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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack99" data-source="post: 4599262" data-attributes="member: 53135">Okay, so the fight was on tonight. Unfortunately, one player was ill and had to stay home. So we had 4 players (fighter, warlock, cleric, rogue) against a 3500 xp fight (10th level solo dragon, 10 level 9 minions). A bit rough (that would be between n+4 and n+5 for 4 characters) I thought, so I made a few changes. I removed 20% of the dragon’s hitpoints (to be precise, I started it with 105 damage – it had 525 hitpoints in total), and a couple of minions, but kept everything else as is. I think that keeps the battle at par. Surely if the wizard had been there, he would have done his share of the damage. So a 10th level green dragon druid (Powers from APG) and eight 9th level minions (that deal a bit more damage than normal minions) against the 4 in the party.The fight lasted 14 rounds and 1h45m (that’s 90 second per turn per person) in real time. But to be fair, it was more like 12 of actually combat, since the two groups started out at opposite ends of a fairly large cavern and there was quite a bit of moving around.The cleric was first to run out of encounter and dailies in round 10. The warlock ran out of them in round 12, and so did the rogue. The fighter ran out already in round 9, because that’s when he went down.The fight was very close. Rogue was down no less than 3 times (had 0 surges left at the end), and the fighter was down from round 9 and onwards (he died permanently).  The cleric spent the last several rounds with very few hitpoints, and almost died several times of the course of the combat. The warlock ended the combat bloodied and a bit more.I asked them afterwards to evaluate on the combat, and they were nothing but very positive. It was longer than normally, but in the good way. Fighting a dragon should be special.  Regarding the grind, they had no issues with only having at wills for the last couple 2-4 rounds, as it only heightened direness of the situation. They were after all fighting for their lives, running on fumes and all that jazz. At no point did the combat feel grindy or did they feel the combat was a given. From a DM’s perspective, I thought they were goners from round 10-13. Only when it missed its attacks in round 14 did I think they had a chance. So no grind for me either.Regarding the setup, it was really nothing fancy. There was an edge they could push it off and pillars they could hide behind to dodge the breath weapon for example. There were also some stalactites they could have made fall down on its head, but no one got that idea. Anyway, to sum up: It was a great fight, it worked perfectly. All my fears about solos seem to be unfounded (but we’ll see, maybe it was just a fluke <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />), but if I ever change anything at some other point in time, I will definitely just remove 20-25% of a solo’s hitpoints, assuming there are 5 players in the group. That should definitely remove any chance of a grind, at least in my campaign.I hope all this made some sense, its 1 AM over here and it’s been a busy week. CheersEDIT: I just wanted to add that I am not saying that people who experience the "grind" are playing wrong or anything. I am just relieved, because between the talk here, and my own fears of solos, I was worried (you know, as worried as one can get over a game) that it could happen to my group. That's why I pushed off using solos until level 9. I wanted the players to have developed their tactical skills and I wanted them to know their powers. Did this change the result? I do not know. But I can honestly say that I am not overly worried about using solos again, soon <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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