Midweek Musings this week opens the discussion on the Paragon Blues for DND 4E.

Paragon Blues?  If you play or DM DND 4E with characters in the Paragon Tier, levels 11 - 20, you may have experienced some of the Paragon Blues: 

• Combat balance which tips away from the player characters.
• Level-appropriate battles that can take three times as long as their heroic tier equivalents.
• Monster defenses and hit points which have clearly won the arms race against player character encounter and at-will powers.

Wizards is slowly fixing this problem; new feats help address the paragon imbalance, for example.  But I currently run a game in which the main player characters are 14th level; I needed, and still need, fixes which would address the balance and help speed up the game.   The Paragon Blues hit us big time over the last few sessions. A standard combat, a run-of-the-mill encounter, ran more than three hours; getting through five encounters in an eight hour session was often a pipe dream. The game was bogging down in combat. In an exciting heroic fantasy that DND best describes, 'bogging down' and 'combat' just should not appear in the same sentence. 

So we experimented with fixes. Most were tweaks that were quickly discarded as not making enough difference to speed of the game to be worth the bother of remembering the rules variant. But eventually I hit upon one that the players enjoyed, and made a significant difference in combat. 

The solution I have been testing over the last three months or so is included in the PDF you can grab at the link. It uses the concept of formalized house rules and session rules, concepts which I wrote for the Dungeon Masters Guide 2. It also imports a design mechanic I well used in previous tabletop games I designed, such as Earthdawn and Torg; an open-ended die roll for skill resolution. If your players really don't like open-ended mechanics, this won't be for them.  The mechanic is intentionally tilted toward the players, so if this clashes with your DM style, then it probably isn't a good fit. But if you are looking for a cure to the Paragon Blues, give these rules a test run.

What I would like to hear from you, the discerning reader and RPG player, is what fixes you have used, home brew rules you have tried, and modifications you have made to help Paragon tier players over the hump.  I have heard of cutting monster hit points in half; that seemed a little drastic, but if your group has had good experience doing that, I would love to know. Do you add capabilities to the player characters, or do you subtract defense from the monsters? Something completely different from that? 

So let me hear your tales of Paragon tribulation, and what you have done to make things better for your player characters.  I, and my players, would be very interested in what you have to say.   

Cure for the Paragon Blues