Gort
Explorer
That's an interesting statement - what does an animal have to have in order to qualify as having a mind? Presumably people do - do horses? How about dogs? I must say, I'd probably have been surprised if I couldn't use mind-affecting spells on a scorpion, giant or otherwise.
I'm in a similar position to where you were at with your game before you did the 23-30 skip. My game has been running since level 1 (though I did power-level them through until about level 6 by having them gain a level a session because I'd played a number of low-level games and didn't really want to see levels 1-6 for a fifth time) and they've just hit epic. I'm going to have them fight gods because there doesn't seem to be a great deal else in the epic tier for them to fight - Monster Vault has ONE level 21 monster, a fire titan.
You definitely have some valid complaints about 4e. Fights take a long time, and the expectation of the setup of the game is that you have a good deal of them in a day without resting. This can be a problem - I think a good D&D session should be about three to four hours, and a fight can easily run to two hours or even more. As a result, I run fewer, bigger fights with the expectation that players will "nova" all their resources in one, maybe two fights a session. That's well and good, but it can make things a lot riskier for the players - I've had them end up in situations where they're out of healing surges and have been effectively unable to heal during an encounter, which is a shortcut to a TPK.
Other complaints I might add to 4e would include gaining +1 to basically every roll you ever make every two levels. It means you have to re-write your character sheet at least fifteen times through the expected course of the campaign - multiply that by five for your five players and you have 75 times where you have to change every skill, every defense, every attack bonus. I'd far rather see a setup where you only had to change the things that actually got better in a real sense - after all, the monsters are all going to get +1 more perception every time you get +1 stealth.
I'd also like to whine about a lack of traps released so far. We've had what, at least five dedicated monster books, gimme a trap book!
The official adventures are terrible hack-fests, every one. Nine mazes full of monsters that you kill your way through. Occasionally they drop in one of those awful skill challenges to spice things up, but sitting round a table while five people roll three dice each is not really a scintillating experience. I get that they wanted everyone to contribute to certain activities, but it's not like skill checks took so long that everyone was sat twiddling their thumbs while the rogue checked a corridor for traps. I'd actually like to see MORE emphasis on skills - perhaps some kind of trap-disarming minigame or something, and something similar for the other skills. (The board game Mansions of Madness has various minigames you play by swapping tiles around to make a picture of a rune, or rearranging wires to reroute electricity. Your character has an intellect score that denotes how many moves you can make in a turn. Something like that would be fantastic for lockpicking or trap disarming.)
The sad thing about the official adventures is that I LOVE the set-up they've got going! I love the idea that I could spend a tenner and get my next ten D&D adventures all written for me, with monsters, maps, names, plot, everything! I could even go online and ask people, "Hey, have you played Castle of the Witch Lemmings?" and get their feedback on how best to run it and what to make easier/harder/better. But unfortunately the official adventures just seem to focus on the things that 4e has already made really easy for me - making encounters. I can do that bit, it's really easy! Make tons of cool plot, locations, items, traps, the stuff I can't do on my own!
Magic items are often a bit on the naff side as well - like they're scared to be too good because they might wreck your game. Perhaps it's because players are supposed to choose their own magic items. My players have never really been into the whole "item lists for the DM to give you" thing - I know what their characters are and when it comes to finding treasure I just have them find stuff that I think would work well with their characters. They're not the kind of players who read a lot about mechanics and how best to munch their characters between sessions so they tend to be happy with what they find, though they always want more!
This has been a really long whiny post, but there are things I really love about 4e. Making encounters is an absolute breeze compared to every other system I have ever played. If I'm in that DM-who-also-has-a-real-job situation of having to come up with an adventure in the car home from work, I can spend that fifteen minutes thinking of my plot and NPCs because I know I can just take four brutes of the right level and a controller to stand at the back, chuck some Crayolas at my party and say, "Draw me the Orc King's throne room" and it'll just work. I'm not going to pretend it'll be the most amazing encounter ever, but for 60 seconds of design it's pretty damn good.
