Quote from: Doom;379175Good, so you see the issue, then. it's so bad you can't even try.

No, but you asked "Can you give me an example of a level 21 encounter that wouldn't threaten a level 1 party, even using monsters 5 or more levels above the party members?"

I don't think such an example exists. All level 21 encounters will threaten  level 1 parties.

QuoteOn the other hand, when it comes to minions, "Probably easily" is the best you can hope for, and any party that even uses remotely crude combat tactics will have no difficulty dispatching the cutters, and then only if it's a party of extremely poorly built characters.

In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of any party that would have trouble with such a minimal encounter. Can you propose such a party, such a scenario, that would work? Everything I think of makes this, like any high-minion encounter, trivial, due to minions being broken.

And so, indeed, we've demonstrated that there is something very wrong with minions.

I'm reasonably certain I could take many parties apart with a large group of minions. I ran a "36 Skeletons" encounter two weeks ago. (April 15th by my recently impugned wiki!)

Thats about 900XP, or equal to a level 3 encounter. If it weren't for a pair of fireburst bolts, the party would have been mobbed and destroyed within 3 rounds. I was able to surround near every character quickly, and then it was 4-6 encounters a round, many of them with flanking, doing 4 damage each, and more when they attempted to break out of the bonepile. This encounter ended with 2 out of 6 characters unconscious.

I still think minions are great! My crazy misconceptions are probably just going to keep on being successful, I guess.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;379146I wouldn't try and prove such a thing. I could however, (probably) easily challenge a 5-member level 1 party with 20 goblin cutters. Those are level 1 minions.

In one game I played in, the DM used 16 minions for an encounter.  It took forever to kill them all, especially since the player party didn't have a controller.  It basically resembled "death by a thousand cuts".

Quote from: jibbajibba;379177Typically what numbers would be talking about? My guess would be on a party of 5 PCs we would be looking at 3 soldiers, 4 skirmisher minions and a controller. I will just go with some numbers. My first glance is that the damage does seem to be low compared to the hits and if the monster and pc hits are clsoe I can see it taking a lot of hits at 1d8 +6 (11 average damage) to deal 150 damage although I am sure that thsi is s tad more complex

Nope, an average party is 1 monster of equal level per each PC. You can mess with these numbers a bit, because the real benchmark is the XP. But that's the standard. An elite is equal to two monsters, a solo is equal to 5 monsters, and 4 minions=1 monster.

So if I've shown 3 level 15 monsters here, it would be a typical encounter for 3 level 15 player characters.

Quote from: ggroy;379180In one game I played in, the DM used 16 minions for an encounter.  It took forever to kill them all, especially since the player party didn't have a controller.  It basically resembled "death by a thousand cuts".

It is death by a thousand cuts. The minions die quickly, but there are a lot of them, and all they have to do is close and flank, and they are suddenly absorbing a ton of hit points. Or rather, they are taking them away from the PCs.

If you mix minions in with other monsters, players are torn whether or not to "waste" an attack just killing a minion (no matter how much damage you do, you only have to hit it once..) or suffering the mob effect. In the long run, I feel like the mob effect is worth shutting down as early as possible.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;379182Nope, an average party is 1 monster of equal level per each PC. You can mess with these numbers a bit, because the real benchmark is the XP. But that's the standard. An elite is equal to two monsters, a solo is equal to 5 monsters, and 4 minions=1 monster.

So if I've shown 3 level 15 monsters here, it would be a typical encounter for 3 level 15 player characters.

That's why I said for 5 PCs we would have 3 soldiers 4 minions and a controller on the basis that minions are 4 for 1

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;379183If you mix minions in with other monsters, players are torn whether or not to "waste" an attack just killing a minion (no matter how much damage you do, you only have to hit it once..)

The extra damage the strikers did, was effectively a waste.  Marks, etc ... were largely useless.

At first when I DM'd my own 4E game, I didn't bother using minions at first.  But apparently my players liked the famous trope of cutting through a bunch of kobolds or goblins.  The most minions I bothered to use was eight, where the players just cut into them while the wizard hit some of them with ranged area attacks.

Quote from: ggroy;379187The extra damage the strikers did, was effectively a waste.  Marks, etc ... were largely useless.

At first when I DM'd my own 4E game, I didn't bother using minions at first.  But apparently my players liked the famous trope of cutting through a bunch of kobolds or goblins.  The most minions I bothered to use was eight, where the players just cut into them while the wizard hit some of them with ranged area attacks.

Yeah; I like minions for precisely that effect. More recent monster design layers some sort of handy effect on minions. I'm running a game tomorrow where the minions have this power:

   Harrier
If a hyena is adjacent to an enemy, all other creatures have combat
advantage against that enemy when making melee attacks.

While all three of the other monster types are getting bonus damage when they have combat advantage. I think that's a significant improvement over bland minions that just do damage.

In general, I assume that anyone who just looks at raw damage output from a level 15 monster is missing the point. 8 damage on average is wrong to start with -- according to the table in the DMG, standard damage for a level 15 monster is 2d8+6, or 15 points of damage. But damage-focused monsters will be running 3d6+6 on their at-will attacks, and for a damaged-focused monster's one-shot attack, they're doing 4d10+6.

And that's before you layer in conditions, auras, stuff like that.

Quote from: jibbajibba;379186That's why I said for 5 PCs we would have 3 soldiers 4 minions and a controller on the basis that minions are 4 for 1

I misread you, my apologies!

Quote from: jibbajibba;379170So Doom I am actually interested in the maths (i know uber geekdom)

In a 2 hour combat how many rounds would there be on either side ?

This will take a long answer, and I don't know if I want to sit down and work it all through theoretically. Apologies if I paint broad strokes.

If you have a pointless, completely non-challenging fight (i.e., where nobody loses more than a single surge, if that much), it can end in under an hour, easily.

So, most encounters are "level + n" in some sense, but this has more to do with the fact that the maths are completely messed up at the higher levels. Many GMs consider "level +3" or thereabouts to be the 'fair' 'level' encounter (with adding damage).

I'm just going to do a basic 'level' fight, which is really so trivial it shouldn't take place at 15th level.

Much as Dungeons and Dragons rather collapses in the 'teens, so too does 4e unless the GM puts some effort into it (hey, it's a similarity, at least, much as CR was meaningless past a few levels in D&D).

As a caveat, I'm talking about level 15 play, primarily. At low levels (say, 1 or 2), where the game was clearly playtested, things work out quite well, and cracks don't start appearing until level 5 or so.

QuoteTypically how many Hp does a monster at say 15th level have and how much damage does a typical PC deal in a round?

A typical level 15 monster has around 140 hit points, and deals around an expected 6 points of damage a round, RAW (by 'expected', I'm assuming the monter hits half the time, but these numbers are low enough that changing to 60% isn't going to matter much). I emphasize RAW because many GMs houserule the damage up, monsters simply don't do enough damage at this level.

A typical 15th level character has around 120 hit points (plus another 120, usually more, available through a wide and myriad array of healing effects, from healing surge, to regeneration to dwarven armor to self-healing powers to many temporary and healing effects sloshing off other players).

Expected damage from a 15th level character varies wildly. Overall expectation for hits are for 20 points, although this has a relatively huge standard deviation (20 points or so--a pacifist cleric expects to hit for 0, after all, and broken powers like Astral Seal, don't deal damage directly with a hit).

On the basis of this alone, "even" combats are supposed to last around 7 rounds. with the monsters completely incapable of even bloodying a character, unless that character actively seeks it, RAW.

A player can easily take 2.5 minutes for his turn. First, remove and/or resolve beginning of turn effects (ongoing damage, regeneration, numerous special powers) (10 seconds). A move takes 40 seconds--lots of interrupts at this level, including lots of deliberately triggered opportunity attacks. The minor action can take 30 seconds--especially if it's a leader (healing power, determine target, determine effect, change hit point totals). Then comes the standard action (60 seconds): determining the actual power, figuring out what it does, declaring the target, rolling the die, factoring in a wide variety of situational effects, determining the hit, determining the damage, putting down the special effect that nearly every power inflicts, resolving any generated special effects like healing or granting temporary hit points.

Then remove and resolve end of turn effects, including saves (10 seconds).

I emphasize, these are AVERAGES, and the standard deviation can be high. Just moving can take 5 minutes if particularly complicated, and missed attacks resolve quickly (sometimes 'rolling a 1' is a relief not to have to go through all the other calculations).

Yes, a turn can take less than 2 minutes, but it can easily take more than 5 minutes, especially if lots of opportunity attacks are involved or there's any discussion at all about what to do. At low level, you don't have NEARLY as many effects going off, speeding up combat dramatically.

Then the GM takes his turn; I try to be fast, but 2 minutes for 5 monsters is hardly out of the question.

So, 7 turns, 6 players at 2.5 minutes a turn, GM at 2 minutes a turn. 119 minutes (i.e., nearly 2 hours), and that's for a very easy fight that offers no challenge whatsoever to the players, a fight so simple that the GM should not bother even having it.

Now, if you want a challenging fight, you have to do *something*. Abyssal Maw correctly noted the game can't handle higher level monsters against lower level players, the increased hit points, combined with rising defenses, make that just a horrible idea. Most GMs add damage (1/2 level seems to be about right, although it makes all the damage 'same-y'), but more than that is necessary to have any real interesting situations come up.

Since you can't add higher level monsters, add same level monsters. Each such monster adds one more round to the combat. Two such monsters (and they're just clones of the monsters the players are already facing), you're now at a "level +2" encounter, still entirely trivial.

Now you're at a 2.5 hour combat, easy.

Want a challenging combat? Add a level +2 monster maybe. Daily powers mean such fights aren't that much longer, but, as shown above, a 2.5 hour combat is intrinsic to the design of 4e, at least at higher levels.

QuoteWe would also need to know the chance to hit and the PC average damage.

I assume 50%. Yes, sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower, but that's good enough for dozens upon dozens of rolls.

I hope this answers your question sufficiently.

Quote from: Abyssal Maw;379178I'm reasonably certain I could take many parties apart with a large group of minions. I ran a "36 Skeletons" encounter two weeks ago. (April 15th by my recently impugned wiki!)

Thats about 900XP, or equal to a level 3 encounter. If it weren't for a pair of fireburst bolts, the party would have been mobbed and destroyed within 3 rounds. I was able to surround near every character quickly, and then it was 4-6 encounters a round, many of them with flanking, doing 4 damage each, and more when they attempted to break out of the bonepile. This encounter ended with 2 out of 6 characters unconscious.

I still think minions are great! My crazy misconceptions are probably just going to keep on being successful, I guess.

And my players had no difficulty with 80 same-level minions backed up by 5 same-level monsters in a wide open area. I'm guessing your whole party somehow managed to build without any burst or area effect attacks, or even familiarity with something called a 'wall'. I'll just call that an anecdotal fluke that proves nothing, like I've indicated many a time now.

Considering how every class has area or multiple target effect powers, and simply lining up on a wall can prevent flanking (especially against skeletons that don't have any movement-inflicting attacks), that's some pretty uber bad play there. Big time.

Anyway, you're talking about level 1, where the game actually works for the most part, I'm talking about higher levels. Let's keep them goalposts in the same spot, eh?

I have found, that in 4e you always need to roll a 12 or better to do stuff. You get a +2 bonus if your class is supposed to be good at stuff, and another +2 for any advantage you gain.
This stays the same across levels, as does the damage done/hitpoint ratio. the number of useful powers is also fixed...

For the most part, yes, but players that really put effort into min-maxing, and don't fall into traps, they can get to 50% (as opposed to your 45%) well enough. My players are a mix of l33t dudes and typical players, like, I suspect, most groups are.

I'm tempted to sit down and show a dwarf fighter that falls into one trap of character design can lead to a ridiculously long fight against a level -1 encounter...maybe later.

Quote from: Doom;379193This will take a long answer, and I don't know if I want to sit down and work it all through theoretically. Apologies if I paint broad strokes.

If you have a pointless, completely non-challenging fight (i.e., where nobody loses more than a single surge, if that much), it can end in under an hour, easily.

So, most encounters are "level + n" in some sense, but this has more to do with the fact that the maths are completely messed up at the higher levels. Many GMs consider "level +3" or thereabouts to be the 'fair' 'level' encounter (with adding damage).

I'm just going to do a basic 'level' fight, which is really so trivial it shouldn't take place at 15th level.

Much as Dungeons and Dragons rather collapses in the 'teens, so too does 4e unless the GM puts some effort into it (hey, it's a similarity, at least, much as CR was meaningless past a few levels in D&D).

As a caveat, I'm talking about level 15 play, primarily. At low levels (say, 1 or 2), where the game was clearly playtested, things work out quite well, and cracks don't start appearing until level 5 or so.



A typical level 15 monster has around 140 hit points, and deals around an expected 6 points of damage a round, RAW (by 'expected', I'm assuming the monter hits half the time, but these numbers are low enough that changing to 60% isn't going to matter much). I emphasize RAW because many GMs houserule the damage up, monsters simply don't do enough damage at this level.

A typical 15th level character has around 120 hit points (plus another 120, usually more, available through a wide and myriad array of healing effects, from healing surge, to regeneration to dwarven armor to self-healing powers to many temporary and healing effects sloshing off other players).

Expected damage from a 15th level character varies wildly. Overall expectation for hits are for 20 points, although this has a relatively huge standard deviation (20 points or so--a pacifist cleric expects to hit for 0, after all, and broken powers like Astral Seal, don't deal damage directly with a hit).

On the basis of this alone, "even" combats are supposed to last around 7 rounds. with the monsters completely incapable of even bloodying a character, unless that character actively seeks it, RAW.

A player can easily take 2.5 minutes for his turn. First, remove and/or resolve beginning of turn effects (ongoing damage, regeneration, numerous special powers) (10 seconds). A move takes 40 seconds--lots of interrupts at this level, including lots of deliberately triggered opportunity attacks. The minor action can take 30 seconds--especially if it's a leader (healing power, determine target, determine effect, change hit point totals). Then comes the standard action (60 seconds): determining the actual power, figuring out what it does, declaring the target, rolling the die, factoring in a wide variety of situational effects, determining the hit, determining the damage, putting down the special effect that nearly every power inflicts, resolving any generated special effects like healing or granting temporary hit points.

Then remove and resolve end of turn effects, including saves (10 seconds).

I emphasize, these are AVERAGES, and the standard deviation can be high. Just moving can take 5 minutes if particularly complicated, and missed attacks resolve quickly (sometimes 'rolling a 1' is a relief not to have to go through all the other calculations).

Yes, a turn can take less than 2 minutes, but it can easily take more than 5 minutes, especially if lots of opportunity attacks are involved or there's any discussion at all about what to do. At low level, you don't have NEARLY as many effects going off, speeding up combat dramatically.

Then the GM takes his turn; I try to be fast, but 2 minutes for 5 monsters is hardly out of the question.

So, 7 turns, 6 players at 2.5 minutes a turn, GM at 2 minutes a turn. 119 minutes (i.e., nearly 2 hours), and that's for a very easy fight that offers no challenge whatsoever to the players, a fight so simple that the GM should not bother even having it.

Now, if you want a challenging fight, you have to do *something*. Abyssal Maw correctly noted the game can't handle higher level monsters against lower level players, the increased hit points, combined with rising defenses, make that just a horrible idea. Most GMs add damage (1/2 level seems to be about right, although it makes all the damage 'same-y'), but more than that is necessary to have any real interesting situations come up.

Since you can't add higher level monsters, add same level monsters. Each such monster adds one more round to the combat. Two such monsters (and they're just clones of the monsters the players are already facing), you're now at a "level +2" encounter, still entirely trivial.

Now you're at a 2.5 hour combat, easy.

Want a challenging combat? Add a level +2 monster maybe. Daily powers mean such fights aren't that much longer, but, as shown above, a 2.5 hour combat is intrinsic to the design of 4e, at least at higher levels.





I assume 50%. Yes, sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower, but that's good enough for dozens upon dozens of rolls.

I hope this answers your question sufficiently.

Thanks mate, those numbers don't look outrageous to me maybe there is really overlap in the PC turns and most players will be planning their move concurrently so I suspect that you could have been able to trim that down to a minute action per PC but that would still mean an 8 minute round so a 1 hour combat  but as you say this is an all but trivial combat and i can easily see how you can add 3 or 4 rounds and increase he time to act by 50% but I will do some sums.....

With thoser numbers I am very supriesed that any 4e combat would take 15 mins or less. It would take 5 mins just to set up the table and the minis.

Quote from: Doom;379193A typical level 15 monster has around 140 hit points, and deals around an expected 6 points of damage a round, RAW (by 'expected', I'm assuming the monter hits half the time, but these numbers are low enough that changing to 60% isn't going to matter much). I emphasize RAW because many GMs houserule the damage up, monsters simply don't do enough damage at this level.

This is wrong, as already noted. It would be closer to correct if you assumed that all monsters simply used basic at-will attacks with no effects. But that's a boring game.

Also: AC in plate at level 15 is 17 (base) plus 10 (plate) plus 3; AC 30. A level 15 soldier's bonus to hit AC is +22. So he's hitting 65% of the time against plate, which is a bit more often than Doom projects. My sorcerer will be sitting at 26 or 27 AC when he hits level 15, depending. The equal level soldier will hit my PC 80% of the time.

QuoteA typical 15th level character has around 120 hit points (plus another 120, usually more, available through a wide and myriad array of healing effects, from healing surge, to regeneration to dwarven armor to self-healing powers to many temporary and healing effects sloshing off other players).

My sorcerer has 83 hit points at level 13 and will have 93 at level 15. My fighter should be up to... 120 or so? But that's a Constitution-oriented character filling the defender role. "Typical" is inaccurate.

QuoteExpected damage from a 15th level character varies wildly. Overall expectation for hits are for 20 points, although this has a relatively huge standard deviation (20 points or so--a pacifist cleric expects to hit for 0, after all, and broken powers like Astral Seal, don't deal damage directly with a hit).

Interesting thought.

QuoteOn the basis of this alone, "even" combats are supposed to last around 7 rounds. with the monsters completely incapable of even bloodying a character, unless that character actively seeks it, RAW.

Note that this math assumes that nobody has any out of turn powers that cause damage to the monsters. This is very likely to be wrong, given that any defender is going to have something. Since you explicitly mentioned deliberately triggered opportunity attacks, you should be aware that these exist. It also assumes that nobody's using any encounters or dailies during the fight.

The rest of your numbers aren't awful. I note that you blithely started thinking about status effects and the like when calculating time, although you ignored them when discussing damage. Funny, that. But your basic idea of how many rounds it takes to finish a fight is so weird that it renders your overall calculations problematic.

Oh, and that's assuming you ignore the by-the-book advice about ending combats early when it's obvious which side is going to win.

So,....they won't do a public game for charity?

Oh Well.

 Some got the dice, some don't.


- Ed C.