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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6079489" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your whole post was interesting, but this is what stood out for me.I have found that as a 4e GM I have a lot of power to fine-tune my encounters in both building - the XP-budget rules applies in accordance with the DMG advice about level ranges, no level+5 soldiers! ,etc - and also resolution. By "resolution" I don't mean fudging - I don't use a GM screen, and generally roll my dice on the open table like the other players - but rather choosing who attacks whom. This can make a big difference both mechanically and thematically to how an encounter plays out - and the transparent and reliable maths tends to make it easy to choose deliberately and be confident that it will turn out more-or-less as you hoped.On the player side, I find 4e PCs very resilient - as the going gets tough they can start to access their healing surges, and this means that as the ranks of the monsters/NPCs thin, the PCs are (mostly) still standing. And so the tide turns.Because of this precision and flexibility on the GM side, combined with the resilience on the player/PC side, I find that 4e really rewards a "gung ho" style from the players. I'm not talking about being irrationally rash or foolhardy. I'm talking about giving it all you've got - throwing your PC into the thick of things and letting the monsters have it, and - if things start to go bad - relying on clever play by you and your friends to turn the tide. Whereas I can see how a very cautious, overly-anticipatory approach ('But what if what if what if . . .) would slow the game down.I don't have any profound suggestions to help here, but maybe run an encounter or two where the PCs find themselve thrust into the thick of things despite themselves - eg they are talking to a dubious NPC, and suddenly she pulls the bell rope hanging from the wall and pits open under the PCs dropping them into the underground arena. You want to set up your geography/terrain so that the PCs aren't all together (ie there are monsters and/or hostile NPCs between them - monsters might work better, because that makes it easier to narrate away a lack of team precision among the adversaries) and therefore before they can regroup and start being cautious and fiddly, each has to bring his/her full suite of powers to bear. And set it up so that their encounter and/or daily powers will have very clear application - eg if one PC has a close burst encounter power, have minion spiders or skeletons or whatever closing on him/her from all directions.The example is probably a bit klunky, but what I'm trying to get at is that you set something up that forces the players to really play their PCs, that also, and really obviously, rewards them for doing that, and that therfore show them that they don't need to play in a cautious way to survive and have fun, and in fact that the game is more fun when they play their PCs to the hilt every time.Anyway, good luck with your RPGing!There are posters here with better build-fu than me, but here are some ideas.For your paladin sorcerer I might try a STR/INT swordmage with paladin multi-class (requires 13 WIS - not too expensive) - you can build this as a dual-wielder, not necessarily tripping but other forms of control coming from your swordmagery, and you can be weapons first with your magic providing utility (though not via explicit buffing, but rather by giving you weapon attacks extra effects via your swordmage powers). Your armour would be leather by default, but Unarmoured Agility can give you the same AC in cloth for a feat. Your CHA won't be that high, so you won't have much in the way of Bluff; and your archery will suck. (You'll have to pick up Acro from a feat or a background; likewise Bluff.)A bladesinger (from the Neverwinter book) has DEX/INT, and so good archery as well as melee attacks that are enhanced by at-will utility attack-buffs. Your CHA will still be low, and you'll have trouble with paladin multi-class (both the STR/WIS mins of 13+, and the stats for any other powers you ended up taking).A paladin/swordmage hybrid (STR and INT) might be a little underpowered but not completely unviable, I would think. If your paladin at-will is Valiant Smite then even though you have it from 1st level there'd be nothing about it that would betray your paladin-ness. Then if you don't take paladin encounter, utility and daily powers until 3rd, 6th and 5th the whole "growing into it" story would be preserved. You'll have the same limitations as the swordmage/multi-class paladin as far as DEX and CHA are concerned.For your priestess of love I'd try the lazy warlord route with cleric multi-class; or a hybrid pacifist cleric/lazy warlord, perhaps. The idea is that your cleric powers don't do damage, and your warlord powers buff and/or activate allies rather than involve you doing stuff yourself. The lasso is hard to build in, unless you go for powers that involve forced movement and reflavour them as lasso called shots - which might be a bit of a stretch (boom boom!). The archery you can get via Archer Warlord and STR, or if your lazy warlord can be built around the WIS you're using as a cleric (I don't know all the warlord options well enough), then you can just pump DEX as your second stat.Pacifist builds for clerics are mostly in Divine Power - if you look through it the elements are pretty clear. You're correct that in 4e if others are attacking to kill then the fact that you want to subdue won't help. I personally like this change, as I think it makes the stake and the intra-party dynamics a bit more clear. That's just my taste, though.</blockquote>

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