From reading threads here, and various D&D-related blogs and such, I've come to feel like I've got some very different play preferences than (what appears to be) the majority of people.
1. Combat Length.
I see tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of posts, blogs, podcasts, and what have you about how to make combat faster, how to make combats shorter, how to reduce "grind", and so on. Or people mentioning, in passing, that certain combats took this many rounds or that many hours of real time, and it seems almost universally accepted that that was a bad thing.
Personally, I don't get it. I want combats to be long. Both in number of rounds and in real-time. I don't mind play going slowly. I like a battle to take long enough that it really feels important and has lots of opportunities for decisions and for each character to be able to do pretty much "all his stuff". If I'm playing, and we have a combat that is resolved in fewer than eight rounds, or takes less than an hour to play, I feel cheated. I think, "Well, that was so easy, what was the point of having the encounter?"
To me, a short encounter makes me feel that the battle was simple and non-challenging enough that my tactical choices didn't really matter, my skill at the game and my character's prowess weren't really necessary. I'd rather have the DM just narrate such a speedbump encounter. If we're rolling initiative, I want it to be scary, dangerous, and epic. I want to barely scrape by with our lives. I want to know that I really had to kick some serious ass, and that I earned a legitimate victory, not just sailed through a tactically-simple "appropriately balanced" little auto-win.
To me, the longer a battle takes, the less it's going to feel like "grind" to me. Because if it takes that long, it must be because it's a challenging and complex encounter which requires a lot of thinking and choices and fighting to win.
That takes me to...
2. Game difficulty.
When I hear about these groups who have TPK'ed in LFR modules, or Keep on the Shadowfell, or whatever, I honestly just boggle. The default difficulty of 4E D&D (which is what I play) is absurdly low, to me (and the guys I play with and DM for). Level +1 encounter? Seriously, that's a joke. I actually get really annoyed when I play with most DMs, because they just won't take off the damn hand-holding kid gloves and actually give us a real challenge. Every battle is sorely disappointing, as we easily stomp all over everything with no real sense of danger, using our cooler powers just for the sake of using them, not because they're necessary. Ending adventuring days with all of my dailies unused because I was, yet again, foolishly saving them for some desperately-hoped-for "hard fight" that, yet again, never materialized.
I want the game to be stupidly hard. I know I'm not totally alone in this, but it definitely seems to be a minority opinion. I want to be forced to go ten or twelve encounters without an extended rest. I want to be facing encounters five or six levels above the party, AND have the DM using ruthless tactics with no punch-pulling. I want to have to use every trick in the book to win. I want to have to use (or have used on me) Raise Dead . . . often. I want us going out and shopping for all sorts of tricky consumables and weird rituals and whatever else we can squeeze some advantage out of, just so that we can prevail.
But no. The game is a cakewalk, as written. (Published adventures, and the way the DMG tells you to build encounters.) Now, the guys I play with (and myself) are pretty damn good at D&D, and they're really smart, and they've been playing RPGs for many years, and they're tactical thinkers, and build strong characters. So I know that we're not "typical" players. But still, I want things to be dramatically more challenging than they are, by system default.
I really hate auto-winning. Even the huge errata to the skill challenge DCs disappointed me. The original numbers made them actually somewhat difficult. The -10 to all DCs that they errata'ed in to "fix" the system made skill challenges nearly impossible to fail. Balanced encounters are nearly impossible to fail. It's not what I want from my D&D game. I want the chance of failure to be high. That's what makes not failing have meaning.
But it seems that not a lot of players feel this way. At least not any more. But for me, the heck with short, simple combats and "balanced math" that lets me practically auto-succeed at everything.
