Encounter Building

After running through several different encounters with several different PC's since 4E first came out, I began to notice a trend that I found kind of disturbing; the PC's would go through a few encounters, spend all of their daily powers within that timeframe, and then take an extended rest. To make matters worse, they would try to get away with multiple ER's in a single day. Worse than that, and this is the truly disturbing part, they would all still have around half or more of their Healing Surges remaining.

Some of this can be attributed to the players due to low die rolls and poor tactical decisions, but really this is mostly the DM's fault. 4E's combat system runs like no other that I'm aware of, and it certainly doesn't run like previous editions of D&D. Also, encounter design was totally different and standard encounters (1 monster per PC of same level) seemed too easy, even for low level PC's. Players would get through them almost too quickly without having to expend resources. Next logical step? Make the encounters harder. When we first toyed with that idea, we learned two things:

1. Just because a standard 4th level encounter for 5 PC's is worth 875xp doesn't mean you can just throw in a Gray Slaad (level 13, xp 800) and a bunch of 1st level minions and call it a day. Sure, the minions are nothing; but the slaad is nigh-unhittable by 4th level PC's.
2. Solo monsters of standard or higher level, when used singularly, do not make an appropriate encounter. The PC's burn all their daily powers and will usually die before losing all their healing surges (whether they ultimate get past the encounter or not). Solo's of lower encounter level and mixed with other monsters do make good encounters.

Not even going to extremes such as the 13th level skirmisher mentioned above, even using slightly higher level monsters was still having the same effects; Daily Powers would get spent, but PC's would either die or be near death once its over and still have a bunch of surges but want to take that ER anyway. The answer became blatantly obvious.

Easier encounters, but more of them was the key! The process of moving through easier encounters would stretch out the party's healing surges because they were taking more short rests and not losing their daily powers, but still getting hit enough to require some healing when all was said and done. Of course, you can't just have all lower level monsters either or then it isn't a challenge, its a given. Throw some tougher guys into your easier encounters once in awhile to make it more challenging. A tougher monster is harder to hit and has more hp, queing the pally to use his 4[w] damage daily power when he'd otherwise have no reason too. Liberal use of minions is good too for challenging encounters, and it forces your controllers to use their big area spells to extinguish several of them at a time.

So try using lower level monsters, lots of minions, and the occassional tough guy to present your players with challenging encounters that require the use of the majority of their resources. They'll be having fun because they'll be kicking butt and loving it, despite the fact that they're using up their surges and daily powers. Also, to make encounters even more fun and challenging, DMG2 has a lot of really cool things to say on that subject. Who says there's no roleplaying in 4E? I don't want to make this an explicit blog so I'll refrain from answering that.