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I’ve spent the last few weeks discussing meta-level RPG issues like player fulfillment because I’ve been running into them in my regular games. Satisfaction with your game, and how to keep things lively are important concerns for any group, I think, but I wanted to return to my D&D focus before I went so far into the aether, my silver cord stretched thin and snapped.

This week I’d like to take a stab (with a +5 bonus, heh) at the most notorious bug in Fourth Edition: combat speed. A lot of electrons have been batted around over this issue, but given what a grind our last session was, I wanted to take some time to offer up my proposed solutions to the problem. I addressed this some in an early article, but I want to dig a bit deeper into encounter design than before and examine a couple more solutions.

The general consensus amongst DMs, I’ve found, is that monsters have too much in the way of resilience, but too little in the way of threat. Their large hit point totals can take hours to grind down, especially if the players have to deal with a cold streak, while their abilities and damage dice do little to threaten a prepared party. These issues have been addressed by Wizards some in Monster Manual 3, the Dark Sun Creature Catalog and the continuing Essentials line, but a great many monsters as-printed still present an endurance test rather than a true challenge.

After running D&D 4e in one form or another for something like a year, I agree with this consensus (or possibly my own confirmation bias). I’ve tried a handful of rules tweaks and alternative combat scenarios to speed things up, but fights, especially big ones, end up sprawling across most of a session. The design of the monsters that I’ve been using lately seems to be speeding things up a bit, but most major combat encounters still run the risk of either being too easy or smothering the night’s fun as they bloat out of control.

The fix that gets the most blog time is to simply reduce monster hit points. After all, the reasoning goes, the amount of HP a monster has is the main determiner of combat length -- as soon as they hit zero the fight's over. I've tried this approach, and while it did speed things up, it also reduced the threat the monsters presented. Enemies only have a short window in a fight in which to truly harm characters before the natural balance of the game ensures their defeat. Reducing HP totals speeds things up, but at the cost of shrinking that window.

This approach can still work with a couple of tweaks (i.e. raising monster defenses and/or attack damage), but I'd like to offer up some other solutions that will not only improve fights, but also increase setting buy-in.

Strategy Over Tactics
Fights in Fourth Edition come down to round-by-round tactics for the most part, but the judicious hoarding and use of daily powers, magic items and action points strays into the strategic. By focusing on these strategic aspects of combat over the tactical, a DM can speed up a story by skimming over lesser fights.

Say my adventuring party is riding a silt skimmer from Balic on their way to the Genasi Isles when they’re accosted by a caravan of giants. I’m anxious to get the characters to the Isles and exploring the dungeon there, but I don’t want to make the trip seem uneventful. So instead of running the fight, I ask the players to describe how they succeed. I inform them that each character loses two healing surges to represent the damage they suffered, but each use of a daily power will reduce the total surges lost amongst the party by two. I further elaborate that if at least three daily powers are expended, the giants will be killed to a man rather than retreat.

This option leaves the players in control of their resources, but it places pressure on them to expend some rather than hoard them. It also provides a clear threat without distracting from the larger dangers they know they will face later. Most importantly, though, it cuts a possible two-hour fight down to thirty minutes of roleplaying and strategizing.

It’s Not About the Monsters
Encounters turn into grinds more often than not once the monsters use up their tricks and special powers and cease being dynamic. They fall into a pattern designed to wear down characters and chip away at their resources, and the only way to overcome them is to hit them until all their hit points fall out. Reducing hit points and upping damage can change the flow of this process, but it doesn’t alter it much.

Rather than just speeding up the current process, a DM should rethink the role monsters so often get shoved into. Instead of featuring them as the sole obstacles in the party’s path, they can be incorporated as part of a larger encounter strategy that includes other complications. Elements like dynamic terrain and multiple traps spring to mind, but "complications" can also encompass story elements like a countdown until some dark deed or another is accomplished off screen by the Big Bad, or even just a desire to avoid death on the monsters’ parts. Fights can be sped up just by taking the focus off a bunch of bad guys lining up to kill or be killed.

The incomparable Rob Donoghue approached this very subject last month on his blog. He proposed a design framework that traded monster stats (read: HP) for other dangers like terrain and traps. While I wouldn’t personally get so fiddly with the mechanics, his system is a great way to re-weight encounters against your players after you slim down your monsters.


So now that’s completely solved forever (completely; don’t argue.) I’ll take my leave for the week. Be sure to come back next Wednesday, though, as I branch off my second suggestion here and explore how to build encounters the PCs should lose. Villain escapes, deus ex manchina, punching above the party’s weight class. Don’t miss it.

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