In part 1, I discussed a common occurrence in D&D 4e where parties becomes much stronger than they should be through what I called the ‘Secret Synergy Bonus.’ This occurs when players figure how to play their PCs as a focused team based on good communication and smart use of power combos to increase combat efficiency tremendously.
I also discussed that while not a necessity to enjoy D&D 4e, this ‘bonus’ could sneak up on a DM and make supposedly challenging encounters too breezy to create much tension with players.
And just so you all know, I’m currently living through those very issues. My players discovered that bonus a long time ago and now that we’re into mid-paragon level, most of our fights, while interesting, end up feeling like they could have been harder. Thus I’ve been in solution-seeking mode for quite some time now.
Today I’ll tackle two types of solutions to bring back challenge into combat encounters with synergistic parties: the questionable solutions and the quick solutions. In part 3, I’ll conclude this series with a discussion on using more elaborate solutions to the issue and share some of the tips left by readers.
Less Than Ideal Solutions
When a problem crops up, humans usually look for the path of least resistance to resolve the issue. We want a simple solution that will resolve everything.
The worse possible solution in my mind would be to try to stifle the bonus by telling players they can’t plot and play like that because it would be meta-gaming (how I hate this word). The game was designed to allow Slayers, Tacticians and Power Gamers (3 of the many types identified in the Dungeon Master Guide) to truly enjoy character creation and combat. The synergy bonus does not prevent story-telling or roleplaying, but is likely a bonus feature for some players to discover and play with.
Also, to make combat more difficult, the first reflex is often to play with the encounter’s XP budget and monster levels. Logic says that if you use higher level monsters, the party will have a harder time dealing with them and thus the fight will be more challenging. However, in practice, while higher level monsters deal more damage (i.e. are more of a threat to PCs) they have higher defenses and more hit points.
So combat encounters may become more challenging, but will also be longer and potentially more frustrating. Against higher defenses, PCs are going to miss more often and when they do manage to hit, they’ll need to dish out more damage to vanquish monsters. This is especially true of Soldier monsters. However, some monster types like Artillery and Skirmishers aren’t so bad. Their defenses and HP are lower to start with and they deal high damage so using higher levels ones can be a workable solution.
I’m also a bit leery of ‘multiply damage of all monsters by X’ and ‘divide all HP by Y.’ I know many DMs use them and I’m the first proponent of house rulings, but in my musings on the subject, these rules may be patches done to sound game math, if uncalibrated for synergistic parties.
In fact, I’m beginning to suspect that while 4e is dead easy to prep for, it can lure DMs into a form of laziness that is easily exploitable by the synergy bonus. Blindly fiddling with combat mechanics numbers to make fights more challenging (or to avoid the grind) is risky, but I believe you can do it knowingly.
Quick Fixes
The biggest issue about the synergy bonus is that players get more and more practice playing the same PCs together and become more efficient while the DM is expected to track combat, monster stats, statuses and control monsters (quick tip: Delegate to players and/or software!) The chances of a DM developing such synergies with his monsters during combat (unless it’s pre-planned, which I’ll discuss in part 3) is unlikely barring a Tactician DM (Oh yeah, those exist too).
Now while the fixes discussed above aren’t ideal, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t other quick fixes that can help.
First is a little secret I stumbled upon while playing with the Monster Maker Adventure Tool application from D&D Insider. While creating monsters for my new Gears of Ruin campaign, I noticed that each attack power had 4 damage options: Low, Medium, High and Custom. Looking at the values, I realized that the low/med/high corresponded to the chart on page 42 of the DMG (and at the beginning of the ‘Trap’ section of the DMG 2).
This made me realize that I could play around with damage outputs within the level range of the p42 chart without changing the XP cost of a monster! So my first tip is simple: Max out damage of your monsters attacks by giving them the ‘High’ column of the normal damage section of the table. If the monster is already at the top, feel free to nudge it up a bit more. Like Mike Shea of Sly Flourish mentions in yesterday’s comments: feel free to add a +5 damage bonus per tier (Heroic/Paragon/Epic) per attack.
Secondly, add damaging terrain to the fight. If you sprinkle the battlemap with areas that deal damage automatically when entered (or when a creature starts its turn in it) then you have a more challenging fight. Remember though, any damage you want to deal without an attack roll should be limited to 5 per tier. Best of all, there are no XP costs for that.
If you want the terrain to deal those wonderful p42 damage amounts, make the ‘terrain’ a trap with a simple trigger (entering/starting in it), an attack bonus (equivalent to a monster of the appropriate level) and pick a damage amount from p42 based on level. The rule of thumb here is that the narrower the trap’s effect is, the higher the amount of damage is. Don’t forget to factor a XP cost equivalent to a full monster (or a minion if its a one shot trap) but feel free to interpret how many ‘zones’ of damage correspond to one trap and budget accordignly.
You can also use hindering terrain that slows/grabs/restricts PC movement. Don’t overdo it as getting grabbed/restricted repeatedly gets annoying and encourages PCs to stop moving, which makes combat less exciting for all.
Third, make sure your monster mix is focused on dealing damage. While you can challenge PCs by stunning, dazing and restraining them to let monsters deal medium damage, this is often a one-way ticket to player frustration. Massively going after the PCs’ hit points is the way to go here. You need high damage dealers like Artileries, Skirmishers, Lurkers and Brutes to worry the players.
Quick Pick Combo
Lastly, you can mix all of the above for best effect. Use high damage monsters and increase their damage further as per the table on page 42. Add damaging or hindering terrain and traps.
More importantly, pick monsters with forced movement powers so they can send PCs into the damaging/hindering zones/traps, making simple combos of your own!
I’ll get into more details about mixing other encounter elements to make fight more challenging in part 3.
In the mean time, what about your own quick fixes? Some were already posted yesterday but maybe you have stumbled upon your own and you’d like to share.
I came to the conclusion a while ago, pretty much the same as you did, that it isn’t effects that win battles for Monsters in 4e, it’s damage. Everyone says that to kill a 4e PC, you have to have all the monsters concentrate damage on him. For the PCs, effects are the most important things, but for monsters, effects rarely do more than just delay the inevitable. If they want to scare the PCs, they have to deal massive, thundering damage that makes them huddle up and think of a new plan.
Though I really like monsters with quirky effects, I’m coming to the conclusion that those just make for really easy fights where the monsters schtick provides the DM a bit of fun before the monster gets godstomped. Or worse, the effects might make the battle last forever while the PCs slowly grind their way to a victory through a barrage of conditions (I’m looking at you, gibbering orb).
I agree that upping the monster’s damage is the way to go. Making the PCs spend their Healing Surges is the only surefire way to give the encounter that extra bite and make the PCs sweat a little. It’s for their own good 😉
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After reading all this, I’m reluctant to keep pushing my players to “make a party” rather than make their players. Some of them seem to be noticing it and some don’t seem to really care. I guess I’ll see how it goes and incorporate some of this in later levels.
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@Wyatt: Some effects can be interesting and will play a role in the solutions I’ll describe in Part 3. Basing an encounter on controllers and soldiers is a bad idea… but having a controller that Area-restricts or Area-Stuns (as a recharge power) combined with Skirmishers can be one evil-effective combo.
@Aaron: Finding other ways to have PCs spend surges, like suggested yesterday is also a great way to attack the issue from both sides.
@Marc: Are you worried about the bonus? Don’t be, we’ll help you! Anyway, even my party template won’t make this happen… it will occur if and when the players decide to.
.-= ChattyDM´s last blog ..Keeping up with the PCs: Part 2, What Not to Do and Quick Fixes =-.
Great minds think alike!
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?
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Thanks for all the great info Chatty, I have been dealing with this problem from the start and we have only just begun. My players come from a solid video game RPG background and they all have tactical minds. Oddly enough they have no real leader and yet seem to work well together. One of my concerns though, and maybe your part 3 will address it, is the tank dilemma I’ve got. I have a goliath barbarian who is spec’d to perfection. Sure, I can hit him, but his HP is ridiculous and getting him bloodied only makes him stronger. Also, his damage output outclasses almost every other PC. It’s made making the encounter challenging without having the party almost totally dependent on him nearly impossible. My only two successes have been based around your terrain ideas, essentially forcing a semi-split party. Otherwise he will clear the room before the other PCs can pull an encounter power out. Any suggestions, or am I jumping too far ahead of your series?
@Ruhk: Splitting the party with terrain is EXACTLY where I’m heading for in First look at your Barbarian closely.
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 =-.
Very nice. (By the way, I’m getting the both RSS from Critical Hits and from your feed for all your posts…I’m guessing you can eventually fix this) I very much like how you encourage a holistic approach to encounters. It’s something that’s not often remembered. It’s more along the lines of “what monsters can I throw at them?” than “how can I shape the battlefield against them?” A bottleneck can be immensely dangerous. Very much agreed with greywulf, that encounters are a three-part thing.
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.
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Andy- we should have more feed options up soon. One “All posts”, one “CH only” and one “Chatty DM only” as well as some other options like “Only RPGs.” That way you can choose how you want it delivered.
Weird, my comment got marked as spam when I tried to edit it. Reposting…
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
This may have been mentioned in the comments yesterday, but a lot of the monster families in the monster manual have built-in synergies that make damage tougher. One monster may have a power that knocks a player prone, and another one in the same family deals extra damage against prone enemies or has combat advantage. These types of synergies make it really easy to make a competent band of monsters that can fight with the same type of effectiveness as a well honed party.
@highbulp: Monte Cook once said that if you wanted a very tough level 1 orc, nothing stopped your from giving him a Con score of 100. That’s given.
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 =-.
The players in my regular game definitely have a strong synergy bonus. I have a small group, just 4 players, and they have been playing together in my campaign for almost one year now. It took some time, but they did learn to work together and talk out their battle strategies. They are definitely a strong fighting machine at this point and challenging them is not as easy as it once was.
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?
@Chatty
Good idea, his charge is pretty rough, though once again, tactically these guys are good at positioning, I’m improvised a few soilder classes into hybrid controllers for that effect, but then the dang mage scorches the group holding him back… Ahhh, good players. Thanks for the advice, and keep writing. Your one shot blood bowl mod is coming up soon. I’ve conned one of our players into running it, he was very excited.
Just signing for them comments, this is very interesting. 😀
I play in two different groups with three players playing two characters each and we synergize well. A lot of this is knowing the way the roles interact well and playing to their strengths. It took us a while to figure this out, as we aren’t mmo players. But that greatly helped our synergy.
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.
If you want the terrain to deal those wonderful p42 damage amounts, make the ‘terrain’ a trap with a simple trigger (entering/starting in it), an attack bonus (equivalent to a monster of the appropriate level) and pick a damage amount from p42 based on level.
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.
As I was reading this article, the following idea occurred to me: What if something happened that caused the players to switch bodies with each other? Suddenly, the Human Wizard is controlling the Goliath Barbarian and the Goliath Barbarian is controlling the Halfling Rogue and the Halfling Rogue is now a Human Wizard?
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.
I like the idea of upping damage when faced with an optimal party, especially given my experiences in Paragon tier where good combos with your striker(s) can make mince-meat of monsters really quickly.
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…
Clanging swords and fireballs are loud. You never can tell what sort of thing that might attract. Just because an encounter begins with 5 Orcs doesn’t require it to end that way. Say your PCs enter a room with 4 Orc harriers and an Orc alchemist. It might also have 2 orc darkblades that although unseen at that start will jump in if they see an advantage. If it looks like that battle is lost then they retreat and warn the next group of Orcs to prepare something nasty.
This is some good food-for-thought for me as I plan my adventure for tomorrow. Thanks Phil!
It also strongly encourages me to plan my encounters a little bit more thoroughly beforehand, so thanks for that as well.
Admittedly, encounter planning has always been my weak suit as a DM. Between myself and the other member of our group that DMs sometimes, we have found that a lot of encounters from the published adventures and many of the suggested encounters from the Monster Manuals do not combine monsters with good power synergies (e.g. they combine monsters like a dire wolf that prone their target with combat advantage and deal extra damage against prone targets with other monster that neither provide combat advantage or knock their opponents prone).
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.