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Message: <blockquote data-quote="sunrisekid" data-source="post: 5654646" data-attributes="member: 57326">The Warlock obligation is to acquire terrible secrets for the purpose of setting up a cult/religion for the Patron.  Plenty of roleplay opportunities and stories to mine!  What is tricky is folding this stuff into the over-all game arc, ie, an arc that other players can get on board with.  It's not necessarily in the interests of the other characters to assist with an otherwise nefarious sub-plot; eg, one of the characters is a dragonborn knight - the tension arising from this interplay is humorous but there appears to be little room for exploring the Warlock angle in the broader context.  At best so far, the player is able to slip in a few comments concerning the obligation, which I can reply to, but it's still an "oh, and…" situation.That said, this is a classic gaming tension going back to the earliest iterations of the game - one player wants to be Evil, the other Good, so how to reconcile..Regardless, playing out the goals of the Warlock Patron is mighty cool to keep in the game.  I completely agree with your earlier comments about how the Warlock is one of the most interesting character types in the game (my personal favorite is the Star Pact - the Lovecraftian flavour is great <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />I've noticed that the players are able to dish out quite a lot of damage in fights but the risk of death is still pretty close; the knight spends a lot of healing surges, the thief sneak attacks approximately every other turn, etc.  The party is not optimized or min-maxed in any way, so this is what may account for increased combat "friction" (in the Clauswitzian sense), requiring them to spend their resources.The players are able to use encounter powers not quite every other turn; many of their triggers are keyed to being bloodied (themselves or the opponent).  The Warlock and the Druid are the only characters that have dailies and, as mentioned earlier, they rarely use them.  There's no wizard.  We don't use a battlemap and we hand-wave the movement/shifting components; combined with high damage output and frequent healing surge expenditure, the fights have been rapid and a lot of fun.  I'm not seeing as much narrativizations of 4E combat mechanics but that might change in time when the players acclimatize.</blockquote>

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