If you’ve been reading other Sly Flourish articles, you might have seen a common thread – challenging players. In my experience, as D&D 4e PCs get up into the paragon tier and above, it becomes harder and harder to offer them a real challenge. The game just feels a lot more deadly at lower levels than it does at higher ones.
Continuing with this theme, we’re going to look at ten quick ways to keep the challenge high for your powerful party of player characters. Let us begin.
1. Run Them Through Five Battles Before Extended Rests
It is a common mistake to let players rest too often. Typical 4e encounters, however, don’t scale well when players only face two or three battles between rests. Always try to find a way to keep the party battling forward without taking an extended rest. Being limited on daily powers and limited on healing surges make things a lot more dire during those end-game boss fights.
2. Use Terrain
A lot of folks talk about this as a way to keep challenge high. When designing any encounter, always consider what terrain effects you can add to make the battle interesting. This can also give an advantage to your monsters if your PCs are particularly powerful. Lava pits in dragon lairs, spike traps in bandit lairs, even pools of necrotic energy in an undead crypt can add a fair bit of challenge and excitement.
3. Use Skill Challenges to Drain Resources
Skill challenges can also help you limit the resources of your players. A failed skill challenge might impose a disease, steal some healing surges, or even suck the magic out of their weapons (removing their ability to use item powers for a battle). Think about ways to use skill challenges to drain your party’s resources to keep the challenge high – but don’t forget that the challenge should make sense and still be fun to play.
4. Carefully Compose the Monster Party
Always consider the mix of your monster types when designing an encounter. A proper mix of brutes, skirmishers, and controllers can bring a good challenge to your PCs. Remember that, pound for pound and exp point per exp point, normal creatures often bring a greater challenge than elites and solos.
5. Use Minions Effectively
Minions can either be speedbumps, fodder, or sometimes a powerful annoyance. Rarely can they impose real danger. Consider carefully how minions will play in your encounters. Send them in waves of fewer numbers and keep them separated to avoid blasts and bursts.
6. Use Surprise Rounds (sparingly)
Every so often, consider setting up a surprise round. Perhaps your PCs are accosted by assassins in the perfect ambush. A surprise round can really play havoc with a well positioned party. Use this sparingly, however, and ensure the surprise makes sense for the situation.
7. Mix Up Encounter Types and Purposes
Not every battle needs to be a razor’s edge challenge. Over half of your battles should be quick skirmishes that let your players feel powerful while also taking some of their resources to beat them. Mix and match battles against six to nine normal opponents with some elite battles and one or two solo battles (always with extra backup – solos aren’t really solos).
8. Tune Battles on Player Skill
Always keep your PCs and player’s strengths in mind when designing a battle. You can use this both to challenge your PCs by exploiting their weak spots as well as giving them a chance to shine by playing to the strength of the PC. Always look to give them a challenge as well as let them show off their stuff.
9. Use House Rules
Keep a list of good house rules handy such as adding +1W when creatures become bloodied, adding +1/2 level to damage and using “tough minions” that get one free “knocked prone” instead of dying on the first hit. Use these sparingly but keep them handy when you need to make a battle more challenging.
10. Cheat
Always remember rule 0 – keep it fun. If that means adding a bit more hitpoints to the monster to keep it alive another round or fudging a d20 die roll to give the monster a chance to show off its stuff, go ahead. Just don’t do it too often or there becomes little purpose in rolling the dice in the first place.
Keeping the challenge high in a higher level D&D game can be tough. Hopefully these give you some ideas to keep the challenge high in your own game.
Excellent suggestions Mike!
Really great selection of helpful ideas. I’m most partial to #2, myself, as skill challenges that I’ve recently been involved in imposed little to no penalty upon failure. Great post.
cheating sux.
either make a good / powerful encounter in advance, or – why not – grant the players victory. next time theyll suffer more.
cheating is the beginning of the end. even if players never realized. if i knew my dm was cheating, trust was gone..
@ Oh Man: Even the DMG suggests fudging at times. It’s not cheating, it’s creative encounter management. Every good DM does it both in favor of their monsters AND in favor of their players. Would you rather have encounters that you bulldoze through every single time or a DM that fudges the rolls to give you a challenge? Or perhaps you’d rather have your beloved character perma-dead rather than a DM who wisely fudges the damage roll to keep your negative hitpoints above your bloodied level. Dice are capricious and vicious and a good DM knows when slap them aside in favor maintaining the fun.
This is an older article but I felt like responding to the above, incase anyoNe like me is going through the archive.
DM cheating is almost necessary to keep the cinematic epic feel of the game alive.
Often times this is like Mike suggests, keeping a monster alive one more round so it can show off it’s teeth, or declaring the monster missed on the blow that would down the final standing character allowing the party one more dice roll to win the day. Almost 99% of the time this choice does NOT include putting a character in mortal danger. I don’t give a monster more hp so it has a chance to kill a PC. I give it more ho because it just went down in 2 rounds, and it’s first round it was dazed and weakened. So cinematically I’ll give it a push of nastiness so that the party “sees” that these horrible monsters do have teeth and will hopefully have a fear response the next time they see them instead of thinking “pssshhh these things never even hit us last time”.
Anyway, my 2 cents.