Everyone has experienced the long, slogging combat in 4e. When we complain of an excessively long combat, what are we really complaining about? Is length the issue, or is the griping more a factor of some parts being boring or tedious? If the combat was filled with awesome all the way through, would anyone even notice the time? Envision your combat as a movie. A good movie is always too short. If it’s gripping from beginning to end, time ceases to matter. If the movie is dry or boring, it’s always too long.
So rather than attempt to speed up combat, my new philosophy is to fill any combat that occurs with raw, unadulterated badassery, start to finish. How do you do this?
Here are techniques I’ve picked up.
- More Difficult Terrain, please! My rule of thumb is to go from 1/5 to even a 1/3 of the terrain as difficult or impassable. Does it clog the battlefield? Yup. But that is what you want! Having lots of difficult terrain makes movement a real choice. It allows players to be clever in utilizing it, and makes them take care in moving to avoid it. The other hidden benefit is it makes your battlefield bigger without making it take up any more space. If you made every square difficult terrain (don’t do this!) then the map for melee combatants is twice as large. Ranged combatants don’t care about this, so you can set your artillery across the map behind choice difficult terrain and make the PCs sweat. I avoided more Difficult Terrain at first, but increasing it has made combat more fun, not less.
- Make Combat About More than Killing Kobolds. I did an informal poll of my PCs favorite combats a while back. The unifying theme was that each combat they mentioned was when the combat was about something else then fighting. One fight saw the players fighting wraiths while trying to keep them from killing (and converting into wraiths) innocent townsfolk. More recently, they fought displacer beast who were determined to eat a halfling family. The players had to fight the displacers while keeping their elusive foes away from the tasty little folk. Add sub-goals and combat gets interesting pretty quick.
- Evolve the Battlefield. One of my favorite encounters in 4th edition was one where the characters fought a lumbering stone guardian in his rock garden. Piles of boulders littered the map. He could throw them at the players…and I had the boulders stay on the map. This changed the flow of combat completely! The boulders hurt bad if they hit, but they also changed the layout of the battlefield on the fly. Even better, it provided the PCs with cover. This dynamic “terraforming” got the player’s creative juices flowing, and a lot of clever deeds were performed adapting to the evolving situation.
- Pick One Thing and Amplify. Otherwise called “Get a gimmick”/ The easiest way to make a cool encounter is to take one thing and make it the focus of the fight. In the stone guardian example above, I took the rock-throwing, and I made the whole fight about that. Similarly, you could make a fight with a horde of minions exciting by giving the minions an interesting one-two punch. Our gimmick minions are able to perform a particularly damage attack, but only if two or more minions are grabbing the target. Not too bad…just minions, right? But now we’re going to amp the numbers…there are twenty or more of these guys. They pick a PC as a target, and mob up on that PC, grab him/her, then put him out. The PCs are now focused on beating this limited yet lethal attack. Limit your options and crank the volume.
- Your Delicious Weakness. Give your enemies more interesting weaknesses. And no, vulnerable 20 fire is not interesting. What about a clumsy giant who is vulnerable to any power that forces movement? Any forced movement cause the precariously balanced giant to make a save. If he fails, he loses his footing and falls. He falls in a random direction too, so he could fall right on top of the players. Oops! But wherever he’s falling, the fact that it can happen is a weakness that players will remember. Exploiting the weakness and finding it will keep players entertained the whole fight.
So, what are you doing to bring the awesome into your combats?
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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This is awesome. Five great ideas that I can’t wait to use. Great job!
As my PC’s inch ever closer to their first real BBEG fight, I plan on using a variety of features: difficult terrain (a la strewed bones) in the low-lying area surrounding the focus of the combat, a low obscuring mist emanating from large stone jars that hides small enemies, different height levels inside a large ornate sepulchre . . . and all this after they’ve navigated a claustrophobic, mundane mine.
So far, the boring 4e fights I’ve seen have all had too many opponents, or they’ve been in featureless rooms. I keep a box of rocks, beads, and small blocks handy. These become furnishings or other obstacles to movement and opportunities for cover. Hitting the PCs with conditions is as big as terrain. All this changes their responses, and makes them think about the encounter rather than just rolling dice.
As I prepare for my 4e game I am very happy to read articles like this. Gives me some good thoughts on what I need to be doing with my encounters. Hopefully my players will benefit from my implementation of this advice.
@Ameron Thanks man!
@kingworks that’s how you do it! No time to check th watches when you’re dealing with all that.
@Anarkeith the ratio of ‘Meaty’ (opponents with HP) to ‘Minions’ is one of the great mysteries of 4e encounter design. My experiences lead me to think that about 3-4 meaty opponents and whatever amount of minions is best. As for terrain, I definitely agree with you there. Give the players an environment to interact with and the combat is much more fun.
I’ve had a lot of success by making encounters more dynamic and interactive. One that I was really happy with had the characters on a riverboat being attacked by river pirates.
I drew the river and banks on the battlemap, drew the riverboat and pirate skiffs on graph paper, cut them out and put the miniatures on them. Pirate archers were shooting from the sides of the river, and they had a rope drawn across to keep the ship from going.
The PC’s had to fend of the pirate skiffs, protect the rowers, sever the rope and try to keep the ship from drifting ashore or into the range of the archers on the banks. All while moving over difficult terrain (rowers and benches). Sliding the boats around was fun, and the whole thing was pretty madcap and challenging.
Another thing you can do is have several stages to an encounter, with new enemies joining in if certain things happen. Players can stop or delay the additions by working the environment. You see lots of this in pulp comics – drop the portcullis, pull down the tapestry, knock over the pillar to delay or kill the mooks, then take on the main baddy.
Generally, though, 4e really rewards putting more time into the combat setting – thinking of it as a stage full of props and options rather than as a static board is a good first step.
Again, more quality stuff. I think you hit the nail on the head with each of these ideas. I’ve recently had particular success with the second bulletin – “Make Combat More Thank Killing Kobolds.”
The group recently had a fight with a BBEG who could only be slain by a ritual . . . so while half the group had to keep him occupied the other half had to figure out the ritual and use it against him . . . I got thumbs up all around.
@seanabrady let me know how that works out!
@wickedmurph that sounds fricken awesome. I would love to have seen that in play.
@thelastrogue thanks! The ritual idea is also awesome.
I’d invite anyone to share more discussion in the 4etopia forums! There’s a lot of great stuff here to share, and I made a spot just for it here!
I think it’s understood, everyone hates a slug fest. The most memorable encounters are the ones where the players are rewarded for being creative.
Another important tip is to describe the action. It’s not enough to roll the d20 and say you dealt so much damage. Get creative and paint a picture of something like an over the top kung fu flik.
Wonderful advice! As you say, I’ve been hesitant to use difficult terrain since it does feel like it would clog the battlefields which already never feel like they’re large enough… It’s counter-intuitive, then, that lots of difficult terrain actually makes the battlefield larger.
Great insight!
While reading this, I found myself saying (out loud) “Yes yes yes, YOU’RE SO RIGHT.” Seriously great advice, here.
I was going to say something about non-terrain-based changes to a fight, such as enemies calling in reinforcements, but I think you’ve already got that covered under “Make Combat About More than Killing Kobolds”. After all, an additional goal in a fight could be something like “Keep all the guards away from the alarm bell” or “Keep the necromancer away from the corpses”.
Nice! I like the weakness idea. I’ve actually done the evolving battlefield once. The monsters were a charmed bulette and a group of crazed drumming fey dwarves(kords I think they were called). It was great, the forest clearing that the battle took place in got torn up big time, pits appeared left and right, piles of boulders and rubble got strewn all over the battlefield. Combined with the dwarves abilities to constantly shift made for an interesting combat.
I prefer to use rules where this sort of stuff is not an issue, but if I am ever tricked into running 4e, I’ll be certain to remember this. Good stuff.
Great article gamefiend. May I add one?
6. Make the battlefield vertical. One of the coolest encounters I’ve run in the past was one where the entire battle was fought on a vertical battlefield. Think “sidescroller” video game. The PCs were climbing up a series of vertical caves, so we decided that lateral movement was less important than tracking vertical movement, and the battle map was a “sideview”… with kobold throwing down rocks into mine shafts.
How would the rocks provide cover from other rocks of similar size/mass being thrown at PCs?
I’m with you on the difficult/impassable terrain, We’ve just finished the pyramid of shadows and its almost nothing but one semi-featureless room after another. Not only is it boring but a wizard’s assortment “do damage and a burst and area is difficult until end of your next turn” spells are worthless when it only costs one square to go around it.
My best 4e combat was on a moving carriage racing through town, being pursued by Ork wolfriders. The rules were thus:
1. At its top speed, it would take 10 (6? I can’t remember) rounds to get to their destination.
2. One PC had to be driving the carriage at the start of a round. To drive the carriage, a PC had to use all their move or standard actions.
3. They had to keep the Macguffin alive.
The combat evolved quickly, with PCs desperately trying to hold it together on top of and inside the cramped 2×3 square carriage. People were hanging off the sides, getting pushed off the carriage, stabbing through the top to get at enemies inside, and sacrificing precious healing actions to keep the macguffin alive.
When it was over, I could tell they felt like they had just barely squeaked by.
Sorry, just a demonstration of ways of stacking some of these ideas together to create a memorable combat.
I really like your ideas. In my game it seems like fighting encounters just drag on and on. I would really like to add some more of these different types of ideas.
Keep up the great site!