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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Starfox" data-source="post: 6050913" data-attributes="member: 2303">As with many things 4E, I liled the idea of encounter design, but not the implementation. Xp budgets are easier to use than CR, and 4Es simple monster design (compared to PCs) is really nice. (Xp budgets really are not so very different from CRs, just easier to use.) This ought to have made 4E encounters awesome, but instead they were slow, unwieldy slugfests that seemed to lack direction.In practice, I felt 4E's encounter design produced only set-piece battles. Smaller skirmishes were not interesting to play. Others here have commented on how patrol encounters are played as skill challenges instead of full encounters, so I am not the only one to notice this. Monster hp are such that its almost impossible to take put a patrol silently (unless it is all minions), and the power economy is also geared towards set-piece battles. It's the reverse side of the coin from swinginess; by increasing everyone's hp you make things less chancy, but also make ambushes practically impossible.I think this could have been cured with better minion rules, rules that made minions more dangerous (and thus priority targets) and less vulnerable to auto-hit powers. As they were, minions were largely ignored and left to some minion-specialist auto-hit powers or just ignored completely. Making a patrol out of minions did not feel viable. In my Feng Shui derivative game, most creatures encountered are minions and it works well because minions are dangerous but go down fast - thus very swingy (if easy) making such encounters feel more dangerous than they are.Another problem with both CRs and Xp budgets is that creatures lower in level lose their value too quickly. A CR -2 or 2 levels lower creature is almost worthless. Players in my groups tend to put emphasis on defenses, which makes such creature's chance to hit too low. Creatures of a higher level/CR become very tough for the same reason, making most attacks against them discouraging misses. Put simply, the math is too steep for my taste. This makes Next's flatter math interesting.But these are comments about 4Es game system, not specifically about its encounter model. With a better engine to power it, I think 4E's encounter system could have been great.</blockquote>

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