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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5670685" data-attributes="member: 82106">Eh, you know, I think the heart of it isn't anything to do with classes and items and powers really.The problem is that encounter design is too much of a science. 4e solved designing encounters, and in the process ironically it broke the game. Every level N monster has almost exactly N + 12 NADs and N + 14 AC, and X HP. It isn't impossible to make interesting monsters but fundamentally they are all largely similar. You'll have some minor variation in defenses, and monster powers mostly vary reasonably in a tactical sense, but making a monster that is ponderous for instance doesn't really come off. It still has a high reflex defense. Having an N + 10 reflex simply isn't enough to make the players even NOTICE let alone give it adequate flavor. So monsters eventually come off feeling a bit bland and there's barely any point in them having 4 different defenses. MM3 monsters have perfected the current design, but it is just a bland design concept. Piled on top of watering down special effects 4e monsters are rather vanilla lot overall.Then we have the heart of the problem, which is there's just not that much fundamental variation in encounters. Back in the AD&D days you had a few very different 'types' of encounters. You had the 'meat' (IE some orcs, you hacked on them, cast a spell on them maybe, etc) which was kinda like your 4e encounters. Then you had your 'surprise' encounters (IE oops that pillar is really a roper, oh crap). Then you had your solo encounters where the monster could crisp the whole party in an instant if you didn't figure out a way to work around it (IE a dragon), and your 'poison pill' encounters with things like cockatrices. You also had more dimensions of variation. You could make an encounter with a few high damage monsters with mediocre defenses that went down fast but put the ouch on people, like giants. You could also make an encounter that revolved around outlasting a bunch of weaker monsters. 4e encounters are built around a specific formula at the core. You can't really easily create most of the full range you could get back in the day. Each encounter FEELS like an equal battle against a roughly equal number of tough, durable, relatively low damage opponents. There are elements of the design that are obviously intended to work against that, monsters have an encounter power they can all unleash at the start of the fight to rock the party back and make fights a slightly uphill battle, but it is all much more muted than it was in AD&D.The narrowed range between PCs in 4e has great utility. The narrowed range between monsters not so much. It is easy to understand what the motivation was, but there was too much of a focus on that and too little provision made for going outside it. You CAN mechanically do all of this stuff, but it is just beaten into the DM that things follow a pattern and every existing monster is built around those concepts.If I wanted to give 4e a kick in the ass I'd burn all the MMs, all the encounter building guidelines/rules, and just rewrite that whole aspect of the game. You don't have to change ANY actual mechanics at the table, just use them differently. Some similar things can be said about items too, though I don't think that's really near as important in the long run.So, yes, 4e can adopt a LOT of elements of older editions in a sense and doesn't require any significant mechanical changes. It is a good system that has mostly just been hamstrung by a determined focus on doing things one specific way instead of accepting that RPGs are wonky and simply can't be systematized to the degree WotC would desire.</blockquote>

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