The Middle-Aged DM

I have been experimenting with encounter design my last couple of sessions, trying to find that Goldilocks sweet spot for non-set piece BBEG super smack throw downs. I think I had mentioned in the past about some of the combat grind I was experiencing in terms of length of combat and lack of story or role playing progression. It was one of the reasons I stopped using a lot of published modules after Keep on the Shadowfell as sometimes we could spend 2 sessions moving through 3 rooms in the dungeon. This is not inherently a problem as there are different strokes for different folks, but I could tell that it made my players a little antsy, especially since we only play like once a month.

Combat can take a long time in 4^th edition and that is just a fact, it’s the nature of the beast, but I think I was exacerbating it with my approach. In reflection I can see I was succumbing to the blood lust. I was hurling monsters and bad guys at my players determined to challenge them and create a sense of threat, and maybe, if I was lucky, shit themselves. Part of this stemmed from running two very different groups at the same time. My online group was highly optimized and tactically sound and outfitted with a War Priest with the pacifist healer feat that could basically heal everything anytime all the time (I know I pointed out the paradox to him but he just laughed at me). They had no problem dismantling encounters in the bat of an eye, but when I brought the same encounter design to my offline game the combat took forever and I usually needed to ease off the throttle to prevent annihilation.

I began experimenting, using some of the encounter templates in the DMG at various difficulty levels. The problem I would run into is most of these templates call for lots of enemy combatants of differing roles. Even when I set the difficulty level at party level or even slightly below party level combat still seemed to take a while since it took a long time for all the bad guys to bite it, although with little threat, which I found really boring. I also tried experimenting with minions in terms of having lots of them but the party doesn’t really have multi-attack powers so they tended to stay on the field longer than I wanted, plus I think people like rolling their damage dice and feel cheated when they take out a minion.    

I came upon a solution that seemed to work fairly well for my group and which I will utilize more often for non major throw downs.  Twice in one session I had the party face off against 2 opponents per encounter that were level +2 to level + 3 above the party. The result was quicker fights with me being able to adequately pummel one or two players a fight, while requiring a decent expenditure of resources by them. Nothing ground shaking here but just something I found helpful for this particular group.