Recently I hosted a one day seasonal D&D campaign. We used D&D 4.0. I have many things about 4.0 that I like and a good deal that I criticize. However, it remains the sytem which I am most familiar with. In this case, I was introducing a number of people to the game for the first time.
It was remarkably exciting. The turn-out was 100%. Predictably, this fact sent me into a maelstrom of ambivalence. I felt surprised, excited, honored, and remarkably daunted. We had a total of 8 players. Previously, I had never DM-ed parties more than 5.
Since there were so many people who had never played (4 out of the 8), I realized that I needed to keep things fairly simple. My trusty and stalwart gf assisted me greatly by creating twice as many stock level 3 characters as there were players. Her designs included simple feats that would automatically be calculated into scores. Since I was creating a pseudo-historical 16th century European setting, she used only Humans as the base race. She selected a mix of simple and complex classes, since the party itself was of varied familiarity with D&D and RPGs in general.
I think that I am really finding my DM style: what is important to me, how I feel most comfortable, what I feel I can fudge, what I feel ought to be fudged. This sense is coming through consistently testing my own boundaries and methodologies of preparing and running games. I have been trying in every campaign I run (of which there have been 4) to find refinements to D&D 4.0 rules, define personal and house rules that improve upon official rules, and test them out both on myself and on players.
In this past campaign I was looking to make a couple of refinements whose success I feel are important in general if I am to continue using D&D 4.0 and would be crucial in keeping new players engaged. As a ruleset, 4.0 is very robust. Its primary failure--and this is subjective--is the overwrought combat rules which slow down the playtime far too greatly. It is somewhat sobering when one realizes that a combat that theoretically only last 45 seconds in game time can take 35 minutes or more to resolve in reality.
I had a number of strategies for addressing this, a couple of which included a tacit understanding that there is no way to fully circumvent the combat log and it must therefore be embraced and planned for: 1) use multi-hit minions in the place of some normal monsters; 2) give ample oppotunity for subdual; 3) embrace the idea of lengthy combat and create situations in which the party gets involved in a very minor encounter in which they are the overwhelmong power, but which can escalate very quickly if the players are not careful; 4) embrace the inevitability of lengthy combat, particularly in boss fights, and create dynamic, multi-phased boss fights that require observation and adaptation.
I feel like these were all in some part effective, though I was not able to fully explore the last of them, since the pace of the day was fairly forced. I would like to dissect each a little bit.
1) The idea of multi-hit minions is not by any means my own. I came upon it in one of The Chatty DMs posts. He proposed a multistage minion, when after 1 hit, the minions nature changes. This is an interesting idea. I tried this once before, but in a very conservative way. I had frost elves whose ice shields shattered after one hit lowering their AC and raising their attack bonus (ostensibly because they became more reckless). This seems like a good model of minion.
In the Halloween campaign I did something different and slightly simpler. I wanted fairly bland drones. I made them 4 hit minions. I did this for a number of reasons. I wanted to mob the party. I wanted the mob creatures to go down fairly quickly, but but not too quickly. I also wanted to not have to keep track of HP for the mob creatures. My basic play concept was to take HP, itself an abstraction, and abstract it further. I assumed that each mob minion had 60 hit points. Any hit would count as a strike against a minion's alottment of 4 hits. So anyy hit was worth 15 points regardless of damage roll. In the case of a remarkably high damage roll, two or three strike could be applied, taking the damage and rounding it up to the nearest multiple of 15. In other words a damage roll of 22 would count as two strikes against the mob minion, a damage roll of 31 would count as 3, etc.
This worked quite well for making large numbers of mobs who are dispatched fairly easily but without quite as much dispatch (pardon the pun) as a normal minion. In smaller fights I could see combining this model with that of Chatty, making for more interesting fights. But in a huge mob fight, less complexity and therefore less bookkeeping is key.
2) Keeping subdual as a possibility is more of a mindset than anything else. I tried to set the tone early by having one group of guards asleep, so that the party could try to deal with them before they even woke up. Having set that tone, it was not surprising that they were able to trick and subdue a mini-boss and avoid a pitched battle with a large number of mob-minions.
These first two strategies helped to create combats which were still overblown and felt dangerous without making them knock-down drag-out tests of stamina and patience. These were both predicated upon avoiding lengthy combat. The final two strategies were looking not to deny the inherently lengthy combat of 4.0, but to accept it and find ways to make it meaningful and mitigate its length, to make a long combat feel right and to make it feel less long.
3) I was looking to make the lengthy combat of 4.0 more meaningful to the players, to make it actively add to the suspense of the story and drive the players forward, rather than merely act as a stopping point, the battle retarding the pace of the story. They should be semi-colons, not periods. I feel that the conclusion of any good fight should include some sort of plot point, so that regardless of any financial/gear gain, the party has more useful information by the end of it, or something that will later be helpful to them. And there should be some form of suspense that any fight participates in. It is not enought in my mind to simply say that in order to get across this room and to the next part of the story, the party must fight the baddies in the room. There hould be a reason that the party thinks that they ought to and want to fight the things, again beyond personal gain.
One way in which I tried to implement this was by giving the party a pretty clear goal. They wanted to get out of the dungeon and to the top of the tower where they hoped to punish a mad cleric who had userped the throne of one of the PCs. The fact that it was a one day campaign made the players and thus the characters feel driven to achieve this with as few embroilments as possible. I then designed small, easy combats that could quickly escalate if they were not handled well. For example, as the party was climbing a set of stairs I had them encounter a pair of monks walking down a corridor. The party attempted a stealth check which they failed. When the monks saw the party on the landing, they bolted in the other direction, directly towards a large pair of doors that was two moves away. The party did not know, but could well guess that the room the monks were making for was filled with more and tougher monks. I felt that this made the subsequent combat more suspenseful and meaningful. The party was able to catch the monks before they alerted their brothers and, in the process of hiding the monks in an unoccupied storeroom, the party found mysterious cast-bronze and copper apparatus.
Needless to say, there was little tangible reward for the encounter, but the storeroom contents gave the necessary plot points to drive on the story. Had the party failed to catch the monks, there would have been a much larger, longer battle. On the other hand, the party would have recieved some gear and have gotten perhaps slightly more information regarding the apparatus they found.
4) Un/fortunately, the idea of multi-phased boss fights was not really tested fully. The fact that I did not get to evaluate the success of one of the boss fights was unfortunate, but I was fairly pleased with the general cause behind this result: the players very cleverly navigated the dungeon, avoiding some major pitfalls and mini-bosses and they were remarkably savvy about the bosses they did meet. They totally subdued one boss before a fight broke out through role-play alone. It is always a good thing, I think, if one's grand GM plots are foiled by good roleplay. It means the players are doing something right. The final boss fight with the main boss I had to curtail, for two reasons: firstly, it was getting late and players needed to leave, and secondly, the players were taking the boss down much more quickly than I thought they would. This clearly shows that my boss was not designed as well as he ought to have been.
All in all, the whole session was really fun, and from a DM's (my) point of few productive and instructive.
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