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Cailte wrote:

Harder Fights
Yes I want these, but I also realise that the XP constraints can prevent them from happening.

I suspect that this will be less and less of a problem as characters increase in levels--or perhaps I should say, this will frequently be less of a problem as characters increase in levels.

Here's why:

A. 4th edition characters grow increasingly dissimilar as they increase in level and therefore the capabilities of an unbalanced party become increasingly unbalanced. At level 1, a dragonborn fighter with dragon breath is a decent substitute for a wizard with burning hands. Not as much damage, but it will clear minions just as nicely. At level 11, the dragonborn fighter probably does not have anything that will duplicate the utility of wall of fire, stinking cloud, or blood pulse.

LFR parties are frequently unbalanced because of the semi-random nature of who has what characters at what levels. Coordinators do what they can in order to balance tables as best they can, but at the end of the day, most LFR parties will be lacking in one area and overcompensating in others. This will produce difficult fights that will get more difficult as the missing roles become more distinct and more difficult to replace.

B. 4th edition parties depend heavily upon synergy in order to be effective in combat. The higher level the party, the more powers you have that can either work together or against each other and therefore the greater the difference in performance will be between parties that work well together (see the reason A here--you can fill every WotC approved role and still not work well together) and those that don't. Having more powers creates the possibility--and indeed the expectation--of more complex combinations of powers. The difficulty? Unlike a home group where players would play together and develop and practice combos of powers and might even work out some planned strategies, the typical LFR table does not even know the full capabilities of all the other characters at the table, much less have a plan for working together in a complex manner. Therefore, the types of tactics combining powers and abilities in LFR are likely to be more rudimentary and less smoothely executed than they would be in a home game.

To give one example, a group of five warlords could theoretically squeeze two--maybe even three turns (if they add readies into the mix)--of offense for every character into a single round of instant planning with a carefully coordinated series of guileful switches. However, if someone guileful switches with the wrong character, it can easily wind up being less than the normal one turn of offense for each character that instant planning would normally provide. That is a level of coordination that is theoretically possible in a home game but is simply not possible in RPGA play. There are undoubtedly less complex combinations of powers that are actually possible in home play that will be very rare in RPGA play because they depend upon coordination of the abilities and positions of multiple characters which is something that takes practice--and in a situation where the same table rarely plays more than once, such practice is not a realistic possibility.

Monsters and encounter levels were playtested in home groups. RPGA players have some inherent tactical disadvantages vis a vis home groups that will become more significant as the campaign increases in level.

To use an analogy, if you pick a random group of under 10 soccer players and pit them against a team with players of similar talent who have just finished a season playing together, they will be at a disadvantage. On the other hand, if you picked a world cup style team from the best players of any given nation and, without giving them any practice, pitted them against another world cup team that had just played through the tournament, they would be at a much greater disadvantage. The better players get, the more they can accomplish through teamwork and the more significant practice becomes.