Forked Thread: Death in 4e Poll

[Mark]

Forked from: Death in 4e

I think 4e is MORE lethal than 3.5.

 

[Mark]

No editions warz, no this is better and the other one suxxors, no screaming and crying that this is already an edition warz thread in attempt to get the thread and poll closed. Just relax and give your opinion, understanding that the poll might skew since only people who have played both (or know both rules sets very well) can probably judge this fairly.

Have on!

 

[jadrax]

Unfortunately I don't think it's as simple as that, It causes less deaths through random chance and more deaths by punishing bad tactics.

 

[doctorhook]

Unfortunately I don't think it's as simple as that, It causes less deaths through random chance and more deaths by punishing bad tactics.

Dead on.

I voted "yes", because, in my experience, 4E is absolutely more lethal than 3.5E when it comes to a group of players who don't cooperate well, who don't seem to understand their own strengths and weaknesses.

4E teaches tactics to players very quickly.

 

[Mark]

Be sure to objectively consider what happens to a group who plays well with tactics in each system and, separately, a group who does not play well with tactics in each system, then make an overall statement about how deadly each is. I see the above posters make that distinction but for future posters, be careful not to mix types of group for comparison. Also, try to adjust for groups you know who might have come into 4E knowing tactics but learned them over the course of playing in 3.5E games.

 

[Wormwood]

Unfortunately I don't think it's as simple as that, It causes less deaths through random chance and more deaths by punishing bad tactics.

This.

Also, I've seen a lot more characters knocked out in 4e, but fewer characters actually die.

Which rocks.

 

[Ourph]

Unfortunately I don't think it's as simple as that, It causes less deaths through random chance and more deaths by punishing bad tactics.

This. I voted "4e is less lethal" because IMO players can always improve their play, whereas there's nothing a player can do to counteract swingy combats (other than perhaps min/maxing their character). However, I would also say that 4e is more challenging, which is exactly what I want out of D&D.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

I voted less deadly although I think it's too soon to tell. We played through 20 levels of 3E over 8 years, while we've only played over 5 levels of 4E for 3 months. Very hard to compare. We've had a few deaths and last night was a TPK. I would rather vote equally as deadly for the same reason others have mentioned above.

 

[kmdietri]

I voted more lethal, we're through KotS and the first section of Thunderspire... we've had 2 TPK's and at least 4 indivdual character deaths for a grand total of 16 deaths in 4 levels... I'm not gonna say my group is stupid... but they're stupid. I think since the last TPK they've finally got the whole work together tactics thing. For a while we had one guy who's character we just referred to EC (Encounter Character). He's made it trough two whole sessions since then though.

 

[Merlin the Tuna]

Admittedly I haven't had a chance to play 4e much, but I've found that shifting to a per-encounter setup led to us having more consistently threatening encounters, as opposed to cakewalk-->minor concern-->problematic-->actually threatening. We didn't use arcane casters much in 3.5 though, so that cut out a lot of the Save or Die issues for us.