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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6052382" data-attributes="member: 42582">Yes.From time to time I've wondered what mental picture WotC had of D&D players when they were designing 4e. They seem to have completely missed what - with hindsight - seem to be deep simulationist commitments on the part of many D&D players. In the abstract, I can see how you might get surprised by that - D&D is not a very sim game, after all (hp, action economy, etc). But didn't they do any market research?On an unrelated point - what's your view of LostSoul's hypothesis about skill challenges, situation design and player agency, that I responded to half-a-dozen or so posts upthread?Yes to both of these: 4e condition tracking can be irritating, but so are classic D&D spell durations.Yes to both of these. The 4e modules that I know - H2, P2, E1 plus some of the early free Dungeon ones - are pretty poor. H2, for example, has excellent maps but crappy encounter design - once you ignore the suggested encounter framing, and really take advantage of the cool maps, you can do interesting stuff with it. P2 is primarily a political challenge, but is bizarrely presented in combat format with all the political stuff hidden in another book, in a format that makes it hard to extract the info and adjudicate it.But 3E modules tended to be weak too. Bastion of Broken Souls, for instances, is thematically and conceptually first rate, but then - as written - has needless combat after needless combat: to get useful info from a dream hag, you have to fight her; to get useful info from a banished god, you have to fight him; to get to the banished god, you have to fight the angel who serves as a living gate. When I ran the module, I ignored all this - the PCs negotiated with the dream hag, persuaded the angel that it was her moral duty to let herself be killed so the gate could open (which led to an interesting sub-plot of conflict with her offsider, who didn't see things the same way), and befriended the banished god.While this is harsh, I can relate to it in one respect - I don't want filler combats, and 4e gives me monster builds, action resolution rules and encounter design guidelines which reliably produce non-filler combats. It's hard (not impossible, but hard) to make them filler, or boring, by accident.This relates back to the dungeon crawl discussion upthread, and also to   [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s complaints about attrition and exploration mechanics. 4e does not support a game where the interest is not in the action (in an action cinema, heroic romance sense of "action") but rather is in operational management - how well did we do climbing that cliff while minimising piton loss?; in fighting those 4 kobolds without costing a healing potion?; etc.If that sort of stuff really is D&D for a lot of people, how did WotC miss that when they were designing 4e? Or did they just think that people wouldn't notice that the game wasn't good for that sort of play?</blockquote>

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