TOPIC: Scaling Combat Encounters Difficulty with Minions

valetutto wrote: I truly don't know why some folks hate 4th ed with a passion, but that is another debate and I don't want to derail your thread but my take on the Minion concept was this. It was a good idea as presented but they rushed it. The concept was it needed a dedicated attack to take it down, the practice was that AOE slaughtered them all. I found giving them all 10 hitpoints usually did the trick so that it took a couple AoE attacks to deal with them. Spacing with DnD can help avoid AoE attacks but Spacing in TD is awkward.

The flaw with the idea of having melee get engaged more than ranged is that it will inflate the value of ranged builds. Look at what happened with retribution damage. Retribution was a way to "punish" melee for charging in. They complained about the balance, then we made tokens to avoid the damage then we stopped using it entirely.
Bringing back retribution damage might help create some token choices and make it more relevant.


My take on this is a slightly different one I think. I don't necessarily think the monsters need a rescaling. Maybe an additional 4th difficulty level like Grind did for a mega challenge but really what the monsters need is more interest. Currently all we really care about is sliding the high numbers and cranking out damage. What if the hit location mattered more. Yes it makes the monster harder to DM because it has more rules but maybe we can make the hit location special "effect" easy. We've done this type of thing a bit historically, think back to all those encounters where you had to slid on a special spot, what if they all had some special spot that engendered some effect, even if it was a simple Easter egg like response.

+1. Like the idea of hit location mattering more.

valetutto wrote: I truly don't know why some folks hate 4th ed with a passion,

It felt like they tried to turn WoW into tabletop, but without a computer to manage cool down. And, every class was the same, with just a different class name, and different flavor text on their spells.

My take on this is a slightly different one I think. I don't necessarily think the monsters need a rescaling. Maybe an additional 4th difficulty level like Grind did for a mega challenge

Sure.

but really what the monsters need is more interest...

If used sparingly, I agree. From a metagame perspective, volunteers are scarce. DMs are scarcer. Experienced combat DMs, the rarest of all. Making every combat more complicated will boomerang, because some DMs will falter and parties will have a poorer experience. When we start turning away great combat DMs because we are drowning in awesome ones, then we can make all of the monsters as complex as we like.

(Not a slam on volunteers. It's a matter of training and experience, not skill or motivation.)

Brad Mortensen wrote:

valetutto wrote: I truly don't know why some folks hate 4th ed with a passion,

It felt like they tried to turn WoW into tabletop, but without a computer to manage cool down. And, every class was the same, with just a different class name, and different flavor text on their spells.

Side note: I felt the 4th ed mechanics actually worked great in the co-op boardgames they based on it (Castle Ravenloft, Wrath of Ashardalon, and Legend of Drizzt). If people haven't played those and are interested, I could bring one or two to TDC.

Brad Mortensen wrote:

but really what the monsters need is more interest...

If used sparingly, I agree. From a metagame perspective, volunteers are scarce. DMs are scarcer. Experienced combat DMs, the rarest of all. Making every combat more complicated will boomerang, because some DMs will falter and parties will have a poorer experience. When we start turning away great combat DMs because we are drowning in awesome ones, then we can make all of the monsters as complex as we like.

(Not a slam on volunteers. It's a matter of training and experience, not skill or motivation.)

Agreed. I've seen some great DMs and some that struggled to keep up with the pace as it is. From my understanding, the later rooms are usually the more experienced DMs, so you can experiment a bit more in those. But even then, adding complexity is likely to make the experience more hit-or-miss.