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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4110577" data-attributes="member: 5143">I mean, I exaggerate a decent amount.  People fall asleep, but its mostly because we decide to game in the one time our schedules all overlap, normally ending up with at least one of the players having only 4 hours of sleep before the game or is showing up after working for 12 hours straight.But this is exactly why we need to keep the game moving and keep everyone concentrating on the game.  When the game gets slow or as soon as a player feels their actions are useless in the combat they either fall asleep, start talking to the person next to them, start asking the whole group what they are doing on the weekend, etc.I'm not saying that 4e will SOLVE this.  It certainly won't.  But it helps.Near the beginning of 3e, we saw some of those builds.  Recently, however, no one in my group would be caught dead playing something that bad.  My characters are severe min-maxers.  I have one player who is notorious for making a new character EVERY session since if he discovers ANY problem with his character at all he asks to bring in a new, better one.  Sometimes he just changes characters cause he gets bored with the one he's playing and wants to try something new.  I'm hoping that 4e will give him more interesting options in one character that he'll go at least 4-5 sessions in between wanting to make a new character.I know.  I just never write my own adventures.  I admit, I'm too lazy.  I haven't even attempted to come up with my own idea for an adventure since shortly after 3e came out and my players derailed my plot so badly I couldn't recover it.  I realized that it was much better for me just to run adventures from Dungeon or ones I bought.  Or playing and running in Living Greyhawk mods.However, not every battle is unique.  Some of those examples seem like cheap excuses to remove people's powers or make it so they can't play their characters.  I'm all for interesting environments.  I'm not about inventing monsters with abilities to counter the players or environments specifically created to make a player stop what he's been doing.  If he's been doing it, it means he likes to do it.  I'd just like to make it more fun for him by giving him better options.I'm the first to admit that the tripping combo isn't all that effective in actual play.  However, I see designing the tripping combo as the player's way of saying "I want to play a fighter that doesn't just Full Attack over and over again.  Now I'm doing something different."I see that most of my players eventually turn to spellcasters rather than fighters.  Even one of my players who loves fighters decided that it was better to create a self-buffing favored soul than it was to create a fighter or barbarian.  He could fight just as well and had so many more options.My players universally declared Warblade from Bo9S to be way cooler than the fighter.That's not true.  I love 3.5e in a lot of ways.  If I was just focusing on what ends up being a problem in my 3.5e games, it's almost always the same couple of things:-A focus on simulationism causes the game to constantly grind to a halt as all of my players start discussing whether a particular rule is "realistic" enough.  Example: The multiple hour long argument we had over whether someone could cast spells underwater due to water being in their mouths and possibly throat when they were trying to recite the verbal components(and I was on the simulationst side of that argument.  My players were all "It's a game, it's no fun if water ruins all my abilities, let's just have fun."  I wouldn't listen.  Wasn't realistic enough for me).-A focus of the game rules on simulationism causes there to be all sorts of small rules that are exceptions to the normal rules.  This causes players to forget them on a regular basis.  This causes the rest of the players to constantly point them out.  Example: Charging needs to be in a straight line and there can't be an obstacles between you and the square you are charging to, and you must stop at the first space you can make an attack in.  Someone almost every sessions says "I charge" and the rest of the players point out at least one of the reasons they can't.  This point is a big one for me.  This is just one example, but there are probably hundreds of these things that come up each session.-A focus on the game being a toolkit causes players to overthink their character choices and attempt to combine classes together to make the "ultimate" character.  Causing players to ask to bring in new characters on a regular basis and to make extremely weak characters in failed attempts to powergame.  Example: The warmage/scout someone made who figured they could get 1d6 extra damage from skirmish by taking a level of scout with their orb spells.  And make up for the caster level with Practiced Spellcaster.  However, once they were one level of scout, the higher level abilities looked pretty good as well, so they took a couple of more levels in scout.  No need to worry, they were actually INCREASING the damage dice of their orb spells as their caster level kept going up and their skirmish got better.  However, every time the group needed a spell that wasn't an orb spell, he refused to cast it since his character didn't do that.  And slowly his lack of higher level spells showed more and more until he was the running joke of the group as the most useless party member.</blockquote>

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