However, if you as a DM are using a dire wolf in an encounter, there is nothing that stops you from tweaking the accompanying monsters slightly to take better advantage of its abilities. Perhaps the other monsters knock targets prone if they score a critical hit, or a few of them have smoke bombs they can toss as a minor that deal no damage but temporarily blind everyone in a burst 1 or 2, thus allowing the wolf to get combat advantage and do its own proning and extra damage.

If one of your monsters is a caster, mix it with soldiers and skirmishers and make it more dangerous by having it gain combat advantage at range against enemies flanked by its allies. Give your players a clue that this is happening, of course (“you are so engaged in repeatedly parrying attacks from the kobolds surrounding you that you fail to see the glob of acid hurtling at you until it’s too late”). This may encourage your party to focus on the melee monsters and burn them down faster, allowing the caster/shooter to deal more damage and then run for reinforcements when its companions die, or perhaps they will disengage from the melee attackers to deal with the ranged threat, allowing the melee monsters to spread out and use their own abilities to better effect.

Love the stream of great ideas on this topic, and I am looking forward to running a game again to try some of them out.

It also strongly encourages me to plan my encounters a little bit more thoroughly beforehand, so thanks for that as well.

I’ve joked about it with my players a couple of times recently – when on-form, they end up with about 4 PC’s pounding on a single monster, with the poor critter often prone, blinded, etc – it’s dead in a round or less. Brutal, and hardly noble tactics! I try hard to do the same kind of thing to a PC, but in my experience it’s really hard to pull off, so I think upping the damage output a bit will help me actually put enough hurt on a PC when I multi-team him.

As far as the maths goes, I think moving from Average to High (DMG pg 42) only produces at most +2 damage per tier (possibly not enough), whereas +5 per tier feels a bit more like it to me. However, just adding more flat bonuses to damage doesn’t feel right to me – I’d rather roll lots of dice and announce 20 damage, than roll 1d8 and announce 20 damage (I roll everything in the open, it keeps everyone honest and on their toes). So for me, I’d strongly consider adding +[W] per tier to all monster damage – that’s around +5 per tier, but gives you a nice handful of dice to roll. For example, if your 12th level pirate deals 2d8+3 damage now, that becomes 4d8+3. If you need to explain it, consider it being roughly analogous to allowing monsters to use an encounter power level of damager at-will, and a daily power amount of damage a limited amount of times. Not unfair really, given the expected life-span of a monster against your PC’s!

I do like the point about monster (and terrain) synergies too – for example, monsters that can push or slide PC’s need nasty terrain to move PC’s into; monsters that can immobilise, daze etc, need friends who can make use of that; etc. That’s pretty much the default design assumption of 4e, but all us DM’s need to be reminded of it from time to time…

Sure, they players could still use the same old – albeit successful – tactics, but I think the temptation to play around or act out of character (because they literally are ‘out’ of their characters) would overcome them at least a couple of times before the situation was rectified.

This might also provide for some interesting party interaction and RP’ing if one or more players were concerned about how their PC’s body was being (mis-)handled during the mix up.

That’s a great rule of thumb! I recently used an animated dragon skeleton stuck in a tar pit as terrain and I had no idea how much damage to use for the bite, I had to go looking at all the traps and all the dragon entries to find one I liked.

One solution that I’m sure to see in part three is to control the fronts. When monsters surround the party from more directions than there are defenders, it’s hard to use their normal tactics.

There are two main things I’ve learned from having this dynamic in my game:

First, I strongly encourage it. I find that the players enjoy the fights much more when they are working as a real team and have a stake in each others’ success, not just their own. DMs should always encourage this behaviour in their players!

Second, I’ve found that one good way to challenge groups with good synergy is to prolong the period in between extended rests. The PCs are always supremely confident when they are at full power, but as soon as they run out of daily powers, or as soon as one of them completely runs out of healing surges their start to feel their vulnerability. The worst thing to do is to have early encounters where the PCs know that they will for sure be able to take an extended rest afterwards. With such knowledge they become unstoppable by using daily powers and burning healing surges without any worry of long-term survivability.

Things are much more tense and exciting when the PCs come to the final villain when they are already bruised and bloody and have to dig deep into their reserves to win the ultimate victory. I mean, how exciting would the end of Die Hard have been if Bruce Mclean had been able to take an refreshing nap, have a coffee and bandage himself up before dealing with the bad guy?

My XP example outlined that using higher level encounters (and higher XP budget) was a suboptimal solution. Easy fixes with no XP impact was my starting point. As you say the magic number is not all that important…

You went into a different direction for tweaks that are fine and deconstructing the elements of a group’s Synergy Bonus is a great way to tweak monster numbers to keep things interesting.

Yes… exploring the art of tweaking monsters/encounters without overshooting it and klilling the bonus will likely make a good follow-up post on this series. Thanks
.-= ChattyDM´s last blog ..Keeping up with the PCs: Part 2, What Not to Do and Quick Fixes =-.

You say that you can up the damage of monsters or add damaging terrain without adding to XP cost. But you know what else you can do without upping the XP cost? Anything you want. You can tweak whatever aspects of monsters you want–defenses, damage, HP, abilities, whatever–without adjusting the XP cost. You seem a little focused on that magic number, and I think it may be hiding some other options.

You can raise monster attacks without raising their level or their defenses–just give them a boost to hit or damage and leave everything else the same Similarly, you can increase the defenses or HP but leave the attacks the same in order to give monsters greater longevity. The whole point of 4e monster design is that these different pieces DON’T have to be tied together. Thinking “I can’t raise the level because then the monsters take too long to kill” just doesn’t apply.

The trick is to figure out what kind of “secret synergy bonus” you’re talking about. Are the PCs getting a boost to offense through tactics? To defense? To effective actions per round? What? I haven’t seen the effects of this bonus in my game, so maybe you could elaborate on exactly what is changing.

And the real challenge is, once you’ve identified where the PCs are excelling, how to reign them back in without making them feel like you’re shutting them down. How do you boost the monster defenses without making the PCs feel like their careful attack strategies aren’t pointless, and that they are still awesome? That’s a real art, and would probably be worth an article somewhere ;p

Are you going to touch on the idea of a dynamic encounter? For example: your boulder-turret warforged, where new elements of the encounter emerge to surprise players.
.-= Andy´s last blog ..An Examination of Epic, Part II =-.

As for your barbarian, while it’s possible he dishes more damage than the rest of the party (mine sure did) its might be that he’s using a Bloodclaw weapon (the one that allows at will bonuses to damage vs a few HP of damage per attack) that was changed online… that power is an encounter one now.

Also, the Barbarian doesn’t have that many hit points (look at the Warden), they can be easily bloodied.

The way to deal with a Barbarian is push them in a corner of the map and surround him with monsters. Without his charge powers, his damage output drops and he needs to spend a few rounds trying to get his mobility back.

Just a few thoughts.
.-= ChattyDM´s last blog ..Keeping up with the PCs: Part 2, What Not to Do and Quick Fixes =-.

Put me in the Tactician DM column. I love coming up with sneaky tactical tricks that force the players to improve their game, or die trying. That’s something which comes to the forefront in 4e with it’s emphasis on team-play and co-operative gaming. I like.

Me, I think the DMG puts it well enough, though it’s easily overlooked: an Encounter is composed of Monsters, Traps and Terrain. Omit one or two of those elements and you’re handing the XP to the players on a plate.

DMG 42 is, without doubt, the single most important page in the whole game. It’s your guidelines for everything from trap-setting to monster building and modifying, from falling damage to being eaten by a Tarrasque – it’s all there, and everything in between. Not bad for a pokey little table, eh?
.-= greywulf´s last blog ..How to Survive as a 1st level Character =-.