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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Recidivism" data-source="post: 5610058" data-attributes="member: 51740">Hey guys,Figured I'd come here and seek some DMing advice. I'm actually running my first 4e campaign ever, and I've been running into some issues (or at least, things I perceive as issues).My group initially began as a D&D Encounters group running Keep on the Borderlands. We finished that adventure, but I felt that many of the players in our group wanted to continue playing their characters, so I've been homebrewing a followup campaign.Currently the group consists of the following, all at level 5:Dwarven BattlemindHuman RogueDragonborn FighterMinotaur WarpriestHuman Psion(occasionally) Drow RangerOne of the things I've been noticing is that I don't feel combats are as dynamic or as interesting as I would hope they should be. My experience with 4E is that while combat can tend to drag out a little bit due to monster HP, there's often a lot of tactical positioning going on throughout the fight.However, in the case of this game that I'm running, I feel like the combats proceed in a pretty rote way.-The Psion sits in the rear of the battlefield and basically never moves, instead attacking through her figment-The Rogue sits in the rear of the battlefield and shoots foes with a crossbow. He uses surprise bolts to automatically grant himself combat advantage against foes, and so he pretty much ignores cover/concealment rules. When he does get up into melee combat, he can pretty much just use Clever Strike to basically ignore positioning for combat advantage.-The Ranger, when he shows up, follows a similar route. Hang back and pelt the enemies with arrows, rarely ever moving.-The Battlemind is extremely durable using Iron Fist, being a Dwarf, and on and on. Once this guy marks a foe, they're almost locked down totally unless they've got some skirmisher multiple shift powers.The Minotaur Warpriest is kind of a wildcard, and doesn't always just stand there and slug, so he's okay. And the Dragonborn Fighter is actually a new addition I haven't totally gotten the hang of him yet. Although I will add both these characters are pretty heavily optimized for defense so my monsters are still missing about 50-60% of the time against their AC.In general though it feels a little lame to have 3 characters that hang back, never moving, and 3 characters up front slugging away, rarely moving. My own play experiences in 4e were generally pretty dynamic, but not only were my play experiences awhile ago, I generally stuck to basic printed materials (e.g. PHB, PHB2). The Battlemind is pretty new to me, and Surprise Bolts just seem like typical munchkinizing power creep items.Here's an example of a scenario I concocted for the players and how they ended up playing out:Do you guys have any tips for making my combats more dynamic and interesting?</blockquote>

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