Combat Encounter Design and 4e

First, I wanted to thank everybody who commented on my last post! I didn’t expect so much of a response, so thanks to everybody for checking out my blog.

This week, I wanted to shift gears a little and talk about Dungeons and Dragons, specifically 4th edition. I had sat down to write an article and it was this huge, monstrous rant about my encounter design philosophy, but I sort of hated it, deleted, and started over. I realized that I didn’t want to sit here and rant about how people design their combats “wrong” or talk about how much of a genius I think I am, because let’s face it, nobody wants to read that. I don’t even want to read that. So instead, I want to describe some of my favorite combat encounters that I’ve run for my players, and some of the cooler ideas I’ve developed.

I like monsters with fun gimmicks. In a ice cavern (when is there not an ice cavern?) the PCs faced off against the giant frozen King Lud, a Large creature made out of ice. The room was fairly large, a platform built atop a series of icy columns. Around the outside of the platform were braziers, which granted free saving throws to characters starting next to them, against cold based effects. Lud was a brute, wielding a massive frozen hammer that dealt bonus damage to “frozen” (read: immobilized) targets. Lud had an aura that slowed targets, and a breath weapon that would either slow, or freeze (immobolize) targets who were already slowed. This created a one-two-three combo that kept the PCs on their toes and concerned with managing their conditions. Every time King Lud was hit, he would spawn a minion in an adjacent space: a Rime Crow. Rime Crows were a little bit of custom bastardry I designed. They were mostly annoying (low damage minions), but if they died, they would explode. This attack (called, perhaps blandly, “Rime Explosion”), if it hit a PC, would coat them in cold rime, granted them a cold vulnerability for their trouble. This meant that characters with low damage would devote their time to trying to manage the cluster of minions (since low-damage attacks would just spawn more minions with little reward) while the high-damage characters would focus on striking down the boss.  I think after they bloodied him, be broke down the platform and they had to fight around a cluster of spikes while he tried to throw pillars at them, but that’s not really the relevant part of the story.

In another encounter, the players had to fight a reaper over a large pit. The reaper was this little homebrewed guy with a bunch of strong, basic attacks. He had really high damage resist to all damage types, but if you could force him into one of the beams of light in the room, he would lose his resistance and gain vulnerability to all damage. On a hit, he would mark his attacker and teleport adjacent to them immediately, but the target got to choose the spot where they put him. To complicate things, there were several artillery monsters in the crypt with them. On the far side of the room were the controls that allowed one of the PCs to open skylights in the ceiling to let in light, so they couldn’t just nova-strike the reaper on turn one. It resulted in some really unorthadox strategy, with characters delying or putting themselves at risk to manipulate the reapers movement. It was a fun little experiment.

If it sounds like I’m borrowing from MMO’s like World of Warcraft, I am. Hell, in one encounter, an NPC ghost would occasionally interrupt the fight to tell the PCs to run into a small “safe zone” in the encounter room before the boss used a big, high-damage AOE attack on the whole chamber, which is a classic raiding trope at this point. And I mean, I want to stress that while I really enjoy fiddly fights, I don’t think they should detract from roleplaying opportunities between fights (see my previous article on Quests). One really cool way to bring roleplaying back into combat is to introduce non-standard encounter objectives – saving particular NPCs, trying to kill specific, well-protected monsters, disabling a device, or even just getting to the other side of a large room.

Another thing I love are terrain bonuses – terrain that helps, rather than hinders, the PCs. Hazards are great, and I use them a lot, but most of them follow the formula of, “This hazard sits here on the ground until someone gets pushed or pulled into it. Making a saving throw.” Most hazards can be easily avoided and don’t really add a lot of spice to the encounter. I did a multi-stage encounter once with a giant, hulking werewolf lord who was a bit more potent than the PCs were expecting. They beat him, and then he dragged them into another fight beneath the ground, in a cavern, and they had to take him from bloodied to zero again. When I designed it, I knew they’d be hurting for resources, so there were little ghostly power shrines throughout the room that would give them back powers or HP, depending. However, he could also use them, so they had to race to collect them while the Defender kept him busy. It was a really neat culmination to a long running plot, though it’s probably a little too high-stress to use all the time.

To me, the challenge of the DM isn’t beating the players. Beating the players is easy, if that’s something you want to do, but it’s neither fair nor interesting to do so. The trick is to upset their expectations of what an encounter is supposed to be like, and to do it in a proactive way. “You can’t use Encounter Powers” is an interesting ability for a monster to have, but it’s not especially fair or fun for the PCs to deal with. “I’m immune to all damage that isn’t fire” is also interesting, but again, not fair. However, offering both the restriction and a way around it can change the dynamic of a combat encounter. Combats tend to move towards stasis: the melees move up, away from the traps, and hop into flanking positions. Artillery on both sides fire at priority targets. Rinse, repeat.  The trick then becomes mixing up the formula, drawing inspiration from a variety of other tactical games, to keep things fresh and challenging for the players.

One final thing: I love gimmicks and weird things that lead to situational monster invulnerability or hyper-deadly, narrowly applicable attacks. But I always announce them, and I always offer a way out. An instant death trap is only interesting if the players can avoid it. If there is any possibility of them getting pushed into it on the first round, that’s boring as hell because there’s no strategy involved – they lose initiative, get hit, fail save, die. Likewise, letting players wail on a monster round after round without letting them know they aren’t hurting the monster at all – or better yet, giving them clues as to why their opponent might not be taking any damage – is lame. I try to give players clues with Passive Perception, because the challenge comes in navigating the available risk-reward choices, not in knowing that they exist.

What do you do to spice up encounters?

~ by aatramor on October 6, 2011.