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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 6050849" data-attributes="member: 58416">The main problem I had revolved around the PCs being so much better than their foes, that the foes were often laughable.  Reading through Manbear's post, all I can think is that the "walkthrough" category seemed to cover everything unless the GM severely stacked the deck against the group I played 4E with most often.  I liked a lot of the encounter design ideals such as having more moving pieces in combat.  I disliked that there was such a disparity between the numbers the PCs could generate, what the monsters could generate, and the vastly different relationships those two sets of numbers had with the 'physics' that the 4E world was built upon.  Something simple such as breaking through a door which might be a cakewalk for a low level PC could at times be a struggle for even the mightiest of foes.  That disparity sometimes created oddities which were difficult to ignore.  I'm fine with monsters and PCs being built differently, but I feel I would have been more happy with the results of the system had the two sides (monster/pc) interacted with the game world in a way which was more consistent.  While I found encounters very easy to build, and I do feel I was able to be very creative with them, I also feel that it was more difficult to get the game to work as expected for someone (me) who didn't want to break their world down into 'encounters.'  In past conversations, this topic has lead to conversations about scene framing.  While I understand what scene framing is, it is still somewhat alien to me when I think about how I want to design a rpg world because -to me- the world itself is the scene.  Once the pieces are set in motion, I prefer for them to act naturally and grow organically with as little input from metagame concepts such as level and encounter as possible.  When designing my stories for 4E, I needed to bend my vision to the desires of the system more than I felt I was able to use the system to create the vision I wanted to create.  I still enjoyed the system, and I have run games which were very successful, but I still feel as though I never truly was able to run the game I wanted to run with 4E.  It may be that I'm at fault for trying to use a screwdriver as a hacksaw.  Whatever the case, I found that --as said-- I had to bend my vision to the desires of the system more than I felt able to have the system serve the desires of my vision.</blockquote>

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