I hate freely available
raise dead magic. I'm in a sizeable minority there, but it definitely does seem to be a minority.
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?"
Speaking just for myself, the "grind" problem is not with long combats
per se; it's when the outcome of the combat is clear long before the combat itself is over. The PCs are obviously going to win, but there's still a bunch of mopping up to do. The DM is reluctant to handwave the rest of the fight, because it remains in question how many hit points and healing surges the PCs will have to spend, but the tension is gone.
A long, grueling nail-biter of a battle is awesome, albeit stressful (I definitely need a few minutes to unwind afterward!). To me, the best battle is one where the winning side has a net hit point total less than zero. As a DM, though, it's a challenge to achieve that without fudging the dice--you're skirting the edge of a TPK.
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.
This can be an issue in 4E for various reasons, one of which is that I find party power level drifts upward relative to monsters of their level. When my PCs were in Heroic tier, I got a pretty good feel for what they could handle; level + 1 or less wasn't worth playing out, level + 2 was a solid fight but not tremendously challenging, level + 3 they would have to work for, level + 4 was blood and death, and level + 5 was TPK territory.
As they move up through Paragon tier, however, I find those guidelines no longer apply. Anything less than level + 4 is too weak to bother with. Level + 5 is the new level + 3. I expect it'll get even worse if we go into Epic. I think I've got a handle on it now, but there were a bunch of overly easy fights before I realized what was happening.
Incidentally, have you tried "War of the Burning Sky?" You might like it; I think the encounters are better calibrated to what you're looking for.
