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Well, the first thing I can tell you is that encounter speed does not change much at the various tiers. Whether you consider that a strength or weakness, you don't generally run into the problem of encounters stretching out as characters go up levels.
That said, I've had the same problem with average encounter length being too long. There are a few things that can help. First, limit your use of brutes and soldiers. The additional hit points of the first, and AC of the second tend to make encounters go longer. Second, make good use of minions - they keep the fights dangerous, but also help make them short (and give controllers a chance to shine.)
If you're using beasts, remember they can flee - I generally have them flee when bloodied, if they don't have an owner/controller around. Players know this by now, so they also know to take down the controllers, then drive off the beasts. But this isn't a bad general rule. If the encounter is over, except that players have to drop the last couple of enemies, let them run.
These things help, but I still find my average encounter time running around 45 min - 1 hr. For a while I ran encounters with fewer monsters, but that makes controllers a fifth wheel, so I was never happy with that solution. At the moment, I just go with this time, and keep looking for other ways to speed it up.
A group of experienced, focused players can reliably get through a combat with 15-20 combatants in less than an hour. Here is the list I send to my players at the beginning of the campaign (some of which is shameless borrowed/cribbed/mangled from the lists of others):
- Determine your actions before your turn: You have a ten-count to change plans.
- Announce you actions as you take them. E.g. "I take a move action to move my speed" as you move your mini, "I take a standard action to attack" followed by your attack roll, etc. This should really help newer players pick up the various actions types and their use.
- Use power cards. Have all your numbers calculated, factor in your modifiers. Turn your Encounter and Daily power cards over when used.
- If in doubt about a rule, roll the die to see if it matters, and then look it up. If the rule cannot be found within 2 minutes, the DM makes the call - the details will be looked up before next session.
- Stay focused on the game, even when its not your Turn. If you're bored, help look up rules for the DM and other players.
- Roll all dice together (your attack + damage).
- When rolling an attack, announce your total and the defense targeted. E.g."I rolled a 19 vs. Will." or "22 vs. A.C.!"
- Dice which roll off the table, as well as "cocked dice," do not count. Please re-roll.
- Track healing surges and action points with counters.
- Say done: Simply say "done" when finished with your turn. Surprisingly, this suggestion alone can make a noticeable difference.
This has come up more then once before and there are a variety of solutions. The one that works well at our table is to have more strikers and less defenders in the players party. If lots of members of the party are very durable and can take hits all day thats an effective party design but it leads to longer fights. If the players really put out the damage then the encounter tends to end that many rounds sooner. Furthermore, because the players have a bit of glass cannon themselves the fights feel dangerous until almost the very end.
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These are all good suggestions. I found I used a number of different tactics based on what I was looking for in the encounter.
1) Tailor the encounter. Usually this means using less brutes and soldiers. Actually, Stalker0 at ENWorld had a great method for tailoring encounters to encourage speed. You can find it here . This thread has some really good stuff.
2) Work with hit points and defenses. You can either lower hit points or lower defenses. If you lower hit points though, I would suggest actually increasing defenses a bit. Both of these will lead to faster encounters. I often lowered hp by a quarter and increased the defenses by 1 or 2 to compensate. But this only happened in situations where I thought the creature needed it, such as if the creature had somewhat low defenses to begin with. Sometimes I would lower defenses by 2 and not touch hit points. In other words, play with it until you hit the happy balance you are looking for.
3) Encourage a certain party composition. Like others have said, encourage your players to focus on certain roles. More strikers and fewer defenders. You can also go pretty far with a couple of controllers. If you have a group of seven I would suggest having two defenders, a leader, two strikers, and two controllers. Or, replace one of the controllers with another striker.
There are a ton of strikers in the game and they tend to play a bit differently. For instance, a rogue is very different than a warlock or an avenger. Those three in the same party would rock.
Also, there are a number of 4e blogs out there that give wonderful advice on this subject and many more. My favorite is Sly Flourish . Lots of great DM advice there. I still like to read the blog even though I am not currently running a 4e campaign. It is that good. In fact, Sly Flourish recently featured a short article on Paragon Tier play.
Asmor's Encounter-a-day blog also provides some interesting, out of the box ideas on various subjects.
A group of experienced, focused players can reliably get through a combat with 15-20 combatants in less than an hour. Here is the list I send to my players at the beginning of the campaign (some of which is shameless borrowed/cribbed/mangled from the lists of others):
- Determine your actions before your turn: You have a ten-count to change plans.
- Announce you actions as you take them. E.g. "I take a move action to move my speed" as you move your mini, "I take a standard action to attack" followed by your attack roll, etc. This should really help newer players pick up the various actions types and their use.
- Use power cards. Have all your numbers calculated, factor in your modifiers. Turn your Encounter and Daily power cards over when used.
- If in doubt about a rule, roll the die to see if it matters, and then look it up. If the rule cannot be found within 2 minutes, the DM makes the call - the details will be looked up before next session.
- Stay focused on the game, even when its not your Turn. If you're bored, help look up rules for the DM and other players.
- Roll all dice together (your attack + damage).
- When rolling an attack, announce your total and the defense targeted. E.g."I rolled a 19 vs. Will." or "22 vs. A.C.!"
- Dice which roll off the table, as well as "cocked dice," do not count. Please re-roll.
- Track healing surges and action points with counters.
- Say done: Simply say "done" when finished with your turn. Surprisingly, this suggestion alone can make a noticeable difference.
These.
Before you start fiddling with the rules of the game, enact these suggestions. If the encounters are still taking too long, then you should consider taking more drastic measures.
3) Encourage a certain party composition. Like others have said, encourage your players to focus on certain roles. More strikers and fewer defenders. You can also go pretty far with a couple of controllers. If you have a group of seven I would suggest having two defenders, a leader, two strikers, and two controllers. Or, replace one of the controllers with another striker.There are a ton of strikers in the game and they tend to play a bit differently. For instance, a rogue is very different than a warlock or an avenger. Those three in the same party would rock.
I actually got to see this effect in action. When ur group first started it was 2 Defenders, my cleric and a Striker. However our group both shifted and grew - one of the defenders was totally enamored with the Avenger when it came out and switched classes and more people joined our group and mostly choose to play strikers. The DM, of course increased the difficulty of the encounters to deal with a 6 player group instead of a 4 player group. I was paying attention to how this would effect 'The Grind' as I had been reading about it on these boards at the time and in fact was encouraging the new players to pick up Strikers to help avoid 'The Grind'.
Encounters began to run quicker but the real impact was less in the physical speed of the encounters and more in how they felt. What really makes 'The Grind' feel long is the way you can have an encounter morph from one thats really challenging and has a lot of tension into one where you know you've won but there are still a lot of rounds of combat left while you drain the remaining bad guys of hps. A Striker heavy party has a lot less of this even beyond just shaving off a couple of rounds of combat at the end.
Basically not only do you shave a few rounds off the combat at the end but, because Strikers have less AC, fewer hps and, usually, don't have lock down marking abilities, there are a few extra rounds in the middle where the enemies still seem really nasty and dangerous instead of having them locked down by fighters and waiting for the party to drain them of hps they are running rampant scaring the group.
Actually, Stalker0 at ENWorld had a great method for tailoring encounters to encourage speed. You can find it here . This thread has some really good stuff.
THIS
Quite easy. subtract 33% of all monsters hit points while adding +50% damage to their attacks (calculate average damage and add 50% of that to the original damage (example: 2d8+7=16 average damage. 50% of 16 is 8. New damage is 2d8+15.
We now run equal level fights in 15-20 minutes. This will of course depend on how fast your own players are, as well as the DM.
Actually, Stalker0 at ENWorld had a great method for tailoring encounters to encourage speed. You can find it here . This thread has some really good stuff.THIS
Awesome article, very helpful! My game has improved dramatically now that I have used some of his tips. Encounters are quick, but not too quick, and I use brutes, elites, and solos much more sparingly now, and at slightly lower levels than before.
Stalker0 at ENWorld had a great method for tailoring encounters to encourage speed. You can find it here . This thread has some really good stuff.
I wish I had read this a couple days ago. I've been spending my free time setting up a new adventure and I've put together some of the challenges. However, this advise is invaluable and unfortunately, I did something of the opposite of the advise for many of my encounters. I now have to revisit some of my encounters to incorporate these ideas.
Despite the extra work I now have, thank you for pointing out the thread.
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I'll tell you my tip. I can't print out power cards because I have a Mac and can't use the character builder. But I liked the idea, so I wrote up my own on index cards.
That way, not only do I have the powers written out in front of me, the experience of writing them out helps me learn the ins and outs of what they do.
It works for me, but I freely admit that if I could just print them out, I would ;)
I'll tell you my tip. I can't print out power cards because I have a Mac and can't use the character builder. But I liked the idea, so I wrote up my own on index cards.
That way, not only do I have the powers written out in front of me, the experience of writing them out helps me learn the ins and outs of what they do.
It works for me, but I freely admit that if I could just print them out, I would ;)
You could always use Boot Camp / VMParallells to run a Windows environment in addition to Mac OS X.
It's wierd, but I have been finding my combats to be pretty quick - in a 3.5 to 4 hour session we usually get 3 encounters done.
Some of it has to do with group makeup I'm pretty sure, I do tend to use a "pyramid" when building encounters - more minions and skirmishers, less brutes and soldiers - but I think that was mentioned already.
It could also be your party makeup - i'd be curious to know how many strikers you have versus defenders and leaders? It might just be a need as a DM to look over their power picks and recommend some tweeks.
Yep, having at least one good striker in the group makes a big difference. It's like all the PC's could be really defense focused, hard to hit, lots of temp hp, and so on, but with poor damage output, they are going to win eventually, but take a long time getting there - booooring! As the saying goes, the best form of defense is a good offense...
I've been DM from 6th to 13th level now, and the group's bugbear daggermaster (brute) rogue is now at the point where, with a little bit of luck, he can put out near to 100 hp of damage in a single round, which is enough to kill a single regulation creature, or bloody most others to the point where a couple of other PC's can finish it off. Sure, he can't do that every round, but he dishes out around 40-50 pretty much every round, give or take, and often a lot more, as he has focused on getting as many attacks in per round (minor action attacks, close blast attacks, re-roll chances, the warlord granting him a free attack), with crits on 18-20, so with great sneak attack damage, and incredible amounts of damage with criticals (which happen a lot due to his multiple attacks and re-roll chances), he's "damage incorporated". At 14th level, he's just picked up ranger multi-class for 2 rounds of 2d6 more damage - he just keeps layering on more and more damage with every new level, magic item, etc. That's exactly what a striker is supposed to do. Without a good striker, preferably two if there's at least 5 PC's, your combats are always going to take longer. The higher up in levels you go, the more pronounced this will become - at low levels a defender can dish damage close to a striker, and perhaps more reliably and at less risk due to being less fragile, at higher levels no-one can get close to the damage output of a well put together striker. The role distinctions become more pronounced at higher levels, at least that's my observation. So yeah, if your PC's are well balanced and decent examples of their roles, fights should not get slower as you gain levels - if anything, I've found plenty of fights go quicker now - a combo of the players getting better at design and game play, the increased capabilities of higher level PC's, and me designing fights that are challenging but not a grind.
Personally, I also reduce monsters hp too, and use more of them to balance it out (preferably more monsters that can dish out good damage, like skirmishers). For 4 PC's, I was using encounters designed for 5 players, but using 2/3 hp for each monster. That makes it easier to kill a monster, but keeps up the threat level, and it's really easy to do. For 5 PC's, I'm generally just taking one interesting creature (e.g. a skirmisher), and adding one or two more of them. Although really I'm converting a 3.5 campaign, so generally I'm designing for about 25% more xp per fight than the "standard", and of course 2/3 hp for all monsters. And I use different minions, but that's tangential really, it's just that none of us like the "1 hp minion" idea, especially for higher levels, so wen I do use minions they have 10-20 hp and variable damage, so they hit harder and need a solid hit to be killed in one shot. Anyway, the 2/3 hp and +25% xp rule seems to speed up fights a little bit, and certainly I think it helps make fights a bit more interesting as there's more focus on using your cool powers as generally fights take a couple of rounds less to resolve.
Oh, and lastly, as DM don't optimise your tactics all the time - if in doubt, take the risky option rather than the safe option which will likely slow down the battle. For example, don't be afraid to provoke opportunity attacks, ignore defenders marks, let them flank, and so on - let the players enjoy their attacks of opportunity, the fact their marks actually work, and so on - the PC's will then deal out more damage per round, and not get frustrated that they never got to use their cool abilities. Only especially smart and important monsters / NPCs should be treated with the same level of care that a player gives their PC - most monsters should use fairly simple tactics and ignore most of the "if I do this, something bad will happen" options. For example let the PC's track their marks, and just do what you think makes sense for the monster - for example, running off to get the squishy-looking guy in robes instead of going toe to toe with the guy(s) in heavy armour with big sharp weapons...
I find that if I run an encounter with about 3-4 monsters around the party level and a handful of minions that they can easily get through it in 30-45 minutes.
However bigger battles take longer. Last game session they helped defend a village from an orc raid in a mass battle siege. It consisted of what was equivalent to probably 3 encounters and took about an 1 hour and 20 minutes to run. I haven't had fights go much more than that.