4E Bringing You Down? Try This!
Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 12:00PM A few weeks ago I posted my problems with 4E, and many readers educated me on how to deal with my flagging interest in the system. I've compiled their wisdom here.
Extra special thanks to Kimble, Anarchangel, Swordgleam, Scott, Jonathan, Phil, Anarkeith, PrecociousApprentice, Greywulf, Wyatt, Dawn_Raven, WickedMurph, Thasmodious, Donny_the_DM, Daniel Anand, John F, Joshua, DeadGod, Dead Orcs, and Scott. With the following tips and strategies I expect my 4E experiences to be much richer with better, smoother skill challenges, breezy, exciting combat, and cooler magic items.
Skill challenges got you down? Try this!
1. Don’t announce a skill challenge until after the players announce their intentions
2. Don’t announce the number of successes required
3. If the goals are clear, don’t announce the skill challenge at all
4. Avoid making assumptions about your players’ actions
5. Keep skill challenges simple (even if succeeding is not), but think ahead. If the players succeed/fail, know what happens, and how the skill challenge is affected.
6. Call for checks when you feel they’re appropriate and hand out bonuses for good roleplaying, heroic/intelligent actions, or whatever else you feel is worthy
7. Have the DCs in mind, but be willing to modify them depending on player actions
Combat got you down? Try this!
1. Use lots of minions!
2. Cut monster HP in half and add to their damage (good options could be +5 per adventure tier, or + ½ the monster’s level).
3. Lower Monster defenses by one or two.
4. Be the monster, not the guy running the monster (roll with the punches). Just because you're aware you're marked doesn't mean you won't be willing to attack someone other than the marker.
5. Add an in-game time limit to the combat. For example, this level of the dungeon is flooding, and you hand a stopwatch to the players and tell each that they have 30 seconds to choose their actions.
6. Encourage your players to press on, even if they're hurt. Players react very differently when their characters are on death's door, changing the encounter in drastic ways, and perhaps encouraging them to look at fighting smarter, or not at all.
7. Watch encounter group makeup with a militant eye—creature synergies are a big deal. Lots of brutes makes a combat drag. An encounter group made entirely of skirmishers makes a combat drag. Minions and mixed encounter groups do not.
8. Bring the combat setting alive! Add hazards, terrain types, destructible objects, and different altitudes. Encourage the use of stunts (from page 42 of the 4E DMG) instead of the same powers round after round.
Magic Items got you down? Try this!
1. Use magic items form prior editions, or elsewhere, and translate the durations.
2. Modify your outlook—many 4E magic items are now supplements and enhancements to the power system where they’ve been much more dramatic in previous editions.
3. Focus on wondrous items, rings, and artifacts (the coolest stuff) rather than weapons and armor.
4. Mix and match 4E magic item abilities with different types of items—rods to blades to staves to armour to rings and back.
5. Allow healing surges to be spent to reactivate an item’s daily or encounter power.
6. Do away with the limits on the number of daily item powers that can be activated.
7. Bring items to life on your own—history, description, and personality go a long way
4E Combat, 4E Magic Items, Skill Challanges in 4E, DMing, Encounter Design, Running Encounters 
Reader Comments (12)
Excellent compilation you've got there. Good stuff.
Also, not to be an attention whore, but you could try some other house rules. I go around collecting ones I like and writing ones I like and put them here:
http://spiritsofeden.wordpress.com/2008/12/03/wyatts-4e-houserules/
I have user suggested rules, rules of my own invention, anonymous submissions, and links to other blogs and sites with house rules, and am always on the lookout for more things to grow the article with (though I only take particularly interesting/oddball suggestions). So maybe if you're fed up with the orthodoxy of the game, you might try something to warp it further into something you do like. I rarely play any RPG game straight from the books.
Some excellent thoughts here. Thank you for an excellent article.
I'm sorry, I don't think you understand how the internet works. You had an opinion on something, which was a good start. Then you actively solicited new information about that topic, which is a bad idea but forgivable. But then you CHANGED YOUR MIND based on that new information. I'm not sure if you realize this, but that's not allowed.
Those are some good tips. Our GM uses some of them acutally. But honestly, if they game is just getting you down in general, why not just try a new game?
Although I don't agree with everything you've compiled and presented here, I can see the value in trying out these changes. I'd be very interested to see a follow-yup piece to this post after some of us have had a chance to try these changes in actual game play.
Ahaha! How I bristled when i first started reading your comment, Swordgleam! Thanks for the laugh! :)
Thanks for the link, Wyatt. I'll be checking that ou in a minute here.
Hey Ameron, I'll deifnitely post a follow-up once I've had my next session, but RL keeps pushing that further and further back.
I was planning on trying a new game, Samuel. I still might, but I wanted to give 4E a fair shake. I think the feedback I've gotten will improve it in a number of ways. Whether that will keep it as my game of choice is another question entirely.
And many thanks to Greywulf and Mike Shea for the kind words.
Thanks for stopping by, all!
Wow. The more I read about 4E the less I want to play it! If that compilation of advice is required to make combat less "grindy" and more fun in 4E count me out.
Give me a simple d20 do or die roll any day!
Heya Chris, welcome to U20!
I don't mean to give the impression that 4E isn't worth checking out, or that my opinion—that it needs some work to make it as fun as previous editions—is the norm around the blogosphere. There are plenty of people who disagree. :)
Still, if what you're reading isn't sounding good, I'd caution you to save your money and worm your way into someone else's game so you can see what's what. Or, you could go out on a joint book-buying venture with your crew so you can all try it out at lower cost. You might really like it, but judging by your comment it might be an uphill struggle. It has been for me.
With so many other great systems around I'm not sure if it's worth it.
Wow, it's been a while since my last visit, and you put a lot of good stuff here. Definitively bookmarked and feed subscribed!
Muchas graçias, Daniel—I've actually been letting the blog portion of U20 languish a bit for the last month or so as I'm working on other projects for 4E and 3.5/PF. I'm also smack dab in the middle of starting a new campaign while I sort out another, so I haven't had a lot of time to write.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by, and for the kind words. There will be some more good stuff on U20 very soon! :)
Another rule my group has been enjoying for magic items:
Mostly remove them. We ran into a problem that the game expects you to have the bonuses you get from magic items. So instead of handing those out, we decided instead to apply character level/5 has a Magic Item bonus, of sorts, to attacks, damage, and all defenses.
It's been working out pretty well so far, and we've been able to make magic items rare enough that they have a certain kind of mystique to them, and have all been artifact-type things.