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My buddy, Vic, and I are getting ready to share dungeon master responsibilities on a new 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons (“4e”) campaign set in a game world of our own creation. The subject of my Dungeon Crawl System (“DCS”) came up, and it had me thinking about a change I should have made to it back when people were playing 4e en masse.
For context, the DCS is a method of 4e encounter design that speeds up 4e’s notoriously slow combats and eliminates the need for the so-called “15-minute adventuring day.” The PDF can be found here.
There are two things you need to know to understand the change. First, in the DCS, NPCs were granted a +10 environment bonus to initiative assuring they’d almost always go first, and when they didn’t, the result would feel remarkably satisfying for the players. Second, there was a flaw in 4e’s math that didn’t manifest for most games because epic-level play was relatively rare. NPCs didn’t keep pace with PCs, such that by the time you reached epic level, the PCs were walking through NPCs as if they weren’t even there.
This, of course, assumes that you built your epic encounters as instructed. Sly Flourish provided some excellent (and free) advice on how to design your encounters so that they could keep pace with the PCs’ power curve. The short answer was cheat. Pull out all sorts of terrain, traps, and other tricks. “Gone are the days where monsters out of the book could threaten PCs.” If you’re completely unfair, the end result will be a reasonable challenge for the PCs. The long answer provides far more precise science than that.
The fact that the NPCs couldn’t keep pace with the PCs detracted from the game as written, but it fit nicely with my DCS. To put a point on it, epic level 4e as written in the sourcebooks was the DCS. Build encounters as written, don’t allow short rests more often than every other encounter, and epic level was fast and furious and reasonably balanced.
The Change
Put another way, as the PCs approach epic level, there’s less of a need for the DCS. 4e itself slowly morphs into the DCS, so the DCS needs to slowly eliminate itself. There was one easy way to do that requiring an insignificant conceptual leap.
For the NPCs’ environment bonus to initiative, the bonus shouldn’t be a flat +10. Instead, use this formula: ((30-[PC level])/3)+1 always rounding down. In Excel, use column A to list the levels from 1 to 30, then populate column B with =MAXA((ROUNDDOWN((30-A#)/3,0)+1),0), where A# is a placeholder for cells A1, A2, A3, etc. In English, it’s this: For levels 1-3, the bonus is +10; levels 4-6, it’s +9; 7-0, it’s +8; etc. Each set of three continuous levels has the same bonus, and it’s one less than the previous (i.e., lower) set of three levels. For those who work best with charts, it’s this:
| Level | Bonus |
| 1-3 | +10 |
| 4-6 | +9 |
| 7-9 | +8 |
| 10-12 | +7 |
| 13-15 | +6 |
| 16-18 | +5 |
| 19-21 | +4 |
| 22-24 | +3 |
| 25-27 | +2 |
| 28-30 | +1 |
This creates enough of an improvement that no further tweaks are strictly necessary. So, as for the rest of the numbers, until you hear otherwise, use my system as written for levels 1-20, but when you hit 21st level, build encounters the way the Dungeon Master’s Guide instructs you. That’s probably precise enough because, if you’ve bought in to running the game, you’re already committed to the notion that you’re bound to tweak your encounters anyway. My system’s precision is close enough for dungeon master work, even at high paragon and epic.
I will definitely be using this system quite a bit when I running this campaign.
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