Yeah, way to editionwarify the best thread ever, guys.
Anyway, does anyone else think it's easier for any system to accommodate CaW than it is for any system to accommodate CaS? I mean, you can take a system that's mainly about CaS and do a lot of CaW with it, if the system helps out at least a little and the DM's good at it. But a system that really doesn't strive for the kind of level-by-level and encounter-by-encounter balance and the kind of setpiece encounter design that CaS works on, that'd be awfully hard to run a CaS game with.
I'm not trying to trumpet 4th edition over 3rd edition here. 3rd did, after all, have encounter balance tools, and it had a pretty great sweet stop from, like, 4th to 12th level where the party was usually reasonably balanced and CaS wasn't terribly hard if the DM knew his party's capabilities. And it is true that 4e's powers sometimes had the psychological effect of limiting players' options (Disarm is a power. Can I disarm using pg. 42? If so, why take the power? That sort of thing). But something tells me it's a lot easier to run a CaW game with 4e than it is to run a CaS game with a system that isn't even trying to allow tight encounter balance.
But maybe I'm wrong. What do you think?