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Message: <blockquote data-quote="UngainlyTitan" data-source="post: 8991458" data-attributes="member: 28487">Ok, I begin to understand. I will offer the advice that has worked for me but to quote Tolkien "Advice is dangerous, even from the wise to the wise"You have different and to be honest more exacting standards than I. For me the combat encounter minimum is that the fight last long enough that the monsters get to do their cool thing(s). If I manage that, I find that the players will have the opportunities to shine. Since you mostly use professionally produced adventures and I do not have your party, here is what I think:I think that most encounters (WoTC ones especially) are for a party of 4 that are not particularly optimised in any way. I DM for a party of 4 PCs and after level 4 or so in WoTC encounters I would routinely trigger the nearby encounters to come to the fight. "March to the sound of the guns".The party can generally handle it with out too much difficulty and the fight is more interesting because the first lot start to retreat toward their nearest allies and they are coming to them so the terrain is changing. If the fight is trivial narrate it and may be inflict some damage like it was a trap. If you want an interesting boss fight then you have to account for the actions the party has in a round and the parties expected damage per round. You may also have to take into account control effect you party may have. The bad guys have to have enough resilience and numbers to survive to act in order to be a threat. I find that the CR system is useless but the XP by PC is useful. The Easy, Medium, Hard and Deadly labels are kind of useless but if you find that you party are making deadly encounters hard or even medium then you may have to double or more than double those threasholds but you they give target numbers that can be very useful guidelines. Do not give away battlefield control without adjusting for it. Then use that method to recalibrate your XP thresholds for encounter difficulty. Once you have done it a few times and see what the XP values are totalling out at, I think you will have strong gauge for a fight. You are right but what can you do?I really liked 4e but ,yes combat took too long.Then have less combat, introduce morale for thrash fights where they flee before combat and/or reinforce the next one along. Another thing I regularly do in area dominated by a particular faction is if the party takes a rest after thrashing the leadership is have the remaining bad guys flee in terror. I use milestone XP though. They leave much of the  non coin treasure and any clues needed to get to the next stage.</blockquote>

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