Why is 4E so grindy?

[pemerton]

In my group, the combats aren't grindy, in the sense that stuff is generally happening (monster dying, new monster showing up, players going up and down in hp/surges and tactical positioning, terrain doing its stuff etc). But they take a long time. This is partly external stuff due to the circumstances in which we play (eg multiple kids around who need taking care of from time to time) but also in part because some of the players take quite a while to decide what to do on each turn. They haven't internalised their suit of options and how to use them.

One contributor to this seems to be the Character Builder character sheets, which produce (IMO) pretty bad power cards that are hard to read and that hide rather than advertise the relevant info.

 

[keterys]

My group is finding that we take 17 minutes per round: 4 players, 1 DM, paragon levels (13-14).

With the exception of some rare mega crazy round, you guys should probably have an absolute cap at 10 minutes and most turns should be 5 minutes or less once initial confusion abates. There's probably a lot there you can do to improve individual speeds.

The problem, the point where it feels like a "grind", occurs at that instant where the tension goes out of the fight: we the party know we've won it, we've eliminated all of the bad guys except for the flying Elite, who has demonstrated that he can't knock an un-bloodied character unconscious, so as long as we can heal to stay above bloodied, we're in no danger ... we've blocked the exit so he can't escape ... and now we're just whittling down the hit points.

There may be some things that can still be done to make both sides more damage oriented and less "invulnerable" that would help. The DM should call the combat more often, then (they flee, surrender, kamikaze, or 'Aand someone spend 1 surge and I'll call the monster dead')

Group construction is Fighter, Warden, Druid, Warlock, so two Defenders, a Leader, and a Striker .. we might be better suited to get through things with a second Striker or a Controller.

A lot of it probably also depends on how you guys are built. All of those _can_ do damage, but as a default state they aren't actually all that geared towards it.

And yeah, goals other than 'kill everything' are always cool. I'm very happy with one of my parties that tries to talk to just about everything... and many combats they'll try to talk to or intimidate enemies when things look grim for the enemies. So it's easy to call the combat and move right on to the RP.