Even 4E Combat Can Bore
Friday, October 17, 2008 at 10:10AM The One-Shot
Last night three friends of mine (including Johnn Four of Roleplaying Tips called on me to run a one-shot 4E session. I spent an hour gathering 1st-3rd level critters and developing a brief session plan before heading out to the Bioware Edmonton offices to play.
The Setup
The PCs woke up shackled to each other in the pits of a colloseum, and were instructed to ready themselves as it would soon be time to fight. Yeah, yeah, I know, but I had one hour to plan here. Plus they had amnesia and met in a tavern. There was an ancient evil. Kobolds in a keep nearby. Sue me.
The First Battle
A group of zombies were felled followed immediately by the greedy paladin unwittingly approaching one of U20's doppelganger jellies. My critters were universally stupid, of course, but sating flesh-lust is pretty entertaining regardless of the outcome. We had an impromptu skill challenge that was going splendidly until a couple of botched rolls. So far, so good for the one-shot.
I was looking forward to the next battle against a varied group of drakes (I tore the wings off of the flyers, split the difference between their normal flight and ground speeds, and gave the skirmishers a spring attack equivalent ability instead of flyby attack). I rolled out the arena map again and added columns, trenches, deep sand (difficult terrain), burning puddles of pitch, and a few more piles of equipment that each may have housed one of the colloseum's clean-up oozes. It promised to be a good battle.
Boredom Sets In
Both sides repeated the same actions they had done the whole session. This has been my concern with 4E combat since I first cracked those fine-looking core manuals.
Knowing your role is great; it promotes teamwork and makes everyone not only useful, but often vital to the group, but what if you want to step out of that role, even for one round? I observed that you couldn't, or at least that nobody would because their effectiveness would drop too far for it to be viable.
My Spitting Drake (artillery) retreated from the party while spitting, every round, until dead. My nimble skirmishers stayed well away from the PCs as they reached flanking positions, but the PCs opted to make double-moves to chase while using the same lances of faith or eyebites they've used every round, rather than switch to ranged weapons to kill them from a distance. The fighter moved and then charged every chance he got, as in the previous rounds, as in the previous battle. It was repetitive, and we closed down about an hour earlier than we normally would have once that final skirmisher fell because our energy levels were somewhere around that of a banana slug's.
To be fair, though...
4E is new, and this is a tiny cross-section of low-level play (and the first I've heard of combat dissatisfaction). Many factors could have contributed to the boredom, from my dry DMing, to fatigue, or stress, but whatever. I've found that enjoying D&D transcends most of these factors in any given session. Creating those encounters was a snap, and we had fun, but then I'd have fun with this group regardless of what we did.
Would it have been different in 3E? I imagine creatures and PCs being bull-rushed into pits, lots of arrows and use of tactical movement behind cover. I imagine attacking defensively, and climbing those pillars, and trip attempts, and tumble checks and a lot of things that I didn't see last night. The "interesting" terrain added to the drake fight felt like an impediment to the fun, not a new layer to the combat.
Bah. I'm not condemning 4E, although I'm sure it sounds like I am, but I do expect more out of its much-touted tactical combat than I got last night. Next time we're going to run a paragon-level one-shot dungeon, and I'm hoping the experience will be better in all respects, but if I still have three or four powers per PC and two or three for each critter I expect we'll settle into a predictable rhythm pretty quickly.
Reader Comments (5)
Interesting, when I read the title I thought this would be about the length of 4e combats (which is a common complaint, including among some of my players.) But instead, you seem to have the opposite reaction to me between 4e and 3e... all my years of playing 3e were always "run up and hit" fests with bull rush almost never being a viable option. In 4e, I see all sorts of the kinds of tactics you describe, especially given all the forced movement powers beyond Bull Rush.
But is the players not coming up with cool things to do the fault of the system, or the fault of the players.
To Dave:
Come to think of it, those combats were pretty long, especially in consideration of them being 1st and 2nd level encounters. *shrugs* Of course a lot can be said for preferences in game style, and if your players make tanks, they'll tank most of the time (and that's just fine).
I maintain that a tank can become an archer, a specialist, or even a controller in D&D 3E with little more than that decision, but I don't think you can say the same thing for 4E. I could be wrong. I *hope* I'm wrong, and I'm hoping that the foray into paragon territory will prove it.
Also, please forgive that I'm using 4E terms to describe roles for 3E. I'm sure you know what I mean.
To Marcel:
Maybe. I think the system has a lot to do with encouraging play style, and it seems 4E encourages you to choose a role and stay there. This isn't a bad thing for everyone, of course, but I've always gravitated towards adaptable, complex, utility characters, rather than specialists. I have a short attention span, what can I say? ;)
Beyond that, my players are certainly able to come up with cool things to do, but the powers system is already pretty cool and rather effective, just limited in scope. My beef is mainly that you see the same things over and over, and then when you can't do those two or three things, there *seems* to be a lack of resources to adapt.
At the very least, you should be able to make a great archer without rolling a ranger. Maybe you can. I hope so.
Let me give you an advice, will you?
To enjoy more combat in 4E you have to do it less frequently and to make every combat memorable. Try to meddle with terrains, with monsters with terrain affecting powers, with traps, with monsters with strong powers that players can neutralize if they understand the enemy's flaws, with synergies of powers from different monsters.
Try even to play dumb monsters, or drunk monsters or monsters who use tactics based on motivations and not only on min-maxing the effectiveness.
4E combat plays great, but you have to spice it up.
That is some really excellent advice, regardless of the edition of D&D you play. Thanks, Gomez.