Making epic combat interesting and challenging but not complicated

Question

I'm running up on the tail end of a year-and-a-half 4e campaign, and epic levels are exhausting to GM. Everyone has more weird powers than you can shake a dragon at, and that includes the NPCs --particularly elites and solos.

There's gotta be a way to make an encounter interesting and challenging at epic levels without using five different monsters with 30 different powers to track and recharge, terrain effects that require an additional set of active monitoring, and a liberal amount of "just say no" mechanics to squelch the party's abilities that would render the fight trivial.

How can I simplify epic combat without trivializing it or making it boring? This is about making it actually less complicated to run, not about asking the players to take up some of the mechanical load; we're doing that already.

Things I've tried that help a little:

• Level 1 Equivalent damage to make fights shorter but still brutal (this reduces complication because we don't need so many powers to keep long fights interesting).

• NPC actions that trigger at the start or end of each enemy's turn (reduces the need for Weird Immediate Reactions whose triggers must be tracked).

• Giving a boss a handful of basic attack powers and a standard-action utility power that grants the NPC multiple basic attacks (replaces unusual multi-attack powers with brand-new effects).

• Removing dice-based recharge mechanics entirely.

• Making a monster change its power set entirely at bloodied, almost as if it were a new monster (adds more powers to a fight, but not adding to the number of powers I have to keep track of at any given time).

• Boss powers that let them slough an effect onto an ally (rather than removing or ignoring effects entirely or making an interminable number of saves).

Answer 1

One thing my last DM did that helped at high levels (also low levels, but especially high) was to split solos into, effectively, three monsters. So a dragon might become the head, the body, and the tail; while a demon might be head, body, and arms, depending on the powers. He would divide the solo's actions up and give each piece hitpoints so that two of the pieces were equivalent to an elite monster and the third was equivalent to a standard monster. Each piece gets its own initiative and set of standard/move/minor actions, and players target pieces separately (so, for example, an assassin could shroud the head, but wouldn't get shroud damage if he then attacked the body).

You would want to adjust the specific mechanics for your own game - we tended to address issues like whether "slowed" affects one piece or the whole creature on the spot and depending on how the creature was split up - but if your aim is to reduce complexity, it would be worth figuring out satisfactory answers to common effects up front. Then once play starts you already know the answer.

It ends up being significantly simpler for the DM since you have the strength and threat of three monsters, but the abilities and powers of only one to keep track of. It also requires fewer additional monsters/terrain/whatever to build out the encounter, again reducing the complexity of any given combat. You also get the advantage that a combat against a solo becomes much more interesting, because you've got three parts of the monster moving and acting independently (preventing the solo from being pinned down and focus-fired), which again increases the fun without increasing complexity.

Answer 2

Some other good suggestions here. I hate to pimp my own work but I specifically wrote "Running Epic Tier D&D Games" to address a lot of the questions and ideas you have:

http://slyflourish.com/epic/

It's hard to keep battles going fast. You might experiment with effects that limit player choices. For example, maybe some sort of psychic front prevents them from using anything but at-will powers for a shorter battle. Maybe some strange temporal rift removes all minor actions.

I found that environmental effects and associated skill challenges worked well to keep the threat high in a battle without increasing a lot of time. When in doubt, add a 50 damage aura =)

In March, I have an article coming out on D&D Insider outlining the elemental prince Cryonax. I believe it might be the most dangerous officially-published 4e monster ever created. It uses a lot of the ideas you mention including limiting status effects, very high damage output, a big dangerous aura, and other interesting effects.

Good luck!

Answer 3

Mike Shea at slyflourish.com has a number of recommendations that can be see in his article on Orcus: http://slyflourish.com/pimp_my_orcus.html, and also in other articles on his site

Tools that I particularly like, and examples from the linked article, are:

• Damage auras (and automatic damage environmental effects)
• Echoing damage back at players

Aura of Death; Aura 20

Enemies that enter or start their turns in the aura take 20 necrotic damage (40 necrotic damage while Orcus is bloodied).

Aura of Imix

While active, any time Orcus takes damage from an attack, the attacker takes 30 fire damage. This damage penetrates 10 fire resistance.

I'm not as big a fan of damage resistance and healing as those are liable to make the fight drag longer than I'd like, but he also uses those to good effect.

Answer 4

I am a fan of stringing combats together with only short rests in-between. I am also a fan of staggering enemies entering the battlefields. So you can start out with 4 enemies and then a wave of minions and then a group of 3 ranged guys thereafter, etc. The stuff will die quick but it mixes it up and burns through healing surges...

Answer 5

My simple and very effective fix to all monsters damage is this:

1. Multiply the monster's damaga dice by tier.

   Meaning a Heroic monster's damage dice stay the same, at Paragon they are doubled, and at Epic they are tripled. Or you can add one damage die every five levels after first for quicker scaling, this is my preferred option. And…

2. Add half the monster's level to the damage modifier.

Doing this makes sure the players stay on the edge if their seats the whole encounter, with a character being knocked unconscious at least every other encounter (they will be fine with a good leader). This method may or may not work for your group, it does mine because they all have a high dose of Power Gamer in them (the Fighter (Slayer) killing the Elite in one turn before it can even act, sound familiar?).

Also I still add the bonuses to Elites' and Solos' defenses, and instead of multiplying a solo's hit points by 4 I multiply them by the number of characters in the party, ignoring the changes and advice from the DMG2. That way the boss has the hit points to match the party's damage (more or less, it still has less hit points than the same number of standard monsters it is supposed to be worth).

I often times on top of these boosts give Solos another standard action or even a second turn in the initiative. You need to make sure your solo is putting out enough damage for how many monsters it is worth, for an example with a solo worth five monsters: lets say the boss is level 4, five standard fourth level monsters deal about 13 (2d6+6) damage apiece (using the chart from the link posted by BESW), so your solo monster should be able to deal about 65 damage per round, spread out in at least five different attacks using its standard (multiattack maybe), move (yes there are move actions that deal damage), minor, immediate, and free actions (not counting action points).

And do not forget, if you have to bend or even break the rules (as in my Solos that are worth six monsters, as I have a party of six, or the Orog Champion jumping down thirty feet without taking damage or falling prone, in Siege of Bordrin's Watch — that one really freaked the players out) to make your game enjoyable, by all means do so. As James Wyatt (I think it was) said: the rules in the books are only guidelines. You must figure what is fun for and works for your own group. Do not fall into the trap of thinking you must follow the rules to the letter (as I did at first). Being a good Dungeon Master comes with time, patience, experience, and lots of mistakes (you often learn the hard way).