I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Glad that many agree!
Anyone else want to offer up their lessons learned playing 4e?
Anyone else want to offer up their lessons learned playing 4e?
On Activities Outside Combat:
I don't know what to do about this. I want cool tactical combat, and I dislike shallow subsystems. I'm worried that anything except a broad framework (like the skill challenge system) would simply take up too much space or be too tough to balance in terms of providing a unique experience for each type of activity. Ideally, yes, exploration and intrigue and stealth and everything else would have its own rules structure to support it. I just don't think it's feasible.
What I've learned is that sharply reducing the number of effects, conditions, and save-or-dies sounds really good on paper, but in practice leads to really boring monsters. I think there has to be a middle ground between a banshee TPKing your party in one round, and having a medusa who struggles to petrify a single PC. YMMV, of course.
However, if you're the PC that was turned to stone or killed by a Finger of Death or similar, it kind of sucks to be you for that combat in game, especially if it happens in round 1 of the combat
Oh, definitely. One way to mitigate that is to make combat move much more quickly. OK, so you were petrified in round 1, but if the combat is over in 10 minutes, it's less of a big deal.
I'm not voting for moving the pendulum all the way back to 3e (or 1e), but I think 4e has swung too far towards simple hit point attrition. I'd like to see more dramatic effects from time to time, both from the PCs and the monsters.
NewJeffCT said:Good point - if the combat were over quickly, it would be less painful. My last 3.5E campaign, the combats to to be so long that I had extra NPCs tagging along with the party just in case a PC went down early (OK, your dwarf is dead... here, run this NPC for now, at least until you can get hit with a Revivify or similar.) because the one combat would often run almost the entire session (and longer once we got up past level 15 or so)
Dannager said:Ideally, yes, exploration and intrigue and stealth and everything else would have its own rules structure to support it. I just don't think it's feasible.
Alzurius said:No bullet point for "I don't want a wrought-iron fence made of tigers between the crunch and the fluff"?