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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5359055" data-attributes="member: 82106">You know, I have played D&D since pretty much the start of the thing. I remember when you could be a fighter, a cleric, or a magic user and thief wasn't even invented yet.Players have ALWAYS mostly stuck to the things that were built into the game. Especially when there wasn't a situation where they didn't have the tools on their character sheet to do what they needed to survive or get past an obstacle. Now, 4e certainly gives the players more built-in tools, so they don't have quite as much reason to improvise, but is that really the fault of the design of the game or is it more the result of the set-piece sort of adventure design that has prevailed? Lets go back to 1e, as a pretty well developed system. Encounter design was moderately haphazard. Adventure design overall was pretty set-piece, but without as cut-and-dried a definition of encounter things tended to vary a lot more in practice. For one thing with a low level party having only small resources of hit points and a few spells everything was problematic by definition. It is no joke a house cat could kill a 1st level PC. ALL situations were desperate and hardly any encounter was balanced. If it WAS balanced then it was either balanced with the MU's Sleep spell in mind (Magic Missile, pfft) or not and the presence or absence of that one spell made all the difference between it was a slaughter or a cake walk.In other words, if you want to see improvisation PUSH MORE. The canned 4e level+N encounter and then you get to rest thing is nice and reliable and it is fine in plenty of cases, but it is NOT the be-all and end-all of how the game should really run. I think the only real 'problem' with 4e is that the people designing these games have gotten so polished at creating a game that works excellently well in a specific way that they simply never really thought about what happens when you keep playing it. Pretty soon you need to venture out of their little garden, but they didn't really put a lot of signs out there telling you that. I think they have played so much and written so many games that they've kind of forgotten. The 4e DMGs have a lot of great ideas related to adventures and plots and story telling techniques, etc. What they really DON'T have is a lot about going outside the box with the basic bread-and-butter piece of the game, the encounter. Sure, they tell you a bunch about terrain and such things, but I think they needed to get more into what makes an encounter feel threatening and BE really interestingly challenging and what makes it tick as part of a larger whole. Old D&D was organic because nobody really designed it and those kinds of things didn't come up in the same way. It is hard to actually put it in words, but the difference isn't that players have more powers to play with, it is that they're now hit with basically the same situation over and over again.</blockquote>

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