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 pretre wrote:
Yes! Minions are one of my favorite parts of 4E. I love making my players feel like they are badasses.

As for dungeon economy, I actually ran a hardcore old-style campaign where the players were celebrity dungeon crawlers who played to a crowd. So the longer they went without resting and the more dramatic ways they figured out puzzles, solved encounters, etc, the more prestige/xp/loot they would get. It really made them try to space out those dailies.

Love me some X-Crawl! http://www.goodman-games.com/GMGP2000preview.html

Also I still remember one of the first scenarios I ever ran for 4e. It was very much a "night of the living dead" scenario. The players were trapped in an abandoned temple in the middle of the woods and had accidentally activated an ancient artifact that would call all the restless dead in the forest to their location. The last part was deliberately set up as a "combat gauntlet" with waves of monsters followed by a short rest. One of the waves was a 3rd level encounter (players were lvl 2)...30 lvl 1 minions.

I don't think I will ever run an encounter like that again but darn was it worth it to do once.

I'd never seen that game, that's neat.

I was mostly using the Fourthcore movement and making it my own.

Yeah, that many minions just make people feel like badasses. Nothing more satisfying than scything down scores of the enemy. And, as was said on the previous page, when you go to a normal enemy or a solo/boss, people really notice it.

It was hilarious because they were fighting in a big open courtyard of the temple, and it basically ended up completely filled with monsters. Of course it wasn't really as dangerous as it could have been, since the wizard had an at will power that did auto-damage to anybody who stepped into a given area. He put that in one of the entrances, and basically blew apart half the monsters before they even got into the courtyard. The wizard's player absolutely loved that.

Minions are a great idea. Another thread on this forum recently had a discussion about the need to challenge players but to also give them the satisfaction of getting more powerful, and minions are a great way to do both of these. The 4e game my group played had a fighter-type who could do some impressive maneuvers to pull minions towards him then go all blender-mode with attacks on everyone adjacent that was always fun to watch, even if it didn't always accomplish much more than crowd control...

Yeah, there's definitely a need to feel like you have advanced and are powerful and they certainly play into that.

I'm a big fan of 4e for many of the reasons already stated. Being able to play whatever class, and be useful (or at least, have a role) throughout all levels is a major improvement over 3/3.5s "caster issue".

I know people hate them, but I'm also a big fan of the way healing surges allow everyone to share the Band-Aid burden. It literally became a battle in many of my games to see "okay, who wants to play the healer". It was an absolutely necessary, but ultimately boring and thankless role that rarely got to shine during the game. That, to me, is a system issue that healing surges and the Leader Role fixed greatly in 4e.

As for minions, I definitely think they were underused in many games. Even the sample and module games rarely seemed to use them, which I think is why lots of people complained about HP bloat on monsters. But the transition was supposed to be simple: a single meatbag monster could be broken down to 4 1-HP minions for the same XP/encounter cost/whatever term you want to use. Too many people, it seemed, looked at Minions too much from the 'I need to kill my players' viewpoint, imo, and ruled them out.

I've been toying with a game idea in my head on and off for awhile now. I planned to utilize a TON of minions in the game to simulate "boss with flunkies" encounters. 1 elite or regular monster, tons of minions. Think of the end of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. When the uruk-hai catch up to Boromir and the two hobbits. Most of them go down to a single swing, without doing much other than looking menacing and swinging their weapons. It's not until the Big Boss Man (whose name is escaping me) shows up that anything really happens. That's the sort of encounter I feel like gets skipped all too often.

Nice to see I'm not the only one with that opinion it seems!

Healing Surges were a neat idea as it made 'healing' a sort of shared-resource instead of a neat trick that was mostly the Cleric's job or the domain of limited-usage items.

My only issue with them is we did have some non-trivial 'HP Ping-Pong' as the numbers would bounce around a lot at a point where the math was annoying.

I like the general idea but I felt it did take a lot of the tension out of fights and especially explorations sections. There wasn't much sense of being worn down or tired, because we very rarely got to the end of our healing surges before an extended rest even with multiple encounters. The closest were the times I was being a jerk DM and sapping surges with environmental effects.
Fewer surges would have fixed the problem pretty well, though.

That's a '15 minute work day' problem which can generally be resolved with encounter/adventure planning. Definitely a player behavior thing though.

My players ended up scrounging them.

I suppose it is, but I found 4e worse for it than 3e, which is surprising since they were trying to get rid of it.

I mean, with a normal amount of surges the group can always go into a fight on full HP, and can last 3 fights in a day, easy. I think 3 "proper" encounters is a pretty decent adventuring day, at least, in 4e it has to be because the fights take so damn long. I ran 3e for years without this problem, with the same group.

The couple of times I interrupted extended rests did put them under pressure, but I only do that if my players rest somewhere stupid, and my guys are fairly canny.

I think this is one area where 5e has really got it right- you can only take 1 extended rest per day, and you get back enough stuff to make it interesting with a short rest. The HP are low enough that fights are always tense, and there is limited "hit dice" healing. It's a bit of a halfway house between 4th and 3rd, with the decent ruling of "one rest per 24 hours" making it easier to manage. Should have house ruled that in YEARS ago.

 Da Boss wrote:
I mean, with a normal amount of surges the group can always go into a fight on full HP, and can last 3 fights in a day, easy. I think 3 "proper" encounters is a pretty decent adventuring day, at least, in 4e it has to be because the fights take so damn long. I ran 3e for years without this problem, with the same group.

3 fights in one day is basically 60 minutes of work for 8 hours of extended rest. Also, there's nothing that says the end of a gaming session has to be an extended rest. You just note down your HP/used stuff and come back to it next week. As for fights taking a long time, I won't disagree with that although some of that is, again, up to the group and the DM to deal with. I think that a lot of DMs/Players look at higher level fights as 'throw more/bigger at the PCs' which is really not the way to do it. Higher level fights should be harder, not longer. That really comes down to encounter design.

Oh and 3/3.5e high level fights are just as outlandishly long as any other editions. Combat has always been the longest part of D&D and really any tabletop RPG. Simple reason too: It's the part of the game with the most rules.

Should have house ruled that in YEARS ago.

Yep. Definitely agree.

Most of my problems with 3rd was the complete lack of control of the players. Unless the DM said no occasionally it was possible for some ridiculously powerful characters. We were having 8th-12th Characters regularly toping 100 points of damage a round.
This might not have been so bad unless you were not one of those characters. Then you quickly become one of the supporting casts just waiting for your turn to act.
Then there was the combat, it become very dull and static. I was at the point of at the top of the round I was picking up my 2d20s, my 2d8s and rolling them and then when my turn came up just telling the DM what my damage was and going back to what ever I brought with me to entertain myself for the evening.

Now if 4th I need to pay attention and I can effect the battlefield by moving though powers or moving the monsters around. I can easily push, stun, blind or even make the monster fall down. It had become dynamic, we as players now can create combos. As a Defender I can now make sure that Dragon Attacks me rather than the mage by Marking them, you know my job. I can now if needed shift out of the melee I am in and charge the Orc that is threatening the Cleric.
The only time the game slowdown is when there is a boss monster that has sued up all of his Encounter Power along with us, but even then I can still push it around if I have the right At-Will Power.

I've run a lot of high level 3.5 and one campaign of high level 4th, and I'd say 3.5 is orders of magnitude faster just because it's so swingy and lethal. Fights tended to be over with massive damage really fast. Prep for fights, now that sometimes took forever!
4th fights took a long time due to the large amounts of HP and the limited ways to do large amounts of damage. Early monster design was piss poor at higher levels, too.
I think high level does not get playtested very well or very often.

As to the end of the session being the end of the day, I get that, but in an exploration based sandbox it's difficult to get the density of encounters required. I felt this was easier to achieve in other editions. However this may be down to experience and system mastery.

 pretre wrote:
Oh and 3/3.5e high level fights are just as outlandishly long as any other editions. Combat has always been the longest part of D&D and really any tabletop RPG. Simple reason too: It's the part of the game with the most rules.

I personally agree on this point. Also it seems like in my experience a lot of people who complain about 4e combat taking a long time played wizards or other spellcasting classes in earlier editions. They generally get really surprised when I explain to them that in 4e it's not so much that combat takes way too long, it's that everybody's turn takes the same amount of time. This opposed to earlier editions where one or two characters (i.e. theirs) are taking 75% of the time every combat round. (admittedly this is only 2-3 people in my local game club. I'm not trying to say this is the case about everybody).

Also even in WOTC published adventures there is a strong precedent for having environmental challenges do damage measured in healing surges. I pull that one on the party all the time for skill challenges and such. I think the most absolute low down thing I've ever seen was one DM doing "maximum hit point damage" (i.e. you had to make a skill check to get through a room and your maximum hit point value was reduced by 1d6 each time you failed).

 Da Boss wrote:
It's a bit of a halfway house between 4th and 3rd, with the decent ruling of "one rest per 24 hours" making it easier to manage. Should have house ruled that in YEARS ago.

PHB 1, pg 263. Once you complete an extended rest (which takes 6 hours), you have to go 12 hours before you can take another extended rest. So you're looking at a minimum of 18 hours between getting the benefits of an extended rest. So it's not 24 hours, there's already a pretty close limitation in the game.

And your games must have been very different from ours then. We routinely ran out of healing surges, or at the very least ran low. Then, we tended to get more than 3 encounters in it seemed. With short rests restoring encounter powers and allowing people to heal (in addition to Second Wind, which I thought was a great addition to the game), we were usually on the 4-5 encounter schedule. I mean, once you've done 3 you're just about to get another action point!

Yeah, I guess. My game was a Darksun game and involved lots of trekking through empty wastes, or exploring mostly abandoned ruins. Didn't seem right to spam encounters too heavily in those situations!
Also, I pretty strictly limited our games to 3.5 hours at most. Seems like a longer playtime is common, which would allow more encounters naturally.

Did you manage to get a lot of roleplaying time in in sessions with 5 encounters? Or did you have sort of "combat" sessions and "roleplaying" sessions separated?

dementedwombat: Agreed about the spellcaster problem in 3.5. Still an issue, to be fair. And they're also usually the ones suggesting a rest every 4 minutes!

My only current problem is working in Skill Challenges. I love the concept and their execution. In fact I use a version of them in most games I run, but for some reason they always seem forced in my D&D Games.

I liked how they involved everyone in the "skill" part of the game, and made it feel more like a team thing than "okay, you go do Gather Information!"

I've incorporated that aspect by just asking each of my players "What are you doing?" during those sorts of scenes. Generally, I find this encourages people to think of a way to get involved.

 Da Boss wrote:
I liked how they involved everyone in the "skill" part of the game, and made it feel more like a team thing than "okay, you go do Gather Information!"

I've incorporated that aspect by just asking each of my players "What are you doing?" during those sorts of scenes. Generally, I find this encourages people to think of a way to get involved.

My problem with my old group was when I would ask "What are you doing?", most of them would look blanky at me for a few moments and just say "I make a Perception Check. After so many years of playing under a Roll-Playing Game Master, they could not Role-Play anymore and we had one who decided the whole system sucked when he rolled a "1" once.