The Middle-Aged DM

A veritable plethora of commentary has been made around the length of combat in D&D 4^th edition, its gamiest or tactical nature, and the potential for grind. In the last session of my home game I sort of ran face first into this issue. I new heading in the session was going to be combat heavy as the party was delving into an ancient crypt to retrieve an artifact. I had three encounters planned but cut the middle encounter out because I was worried about the party’s resources for the final fight and trying to reduce combat time to progress the story further given we only play once a month. After they laid a beat down on the tomb guardian and his minions they emerged into the warm desert morning with the precious artifact in hand when I offhandedly and without any prior notion made a comment that they could see a large dust cloud approaching in the distance signaling a group of riders.  Now I should have known better because the first thing out of there mouths was “lets hide and ambush them”. I ended up throwing together an encounter on the fly with a very much hated villain who has pwned the party on more than one occasion.  I wanted to try and give them some real choices in fighting a hated villain were victory was not a given or sneak away with the artifact and complete their mission.  In hindsight it wasn’t really a surprise that we rolled for initiative. Three back to back tuff encounters felt like a massive slog to me, so much so that I had the villain flee from the fight partly because that is the kind of douchey thing he would do and partly because we were running out of game time. I really felt wiped after the session.

A lot has been written on how to speed up combat in 4^th edition. I tend to shy away from implementing too many of these strategies, as I kind of feel that if I am going to alter the game that much I might as well just play another system, plus I like the combat for the most part. When the battle is past that point of no return and is in the inevitable win for the party stage I tend to minionize monsters a bit or turn standard monsters into 2 hit minions. I think, upon reflection, I get exhausted by running that much combat in one game session, there is definitely a tipping point for me. I also want a little more non-combat character interactions and role-play in my games which can be difficult to maintain in a system where the combats can take a long time to resolve. 4^th edition, to me, is a lot like 2 games combined into one. You have the role-playing game and the combat game. When the Dungeon Tiles come out then the role-playing game exits stage left and the combat game begins, and vice versa. I am sure there are better DM’s out there that can integrate the systems more seamlessly than me but when combat breaks out I find it difficult to keep the banter and soliloquies and narrative up for like an hour plus until the last baddy falls. In reality, I really can only come up with a couple of good lines per fight and have to be careful to not prematurely blow my load too early in the battle.

 I have come to the realization that 3 combats is a wee bit too much for me in one session. I think 2 or even 1 large battle with more role-playing/bullshitting will reduce the grind and exhaustion. The funny thing is I was more worried about the player’s and their experience of combat heavy sessions and the long grind, but when I looked around the table they were all excited and on the edge of their seats and mentioned to me what a great time they had. I don’t know, maybe I am a bit of a lightweight, but at least the next time a combat heavy session breaks out I don’t have to worry as much about my players thinking the game sucks.

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