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Message: <blockquote data-quote="D'karr" data-source="post: 4449640" data-attributes="member: 336">Since the thread is about 4e and the few previous posts to the one I made had been about increasing damage to, in essence, make 4e combat more swingy, I limited my comments to that.However, you are correct.  In 3e in most situations in which the PCs were significantly outnumbered the enemies were significantly weaker.  In my experience those enemies were, in most cases, completely ineffective in presenting any threat at all in a combat.  You are correct they were not going to insta-kill, as a matter of fact the great majority of them were not even going to hit.  When the possibility of hitting is only a natural 20 the effectiveness of the opposition is clearly diminished.  This was not so easily experienced in earlier editions of the game because the PCs did not usually have ways to scale their AC into the unhittable range.So if a DM wanted to even begin to challenge a party he had to use encounters that were EL+2, +3 or even +4.  This causes a disconnect because if you use the CR system you can't add that many lower level opponents to a combat to make it interesting.  If I recall correctly the CR calculation table even stated that adding more than 12 creatures to an encounter could pose problems.So I agree in 3e there is the possibility of having many lower level creatures attack the characters but overall they were not a challenge at all.So in order to challenge the party a DM had to swing the pendulum in the opposite direction.  Fewer creatures that were more powerful.And this is where we disagree the most.  I don't believe that a lucky strike that smears a PC is a feature.  Even when it comes to a boss battle.  What fun does a player have if his carefully played PC gets smeared on the first strike by a swingy combat system.  He'll be, more than likely, sitting out the rest of the combat, if not the adventure.  How is that a feature?I completely agree with you here.  But how many players honestly like to sit out combats or entire adventures?Yes, that works, in theory, until you have players that hit those orcs for minimum damage.  Then you have one or several "minions" that require book-keeping.  When you start to add that up the DM soon finds out why the binary state of 4e minions works so well.  Specially when they are used within the proper context.In addition, that might have been your way of doing minions but if you attempt to show that "rule" to a new DM you can't.  Simply because it doesn't exist in any sourcebook that they would have access to.  I used to hand wave minions in 3e too but I've had decades of experience to know what works and what doesn't.  The game should not present that impediment to a new DM that has just bought the 3 core books.In 4e I've already run combats with 20+ creatures against the PCs.  These combats took me no additional effort to run than combats between the PCs and 4-6 opponents.  When you start adding traps, and enviromental hazards the combats become much more exciting.  Not only that, now because I don't have to worry about the lucky one hit kill, the combatants can go all out.  In addition, the PCs now have a chance to decide whether they stick around to fight, if the combat is going their way.  Or they can decide they are going to flee, because they are getting their asses handed to them.Some will say that because damage is on average lower than in 3e that 4e combat is not deadly enough.  I can honestly say, not so.  Characters are more survivable than in 3e, but PC deaths are mostly due to bad decisions on the part of the players than to random chance.  4e combat can be quite deadly, and the stack of dead PC sheets piled up at my table alone is testament to that.</blockquote>

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