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The Stress of Combat
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There’s nothing wrong with easy encounters; let’s make that part clear right now. Easy encounters are necessary at times for two main reasons; pacing, and thwarting what I call ‘battle exhaustion’. We’ve all had it, that moment where you get done with a long, difficult, epic battle, and you’re relieved, and then what do you find? Yet Another Long Combat. Difficult combats are mentally taxing, with the anxiety of whether you’ll live or die ultimately giving way to the point where you don't care one way or the other (note: I'm not talking about the combat lite games where you have combat maybe once every few sessions. In those cases you've given your players time to recover from this. This is mainly for more combat heavy games where you're swinging a sword at least a couple times a session).
In those cases, it's ok to give players some light challenges and some more moderate challenges; combats where the players are supposed to win without too much trouble. The bulk of this post though, talks about the encounters you were planning to make really difficult. The ones they saved all their dailies for. I try to shoot for probably about a quarter to a third of my encounters to fall into this territory. The rest of them I go for having either a decent challenge, or something that's pretty easy and just serves to keep the plot moving.
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Steps 1 & 2: Use Terrain. Also, Use Combined Arms Tactics.
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I list these together because they're so interlinked. Don't just throw a bunch of dudes at your group without much rhyme or reason and expect it to be a challenge. Likewise, don't set everything out in an open field if you want to keep the combat interesting or challenging, because the party will just run around your meat shields to hit your artillery.
If you're going to add in some artillery monsters, make sure they can take a hit or two, and keep them out of the way. The object for them HP wise is to make it so about 3 or 4 good hits can take one down. If you have 4 archers back there and the group can focus one of them down every round, that's still about 4 rounds where the group is getting peppered with arrows and the like, if you position them properly. By proper positioning, I try to aim for at least keeping them surrounded by difficult terrain. You can up the ante by giving them places to hide in cover, having some impassable terrain (like a small chasm or river...of lava), etc. You're not going for making them invincible, you're going for making them hard to get to. If you can manage that with your other monsters with forced movement and marks, great, but never hesitate to craft terrain in a way that works for your monsters.
Don't just stop at terrain, either. Incorporate traps when you can; there's a reason kobolds exist, and it's to make shitty traps that your players hate.
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Step 3: Crunch Those Numbers
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Take a copy of your party's character sheets. Analyze them. What's your group's average to-hit bonus? In an Early Paragon-tier game I'm currently playing in, the average to-hit bonus is somewhere around +17 or so. What does this mean? If the monsters have an AC of 28, the players will, on average, hit on a roll of 11 or better. Design your monsters with this in mind. In this case, if you're fighting a monster with an AC of 30, you hit about 40% of the time. An AC of 32 and that drops to 30%. Be very careful not to make unhittable enemies. A challenging encounter is one thing, but monsters that just don't get hit until someone rolls at least a 16...those are the encounters that are just flat out frustrating, and no fun for anyone. This is why when it comes to monster roles, I stray away from soldiers, and lean more toward brutes. Where soldiers have higher AC, brutes are just fat sacks of HP.
Another thing you may want to look at is the concept of 2-hit minions. Any DM who has run a 4e game and watched the wizard torch half the enemies on the battlefield knows what I'm talking about.
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The Burst Conundrum, or Why Your DM Hates
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No matter what, your players will throw a monkey wrench in your plans. It's like, if Rule 0 is "What the DM says, goes", Rule 0.5 is "The best laid plans will get fucked by the players". It's going to happen. In this case, "it" is daily powers. Once your players know that it's on for real in this fight, they will let loose with everything they have. Typically, this means they will kill the SHIT out of whoever you really don't want them to, like a leader or a controller (or your epic boss). There are a couple of ways to attack this problem.
- Defend that guy (or girl). Keep 'em in the back until they're worn down a bit.
- Give them many many HPs. Way more than the group can feasibly take down in a round or two. Consider the rules for Elite monsters when making monsters you don't want to die in the first round (doubling up on HP and adding in an action point).
- Think of a unique mechanic for last bosses regarding health, like a multi-stage boss fight. Think of all those times you fought Dracula, only to have his true form revealed. Elite monsters with a bunch of new abilities when bloodied are great for this.
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Conclusion
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Being fair to your players while keeping them challenged is a tight rope to walk. As you continue playing, you'll find the balance between the easy encounters and the TPK induccing ones. And believe me, to find the right balance, you may just send a few groups back to the drawing board in the process. That's OKAY. Players need to learn from character death as much as the DM does. So long as you learn from it, the group will rally around you and be happy to play in another game.
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