D&D 4E Tweaking a couple of things my group doesn't like about 4E

[Melkor]

Hi folks,

Just wanted to ask for some advice on making minor tweaks to a couple of things my gaming group dislikes about the 4E system.

First, while we enjoy the combat in 4E, and we have had several sessions where things were nail-bitingly intense, one thing we can't get past is the 'wake up fully recovered after an extended rest." This is mainly due to us really enjoying the way things worked in older editions where you had to struggle and really worry about your low hit points.

So how could you tweak this without throwing off the balance of encounter design?

Second: The slow speed of combat. I know that this has been brought up several times on the forums, but whereas, we used to be able to run 4 combat encounters and several non-combat encounters in a standard weekly gaming session (in pre-3E campaigns), now, we are sometimes lucky to get through 1 combat encounter per session....any tips on tweaking combat speed would be welcome.

Thanks!

 

[Mengu]

First, while we enjoy the combat in 4E, and we have had several sessions where things were nail-bitingly intense, one thing we can't get past is the 'wake up fully recovered after an extended rest." This is mainly due to us really enjoying the way things worked in older editions where you had to struggle and really worry about your low hit points.

Not sure I understand... Didn't an extended rest (sleeping overnight, whatever you want to call it), let you recover all your powers in previous editions? And hit points were typically healed up at the end of an encounter with wands anyway, so the extended rest was irrelevant, except at very low levels until you could afford to buy wands.

If you want effects that survive an extended rest, then diseases, curses, and the like are the tools you want to use. Perhaps being knocked unconscious by a hag's hex could mean your maximum hit points are lowered by d6 until you take 2 extended rests. Or you can have progressive diseases that eat up healing surges.

Another way to wear down a party is through extended skill challenges. A skill challenge that spans days could have ongoing consequences for failure, like failing endurance checks on a given day, could mean you start the next day with 1 less healing surge.

 

[Riastlin]

I think the key to the extended rest recovering everything is to try to drag out the work day. How often is your party doing an extended rest? Keep in mind that the RAW requires 12 hours between extended rests.

If you get 4 - 6 encounters in between extended rests, the threat of death becomes much more real (even without more challenging encounters). The key here is that PCs will eventually run out of healing surges which makes them that much more liable to take a beating.

And as was stated above, diseases are a good way to carry effects over to the next day.

As for speeding up combat, the best suggestions I can think of is rolling damage and attack dice together. Additionally, consider letting intelligent monsters run away or even surrender. Finally, the other suggestions I've heard in the past were to halve monster hit points while doubling their damage. Might need to look closely at new monsters now though with the new damage tables and all.

 

[Alaxk Knight of Galt]

First, while we enjoy the combat in 4E, and we have had several sessions where things were nail-bitingly intense, one thing we can't get past is the 'wake up fully recovered after an extended rest." This is mainly due to us really enjoying the way things worked in older editions where you had to struggle and really worry about your low hit points.

One of these might work for you

• You can only take an extended rest after X number of milestones (I think 2 is light, 3 is hard, and 4 is brutal)
• You can only take extended rests while in some for of civilization
• You can take an extended rest anywhere, but if you are outside of civilization, you only gain back 1 daily power and 1/4th of your healing surges.

Second: The slow speed of combat. I know that this has been brought up several times on the forums, but whereas, we used to be able to run 4 combat encounters and several non-combat encounters in a standard weekly gaming session (in pre-3E campaigns), now, we are sometimes lucky to get through 1 combat encounter per session....any tips on tweaking combat speed would be welcome.

We had a DM offer this solution when the fight was obviously won. He let a character spend a healing surge in order to turn a normal monster into a minion. This way taxes the party and still requires you to hit the target, but speeds up the end of combat grind that can occur.

 

[keterys]

An easy solution on the extended rest thing is to make an _extended_ rest either require nebulous multiple days (something you do between adventures or doing very long breaks) or only be triggered when the adventure, plot, or number of milestones dictate.

For example, Jonathan Tweet used a 'you get an extended rest after two milestones' rule in his game that involved lots of traveling, and I've seen multiple people suggest an 'extended rest every adventure, or major subset of an adventure' house rule.

On speeding up combat, it's _mostly_ on the DM and players. Get people used to taking no more than one minute for their turn, ever, saying what they're doing within 15 seconds, and your combats should never take more than 30 minutes. Usually the problem is just one person (or two) who takes 5-10 minute turns, which further disengages the rest of the table, slowing everything down. It may also be that the DM and players are throwing _way_ too many status effects of varying types around. That's more rare, but simplifying things so you actually know what is happening on the battlefield is a matter of picking monsters and powers. As a DM, try not to have more than three different things to track (ex: dazed save ends, ongoing 10 acid, and slowed are already in your encounter set. Don't then add a monster that prones and deals ongoing 5 psychic and -2 attacks.)

 

[FabioMilitoPagliara]

by RAW you can limit the number of healing surges recovered:

"... in which case the healing surges don't return until the group gets back to a more hospitable enviroment...." (DMG1, PG. 76 little box in the bottom left corner)

so while this should be used for extensive skill checks you can consider that after X encounter or just 1-2 a day if they don't make an endurance check they lose 1 HS until they are "back to a more hospitable enviroment"

try this with care and see if it's ok with your group

notice: this is dangerous and could lead to tpk if abused

 

[Nork]

Rests should service the plot, not obey rule mechanics.

I think maintaining the concept of getting an extended rest "when you go to sleep" was the biggest fumble in D&D4. It should have been, that you get an extended rest at the end of a "chapter" in the story. Fitting 4 or more fights into a plot is usually pretty hard, especially if it isn't a dungeon crawl.

Consider an overland travel adventure where they go to a new city or local.

Either they get to extended rest every night and are not threatened by any of the fights, or the DM throws them an encounter that is so over-budget that it breaks the system. It breaks the system because the players have access to all of their dailies, yet not all of the healing surges. The system wasn't designed to produce one threatening fight, it was designed to be threat by attrition without swingy threats.

Or the party doesn't get to extended rest every night, and by the end of the trip (which the DM will make involve just the right number of encounters per extended rest), the party is taxed and exhausted as they arrive at their destination and can then take an extended rest.

One scenerio is an out of control by necessity situation where it devolves into a DM vs PC "I have to make something extreme to threaten the players" situation, and the other largely lets the D&D4 mechanics run on auto-pilot and do their job and services the plot.


As for combats taking too long, a way to speed them up is to ask people to know what they are going to do before it is their turn. If people take 3 or 4 minutes or longer during their turn to decide what to do, then things are going to slow down a lot. Four players spending 3 minutes pondering what they are going to do during their turn, adds 72 minutes to six turns of combat.

Also ask them to read the text of the powers they intend to use before it is their turn.

That being said, some players enjoy the 'spotlight' of it being their turn and waiting until they are the center of attention to make their decisions gives the decisions a sense of importance. There is nothing wrong with this, it is what makes the game fun for that person. If this is the case, then requiring fast combats would actually be a detriment to the purpose of the game.

If you have a mix of players, just having the players that don't care about that aspect of the game focus on being quick and precise as soon as it is their turn can still drastically speed combat up.

 

[keterys]

One way to preserve the spotlight mechanic is to set a max time per turn normally, and say 'If you AP, you can take (extra time)'. That way it's only once every other combat and people are more likely to only do it when it really counts.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Good organization will make a big difference in speeding up combat. I know groups that can do an average combat in 20 minutes and a complex tough one in 45 or less. It is possible to do them fast. Come up with a good initiative tracking mechanism. Most people seem to have settled on using a small whiteboard. The DM can also speed up the startup period of a combat by having the initiative and possibly stealth and perception checks of monsters pre-rolled for instance. Another trick is to have the players roll an initiative roll at end of a combat and use that for the next one. The DM can then be ready to go really quick, cutting out possibly 10-15 minutes of fumbling around.

Definitely use power cards. The CB prints out reasonable ones, but there are other tools like Masterplan that will also do that (as well as a lot of other stuff). Make some status markers for common conditions and effects that you know will come up using pipe cleaners, hairbands, whatever that you can drop over figures. All this kind of stuff will help. Put someone in charge of tracking initiative and make the players responsible for tracking the effects that they have in play (and the ones on their character for that matter).

 

[Tony Vargas]

First, while we enjoy the combat in 4E, and we have had several sessions where things were nail-bitingly intense, one thing we can't get past is the 'wake up fully recovered after an extended rest."

So how could you tweak this without throwing off the balance of encounter design?

This should be pretty easy, you could:

Require more time for an extended rest: rather than 8 hours, make it 3 days or a week off.

Dissallow extended rests durring general adventuring. Yes, you can find 8 hours to sleep in a dank undead-infested dungeon, swealtering lava cave, baren desert or dismal swamp - but is it really /that/ refreshing? You could restrict long rests to relatively safe, pleasant areas, like 'in town,' or you could peg extended rest opportunities to specific points in the story arc.

Use the Disease mechanic to model serious injuries that take more than an extended rest to fully recover from.

Second: The slow speed of combat. I know that this has been brought up several times on the forums, but whereas, we used to be able to run 4 combat encounters and several non-combat encounters in a standard weekly gaming session (in pre-3E campaigns), now, we are sometimes lucky to get through 1 combat encounter per session....any tips on tweaking combat speed would be welcome.

3e and 4e are can be a bit slower than earlier eds, in which some classes had few choices to make in combat, tactical movement was simplistic or irrellevant, and a single spell could very often end an encounter in one round (well, this last goes for 3e, too).

The tactical aspect of play /can/ make 3e and 4e go a lot slower, but it's primarily a matter of play style. Group size is also an issue. IMHO, it's generaly worth it to take a little longer to get through a combat, when it's the price you pay for having all classes be interesting, balanced, and able to contribute in most situations.

What to do about it is a thorny issue. It's easy to get on the case of anyone who 'takes too long' or to try to simplify combats to make them quicker to resolve. For that matter, Essentials takes away choices from some classes, which'd speed things up slightly. I guess it's up to you how much you're willing to give up.


One very simple options is to just 'call' an encounter when it's clearly past the tipping point, or looks like it's becoming a grind.