I have heard conflicting reports about the difficulty of the Irontoth battle in KoTS, and it causes me to wonder about the kind of "margin of error" present in 4E. Some folks evidently pwned Irontooth and his boys, whereas many others evidently feel to a TPK. And then there's the question of the performance of optimized vs. non-optimized parties.
It reminds me of the LEROY JENKINS! machinima that we're all probably familiar with from WoW (basically, a supposedly ace raiding guild plans on storming the dragon rookery, but overly zealous paladin Leroy Jenkins, whose name is also his battlecry, goes off prematurely and alerts every monster in the chamber... the resulting carnage makes the Battle of the Philippine Sea look like a draw). I'm not interested in "4E is so WoW!" talk because for the purposes of this discussion I just plain don't care. The reason I bring it up (besides that it's funny; I didn't link to it though because it contains very offensive language) is that the subject matter is the fact that in the game, a perfectly composed tactical plan can be turned into a turkey shoot by one untactical doofus. That's a low margin for error and from my time playing WoW I would tend to say that overall it does have a fairly low margin.
WoW isn't the only thing that can have a low tactical error margin. Wargames can be like this, too. I played FOW against some American paras (a fairly hard force) one time and my grenadiers didn't even get into battle... I crushed his whole company in the center of the board with 2 Tigers and 3 StuGs (and took no losses). His hard force was turned into mush because of a few tactical mistakes. That's not the same thing as "swingy" either... that's something separate (40K is also swingy, for instance; I routed Chaos with my Necrons taking no casulaties because I got a few lucky opening shots that sent his whole deployment on a downward spiral and it basically became a shooting gallery). Not all wargames are "swingy" (FOW isn't particularly), but I would say that most tend to be fairly unforgiving at points.
The margin for error in previous D&D editions has varied, in my opinion. There have always been those Save or Die/Petrify situations. Aside from those, I think OD&D had a pretty decent margin of error, since most monsters did 1d6 damage. So if things start going south in OD&D you should have some latitude to change your plan and recover (of course, there aren't a lot of tactics to begin with; joining battle or running are the two most important options). It starts to get much less forgiving in Classic. For example, even a young red dragon bites for 4d8... there's one at the end of a Classic Basic module (for levels 1-3). Obviously, that dragon can one-shot most characters so if they stumble upon it or go in disorganized they might be in for one heck of a TPK. Because once you figure out that you've made a mistake by fighting the thing, it's probaby too late (and once those 4d8 hit the table, somebody is probably losing their character anyway).
3E seemed less forgiving in some ways, maybe more in others. It was very unforgiving with "character builds". I played 3.0 to 16th level and it was evident... I had a Dwarf F/R that was like F6/R10 who probably would have gotten laughed out of the CharOp forum. There was a Wizard/Bard who even I would laugh out of the CharOp forum... him taking those Bard levels was like shooting the whole party in the foot all at once. And in 3E there was no way to undo that mistake, really (whereas in say 2E that might have been suboptimal but not so much so that you'd really notice).
Anyway, I haven't come to a conclusion about 4E's margin for error... I haven't even played it yet. I'm curious to hear what other people think about it, though.
It reminds me of the LEROY JENKINS! machinima that we're all probably familiar with from WoW (basically, a supposedly ace raiding guild plans on storming the dragon rookery, but overly zealous paladin Leroy Jenkins, whose name is also his battlecry, goes off prematurely and alerts every monster in the chamber... the resulting carnage makes the Battle of the Philippine Sea look like a draw). I'm not interested in "4E is so WoW!" talk because for the purposes of this discussion I just plain don't care. The reason I bring it up (besides that it's funny; I didn't link to it though because it contains very offensive language) is that the subject matter is the fact that in the game, a perfectly composed tactical plan can be turned into a turkey shoot by one untactical doofus. That's a low margin for error and from my time playing WoW I would tend to say that overall it does have a fairly low margin.
WoW isn't the only thing that can have a low tactical error margin. Wargames can be like this, too. I played FOW against some American paras (a fairly hard force) one time and my grenadiers didn't even get into battle... I crushed his whole company in the center of the board with 2 Tigers and 3 StuGs (and took no losses). His hard force was turned into mush because of a few tactical mistakes. That's not the same thing as "swingy" either... that's something separate (40K is also swingy, for instance; I routed Chaos with my Necrons taking no casulaties because I got a few lucky opening shots that sent his whole deployment on a downward spiral and it basically became a shooting gallery). Not all wargames are "swingy" (FOW isn't particularly), but I would say that most tend to be fairly unforgiving at points.
The margin for error in previous D&D editions has varied, in my opinion. There have always been those Save or Die/Petrify situations. Aside from those, I think OD&D had a pretty decent margin of error, since most monsters did 1d6 damage. So if things start going south in OD&D you should have some latitude to change your plan and recover (of course, there aren't a lot of tactics to begin with; joining battle or running are the two most important options). It starts to get much less forgiving in Classic. For example, even a young red dragon bites for 4d8... there's one at the end of a Classic Basic module (for levels 1-3). Obviously, that dragon can one-shot most characters so if they stumble upon it or go in disorganized they might be in for one heck of a TPK. Because once you figure out that you've made a mistake by fighting the thing, it's probaby too late (and once those 4d8 hit the table, somebody is probably losing their character anyway).
3E seemed less forgiving in some ways, maybe more in others. It was very unforgiving with "character builds". I played 3.0 to 16th level and it was evident... I had a Dwarf F/R that was like F6/R10 who probably would have gotten laughed out of the CharOp forum. There was a Wizard/Bard who even I would laugh out of the CharOp forum... him taking those Bard levels was like shooting the whole party in the foot all at once. And in 3E there was no way to undo that mistake, really (whereas in say 2E that might have been suboptimal but not so much so that you'd really notice).
Anyway, I haven't come to a conclusion about 4E's margin for error... I haven't even played it yet. I'm curious to hear what other people think about it, though.
