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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Retreater" data-source="post: 7895960" data-attributes="member: 42040">I tried two 4e campaigns within the past year. Even though we liked the tactical depth and balance of the game, combats ended taking up too much time. The other issue I faced was irregular attendance, which upset the party dynamics by missing out on critical party roles. In the end, some of the players enjoyed it. It wasn't terrible, but I just couldn't make it work. We're now trying Pathfinder 2e as a "happy medium" between 4e and 5e. We'll see how that goes.But I don't fault anyone for wanting to give it a try. It's a solid system in many regards. Of all its issues, I think the biggest weakness was bad adventure design. In particular the H1-E3 adventure series (which I did try to run in the past year) was a big downfall. It was written with the design paradigms of previous editions - a bunch of meaningless fights designed to chip away at party resources. This is fine in editions in which combats are over in a matter of minutes, but when a combat can take 1-2 hours (or longer in the case of paragon or epic tiers), you can't reasonably make it through the adventures.In my experience, for 4e to be successful the DM should cut down significantly the number of combat encounters faced, speed up the encounters that are there (using some of the tips in this thread), then rely on Skill Challenges and Roleplay to fill in the gaps.</blockquote>