D&D 4E How to speed up combat?

[pemerton]

At this point I honestly need you to give me a specific, concrete example of what you think best practices are for running 4E because your experience and mine are so diametrically opposed that even if we are talking about the same game we don’t share a common frame of reference.

Obviously I'm not @AbdulAlhazred , but I think these would count as examples of what he has in mind:

Exploration scenarios - my experiment last Sunday

After all the sandbox/railroading threads over the past several weeks, in my most recent session I decided to try running an exploration-heavy scenario to see how it played. The starting point In the previous session of my 4e game, the PCs had arrived at a crude wooden house built on ruins...

www.enworld.org

Doppelganger mayhem (with a long lead up)

In yesterday's session, the PCs fought some doppelgangers. It's the first time I've used doppelgangers for about 20 years, and it was fun. In the previous session, the sorcerer PC had been amassing chaos energy to try to infuse it into himself and/or items. This worked - he imbued himself with...

www.enworld.org

Underdark adventure with Demons, Beholders, Elementals and a Hydra

This post complies and adds to some actual play examples I've been giving in recent New Horizons threads. It is long. _____________________________________________________ By misadventure, the PCs in my game have ended up in the Underdark. They are looking for the Soul Abbatoir, using a...

www.enworld.org

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I get there’s a point at which you can’t generalize and have to slip into hyperbole, but come on. At 1st level every class except thieves, assassins, m-u, and illusionist in AD&D hits AC3 on a 17+/d20. Those four hit AC4 on a 17+/d20. The variety of ACs is wild. Most low hit dice monsters have an AC around 5. So claiming everyone always needs a 17 to-hit anything is beyond hyperbole.

I never said 'everyone always needs...' Nothing like that. I said there have been plenty of fights I can remember where nobody was hitting on anything less than a 17, it happens. Sure, lots of first level monsters have worse than AC4, many don't! Often you're fighting one or two tougher monsters, which often have better ACs, or they have something that situationally makes them harder to hit, or hard to damage, or whatever. The upshot being combat can quite easily drag on.

I played AD&D between once a week and once a month from 1984 through 2008. In that whole time we had maybe 3-4 combats last longer than an 60-90 minutes. And those were the epic finales of campaigns. At our fastest near the end of 4E our shortest combat was 2 1/2-3 hours. And it was a dill slog.

Look, nobody can obviously TELL you what you did, but it seems a tad exaggerated to me. I had MANY 4e fights that lasted 30 minutes, that was rather routine even. I have had many AD&D fights that lasted 2 hours, or even much longer now and then. If you want to tell me that TYPICALLY your AD&D fights were shorter, great. I am not going to argue that. When you tell me there was a consistent 500% difference in length, I am skeptical, quite skeptical.

Note what I've been saying about 'fights' in 4e too. They should be multi-dimensional affairs with more going on than hack-n-slash. So when the PCs bug out because they got what they wanted, that is quite common, and that means shorter fights. Same with monsters deciding to run off and not die, or the floor collapsed and everyone ended up hither and yon and the fight ended, etc.

The list of “substantial” monsters who have less than 3 attacks/round is long. It includes giants, golems, and liches amongst many others.

Many giants often have multiple attacks. Many golems have at least 2. Liches are almost surely casting spells, which is itself a lengthy process, lots lengthier in many cases than 4e powers, which at least resolve quickly. And a LOT of monsters get 3 or more attacks, really a lot.

The rules for breaking off from melee are on page 70 of the DMG.

D&D isn’t about doing what’s optimal, it’s about having fun exploring a fantasy milieu.

At this point I honestly need you to give me a specific, concrete example of what you think best practices are for running 4E because your experience and mine are so diametrically opposed that even if we are talking about the same game we don’t share a common frame of reference.

Yes, you can BREAK OFF from melee, you cannot move around, change (or even decide) who you are fighting, etc.

I think I did give you some examples. OK, I'm not sure exactly what counts as specific and concrete entirely. I recall a fight where the PCs were entering the top level of a tower, and it was filled with spider swarms. This was somewhere in the range of maybe 5th level, I don't recall exactly, but definitely mid-heroic. So the goal of the PCs was to get a book and break a curse. There was some terrain, I don't recall perfectly, but there was an area the spiders wouldn't go. It gave the PCs a chance to kind of play with some tactics, get themselves set up, and then go for the book. I think that fight was the end of an evening, and there were 2 other fights and at least one SC before that getting in, so about 4 encounters in 3 hours, plus some RP involved with figuring out where the tower was. Anyway, the spider encounter couldn't have been more than 45 minutes by itself, and it was a tough encounter. They got the book, and then one of the PCs had a hard time getting out of the room, it got a bit dicey.

I recall one that didn't go so well, it was earlier on. I had a mix of spiders, and the PCs were again in maybe high heroic, maybe just Paragon. There were a couple phase spiders, they jumped into the back ranks and bit the two casters, a wizard and a cleric. It was a save ends incapacitated condition, and man they just would not save. The other three PCs burned everything they had, every daily, everything, and it took FOREVER, but this is the point, there wasn't really a plot to this fight, it was just "get past the fliggin monsters" and it probably did take a good 90 minutes, and put a bit of a damper on that session, since 2 players got to do pretty much nothing for 90 minutes. That was about the last time I ever made a mistake like THAT! Although there was one similar time when a Barlgura just WOULD NOT DIE. lol.

Of course I also remember some 1e/2e encounters like that. too. I remember one where the PCs were maybe 4th level and a 12th level wizard had at them. The poor guy didn't want to burn up his own place, so he was tossing out weird effects. He webbed the party with a wand or something and then hit them with several spells. They managed to win eventually, sort of. Must have taken 3 hours to run that silly fight. I admit that it was kinda fun, at least for me

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

Though there would have been a mutinous riot in the fanbase, they could have potentially designed the game for 15 levels: 1-5 Heroic; 6-10 Paragon; and 11-15 Epic. And instead of releasing dispersing races, classes, and such between PHB 1-3, they could have designed PHB 1 to focus on levels 1-5; PHB 2 on levels 6-10; and PHB 3 on levels 11-15.

Like Dragon Age RPG did.
Then at the end, release a single hardcover with all three books, plus fixes and additions and extra stuff, and refuse to give previous purchasers any discount…

 

[Keldryn]

I think this is/was the big hang up with 4E. Too many people tried doing dungeon crawls instead of action set pieces. So something that's normally fun like combat just becomes a tedious slog.

4E really needed a couple of good adventures that demonstrated how to play to its strengths right from the start. I assume the fact that it didn't was a result of the rushed development timeline.

As I said elsewhere:

"I fell in love with literally everything they did with this edition...except how it actually played at the table. I loved the lore changes, the points-of-light setting, big magic rituals for everyone, residuum, solving linear fighter vs quadratic wizard, roles, power sources, powers, layout, design, monster variety, monster stat blocks, monster roles, MM3 on a business card, the DMGs were amazing...I loved literally everything they did with this edition...except for how it actually played. We played from the start to the finish with this one but could never get a simple combat to be anything less than a multiple hour slog. We tried everything and nothing ever worked. If only they revised the combat rules for speed of play."

This sums up my experience with 4E almost exactly. Except I only ran 8 sessions before we abandoned it.

Part of the problem was me being really out of practice DMing (hadn't truly played regularly since the mid 90s, and only ran maybe a dozen 3.x sessions over its lifespan). So I would fall back on my TSR D&D instincts, which were often at odds with how 4E was designed.

The other main issue was that of my four players, only one actually owned or read any of the 4E books. Two of the players were new to the game and only playing because their partners were, and I had never previously had any problems with that -- give the new/casual player a fighter and explain things as we go along. Attack roll, damage roll, AC, HP gets you 90% of the way there for rules you're likely to encounter in the first 30 minutes or so.

But core 4E doesn't have anything as mechanically straightforward as that, and a new player needs to understand a lot more mechanics right from the start. Essentials came along just after we started so I converted their characters over to help simplify (and it did). But even the simplest 4E classes have a greater cognitive load than a 1e to 3e Fighter. With only one player out of four having any familiarity with 4E, there was a heavy burden on me to help the new/casual players learn how their characters worked.

I'm sure my experience would have been more positive if I hadn't been coming out of a decade long hiatus from DMing with any regularity, and if I'd had a more invested group of players who were motivated to read up on their own. More than any other edition of D&D, I think that 4E really needs a minimum level of player investment to shine.

 

[pemerton]

More than any other edition of D&D, I think that 4E really needs a minimum level of player investment to shine.

This sounds right to me. As you say in your post, there are a lot of moving parts both in PC build and then in play. That second bit matters in particular: you can't just build a PC for a player and then give it to them to play, if they're not interested in engaging with the details of the build and the systems those build elements feed into.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This sounds right to me. As you say in your post, there are a lot of moving parts both in PC build and then in play. That second bit matters in particular: you can't just build a PC for a player and then give it to them to play, if they're not interested in engaging with the details of the build and the systems those build elements feed into.

It is hard to make any story-centered game work if the participants aren't going to engage. I'm not sure I know why I would even attempt to do that... I guess if you want to treat D&D as being very similar to a board game. I would just use low-level B/X for that. While it can be pretty engaging, you CAN play with just basically 'pawn stance' and most of the rules are pretty straightforward.

OTOH lots of people seem to think 4e makes a good 'skirmish game' too. I would not say they are WRONG, but certainly that makes it a pretty involved tactical kind of game, on a par with other demanding tactical games like Star Fleet Battles, or Squad Leader. You better be into it to get far with any of them.