theories that 4E constitutes a more lethal rules enviornment for characters than previous D&D rules. I ran a few 4E preview games and have run four sessions of Keep on the Shadowfell and am starting to wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

The combination of healing surges and the death saves have kept any character from being in significant danger of death......except for one engulfed by a gelatinous cube. (ongoing acid damage!)

What sort of encounters have led to character deaths in your games? Is there something in the 4E rules that creates particularly lethal situations? Have I simply gone soft and should prepare to hand in my rat-bastard DM license?

 

[AntiStateQuixote]

To date only one encounter has led to death in my games and it was a TPK. The final encounter in KotS.

Also, the gelatinous cube was rough; it had three characters engulfed at one point.

I think that combat CAN be very deadly if PCs aren't smart. For example, if they don't focus fire and let the tank take the brunt of the attacks . . . well, a striker will drop fast if two or three brutes or soldiers lines up on him.

 

[Dragonbait]

My group had trouble with the kobolds fight. They felt particularly emasculated after that. Of course, the clerc being Mr. Team Player declared that "Healing normally happens -after- combat" and walked up and did basic attacks on the kobold slinger the whole time.
Needless to say he is not allowd to play a healer from now on.

It sounds like your players adapted well to the situations and worked well together.

I find that smart players fare a LOT better than others. Even more so than in past editions, when one could charge into a room and start a second fight and everyone still survives.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Long time lurker de-lurking for a question.

I've seen a lot of speculation/theories that 4E constitutes a more lethal rules enviornment for characters than previous D&D rules. I ran a few 4E preview games and have run four sessions of Keep on the Shadowfell and am starting to wonder if I'm doing something wrong.

The combination of healing surges and the death saves have kept any character from being in significant danger of death......except for one engulfed by a gelatinous cube. (ongoing acid damage!)

What sort of encounters have led to character deaths in your games? Is there something in the 4E rules that creates particularly lethal situations? Have I simply gone soft and should prepare to hand in my rat-bastard DM license?

How many characters in the group? How much rest do you allow for the PCs? Do you have a good feel of the monster tactics? Do you have less desire to kick puppies since you started playing 4E?

 

[Wolfwood2]

What sort of encounters have led to character deaths in your games? Is there something in the 4E rules that creates particularly lethal situations? Have I simply gone soft and should prepare to hand in my rat-bastard DM license?

Because you're encouraged to use more monsters now, it's easy for a PC to get swarmed and dropped before they realize how much trouble they're really in. If the Defender isn't in the right position, some of the more vulnerable types like wizards and rogues can go down very quickly.

Basically, the DM is highly encouraged to concentrate his fire if he gets the opportunity. If a PC is out of position, swarm him. If you've got a magic artillery monster blasting away at reflex defense, have him target the same low-reflex PC round after round. Because of all the healing abilities and death saves and such, you don't have to worry as much about killing a PC if you drop them.

If you don't drop at least one PC during a battle, not kill but at least drop below 0 for a while, it probably wasn't a very hard fight.

 

[Boarstorm]

I think if you have a good mix of melee and ranged, it's probably not that bad.

My group has one fighter. All four other characters are ranged combatants. As a result, I end up with a lot of bottlenecks as the fighter does his Thermopile impression..

And he goes down.

A LOT.

For him, every combat is a chance to fail at least two death saves.

For the others, it gets dicey when he goes down and the rest of their opponents swarm through the gap and start forcing them into melee.

I think if the party had either 1 more leader or 1 more defender (heck, even a TWF ranger or rogue), things would shape up a lot differently, but for this particular composition, combat can turn very ugly, very quickly.

 

[CountPopeula]

Since D&D combat derives from games like Warhammer, along with Disgaea and Final Fantasy Tactics... people are going to die if you use every ability at your disposal as DM. Well, not die, but get knocked out of combat.

Of course, if the players are particularly tactically adept, they can make it through combat without a loss. If they can, then good for them, especially if they're making it through difficult encounters without dropping to 0 hit points.

 

[mlund]

As a DM, I find the combination of player abilities makes a huge difference. i run a game for a party that is composed on a Wizard, Ranger (Bow), Warlord, Fighter, and Paladin.

When the Fighter and the Paladin form a battle line and mark individual foes my ability to reasonably concentrate fire is greatly curtailed. If nothing else, their respective marks are going to stick to them.

When the Warlord remembers to stay one step behind them, use his Healing Word, and makes decisions with the Dwarven Second Wind and the Paladin's Lay on Hands in mind people generally don't go down.

The big threats tend to come from Ambushes and monsters that use their terrain effectively. There's also a threat on on-going encounters to push them to the limit of their Healing Surges in a day.

- Marty Lund

 

[Mindseye]

Some of it may be attributed to the way I've run Shadowfell. It's basically been designated as a "warm up/let's learn 4E" before we start a game with characters you care about. I've encouraged tweaking between games and freely changing character types between sessions. I really want them to test drive it before we try our serious campaign.

I haven't pulled many punches though and they've weathered it well. We generally have 6-7 players and I've tried to adjust monster encounters according to the number.

I like the monster tactics a lot......I know I forgot some shifting with Kobolds but have run encounters tough since then. The gelatinous cube was a great encounter for my group.........a scary fight for 5 2nd level characters!

 

[Ktulu]

I killed my party of 5 first level characters with:

2 fire beetles, 2 goblin skirmishers, 1 goblin blackblade. Cleric went down due to a crit/fire blast from the beetle. AFter that it was just chipping away. Only one character survived so I mulligan'd that to allow them to keep going:

The next fight was against a goblin hexer, 1 sharpshooter, 1 goblin skull cleaver and 4 minions. This one would have gone better had the rogue and wizard NOT ran off the other direction planning on some sort of surprise attack, leaving the cleric and fighter to be beaten to a pulp while the warlock kept missing with his eldritch blast.

They were captured (technically killed but, again, I didn't really want to start a new game).

Fast forward a few weeks. They're now 3rd level with plenty of magic items (following the parcel system, each character had a magic weapon/implements and some had armor. The party had about 2 pot's of healing each.

The encounter 1 ettercap webspinner, 2 fang guards, 2 deathjump spiders. I wanted a somewhat challenging encounter, so I went with this level 4 suggestion in the book.

In round one, the fighter was poisoned and immobilized, and the cleric was immobilized. The wizard was firing magic missiles from the back, and the warlock was trying to hit with an eldritch blast. (the rogue was absent) In round two, the cleric became poisoned and the webspinner shot his web out to ensure immobilization on the cleric (who made his save).

round 2
A spider jumped and attacked the warlock, but missed. The warlock used his teleport power to hit and immobilize the 1 spider. The wizard used magic missile on a fang guard and hit. The cleric missed with both his daily and hit with one encounter power (used an action point) and the fighter hit hard with one of his encounters. The ettercap fang guard was nearly dead, but knocked back due to the cleric attack

round 3
The wizard used his fire shroud to hit the webspinner, but missed the spider. He was too far away (and didn't move) to hit anyone the fighter & cleric were fighting. The warlock used his eladrin teleport to move out to the open and attacked the spider flanking the fighter, but missed. The ettercap fang guards moved in and took out the fighter, leaving the cleric still immobilized. The spider then jumped to hit the warlock, critted and took him out of the fight. The webspinner moved up, restrained and poisoned the wizard.

Round four, the cleric healed the fighter and killed one ettercap, but he went back down from a crit with a greataxe from the remaining ettercap. The other spider then jumped at the cleric and hit, taking him down.

The wizard was the only one still up, but he only had 3 hp and was poisoned. he went down at the beginning of round 5.

So, yeah, it's been quite deadly. I'm taking a break from DM'ing to read up some more, cuz maybe I'm too deadly.. I dunno. I'll be playing a rogue in one of the other guy's games for a while.