Tomorrow is our next D&D session, which means that I’m two week slate posting the blog for our last session, but I think you will forgive me when I tell you that:
1. Our last session took place during the time when our site didn’t exist, so there was nowhere to post it even if I had written it.
And,
2. Our last session was more boring than you can possibly imagine. And you can probably imagine quite a lot.

So here’s the problem: the creatures in D&D 4E have a lot of hit points, and there are more of them. On the surface this seems like a good thing, because the creatures in D&D 3.5 were way too easy to kill. One of the problems with 3.5 was that there was no way to make a creature more survivable without also making it more deadly, so fights were inherently quick and brutal: something was going to die in the first or second round, and that’s just that. This was compounded by the fact that each combat round in 3.5 took about ten years of actual play time to complete. This resulted in combats that were simultaneously too short to be interesting (there was no time to maneuver, you just point and shoot) and too long to be bearable. A boss fight would last three round and eat up the entire evening.

The best solution to this problem, in my opinion, was to take a monster that was appropriately deadly (ie, it could put out enough damage to be a sensible threat to the party) and then bulk up its hit points artificially to make it appropriately durable (ie, it can last more than two rounds in combat against a pack of deadly PCs). This gave us fights that were exciting without being do-or-die; the monster could take a few hits, the PCs could take a few hits, and nobody was in any danger of being dropped by a one-shot.

The secondary solution to this problem (welcome to “the Dan Wells school of making your RPG fights interesting”) was to place the fights in a dynamic environment, which forces the players to consider the terrain instead of just emptying their clips (so to speak) into the baddies. Even if the environment doesn’t actually do anything dangerous or meaningful, the fact that it is doing anything at all is enough. I remember running a dungeon in Eberron—out of a published adventure, no less—where one corridor of a sewer was lined with water valves that would occasionally open and drench the characters with crap if they were standing in the wrong place. I can’t tell you anything else about that dungeon, including the amazingly wonderful thing they found at the end, but I remember those water valves because they made the fight interesting. The exact same fight in a plain stone hallway with no movement (you know, like 99% of the fights people have in dungeons) would have been fantastically boring and unmemorable.

So anyway, what was I talking about? The hideously boring fight we had two weeks ago in D&D 4E. The point I was trying to make in the last three paragraphs, before I got distracted by my “dynamic environments” pet peeve, is that extra hit points for monsters was always a good thing in 3.5, so we were kind of surprised at how horrible it was in 4E. The other culprit, of course, was the fact that there were SO MANY bad guys—we just couldn’t wade through them fast enough. Now, let’s be clear on one important thing: combat in 4E is indeed significantly faster than it was in 3.5, when you look at the individual combat rounds. A combat round in 3.5 took, as I mentioned before, ten full years to complete, by which I mean about an hour, and that is sadly not an exaggeration. Combat rounds in 3.5 took FOREVER. And combat rounds in 4E take about a minute, maybe two minutes if a couple of players are overanalyzing their options. So yes, that part of combat has been sped up. Unfortunately, the fights have been bulked out with five times as many bad guys, who have five times as many hit points, so the fights end up taking the same amount of total time—except that now you have to say “I fire Eldritch Blast” about 40 times a night, instead of two times a night, so it sometimes actually feels more onerous than before.

Let’s review: fights in 3.5 were boring because the bad guys were way too deadly and way too weak, and because combat took forever. Fights in 4E have bad guys who are more balanced, which makes fights more interesting and tactical, but they throw so many bad guys at you at once that killing them starts to feel like busywork instead of epic battle. Fortunately, there are solutions.

The first solution is built right into the game: minions. 4E is a system that wants a lot of bad guys, and those fights can actually be pretty interesting, because lots of sources of damage, and lots of targets, automatically make a fight more tactical and often do a good job, all on their own, of making an environment seem dynamic. But “lots of damage sources” doesn’t have to equal “lots of hit points to whittle down,” because the minion system allows you to have dangerous foes that drop in a single hit. They’re not deadly one-shot killers, nor are they pathetic thugs you can safely ignore, they’re somewhere in the middle.

(But wait, Dan, didn’t you say that overly weak bad guys are boring? I did, but that was in reference to a single bad guy—if he’s weak enough to go down in a couple of rounds, yet dangerous enough to pose a threat to the party, your fight will suck: the bad guy will be horrific, and then it will be dead. But imagine instead a whole group of people that functions as a single entity; you can drop one or two minions a round without actually removing the overall threat. You get to plan, coordinate with your teammates, and battle back and forth with an enemy that poses a solid danger, all while experiencing a string of minor victories and building up to a hefty battle with the minions’ boss.)

The second solution is, again, to create an interesting environment: give the players something to move through or over or around so it’s not just a case of “stand around and attack.” For example, in this fight we were jumped while camping for the night, so most of us were in tents, and the area was surrounded by trees, and there was a campfire in the middle. All you have to do is turn some of that terrain into points of obstacle and opportunity: say that anyone who stumbles into a fallen tent has a chance of tripping, and anyone who stumbles into the fire takes damage. Viola! All of a sudden the terrain is more than just cover, it’s an active participant in the battle: you can use it to maneuver around, set traps for the bad guys, and use some of 4E’s cool positional powers to hurt the enemy.

The third solution is simply to be very careful how many bad guys your use, minion or otherwise. You want enough to be cool without dragging things out. It’s a tricky balance, and I know our GM is still trying to find it. I imagine most GMs are still adjusting to the new system. The important thing to remember is that any given fight in a campaign, unless it’s a massive boss battle you’ve been building up to for weeks, is simply not a big deal, and you shouldn’t spend a ton of time on it. Keep your fights fun and interesting and short, and then get on with the story.