Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5672072" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, there are 2 observations I would make here. 1 is that 4e isn't AD&D. You don't have wizards with the spell that answers every need. Honestly this wasn't really true in AD&D either in a lot of cases, but that's a whole other discussion. Buying consumables is still a feasible idea, and given how utterly ignored they are now how exactly would this hurt? The thing is BECAUSE you can get by PURELY on the basis of tactics employed during a fight, and the game very explicitly aims at this and thoroughly accomplishes it, you simply aren't motivated to do this. I'd also add other things to the mix, like using rituals. Perhaps I have chosen my words in a less than perfectly precise way. There is nothing wrong with tactics. However the game could afford to shift the focus somewhat from tactical gimmicks employed in combat and more towards STRATEGY employed both beforehand and in the direct run up to an encounter. This is an equally enjoyable area to explore and one that 4e has virtually gutted and left hanging. I have a few different ideas on how that could be accomplished, but some changes to encounter design would be the one which is most amenable to being implemented in 4e without any real rules changes.I disagree. Such an encounter can simply be carried out now. You will find that it is utterly trivial and has no impact on resources. Thus it is not useful in case 1 as it is a hollow consequence (unless you count punishing the players by making them play a useless encounter). Case 2 is equally useless in any mechanical sense. Case 3 is perfectly valid, but again we can do this already. There are other types of encounters though, and many times monsters COULD despite Catastrophic etc believing otherwise use some added differentiation. Ponderous monsters could have REF reduced enough to actually be noticed above the noise floor of the game for instance, and the same with monsters that can be characterized by other variations in defenses. Likewise some variations in hit points and AC would be quite useful without the requirement to shift all the other numbers as a whole. Your average general purpose monsters are fine as they are, but I find that I get considerably better results when I do this. You can also add somewhat more radical powers and traits in some cases than WotC has apparently felt comfortable doing. It requires some care, and that's to be expected. The baseline encounters BY THEMSELVES without consideration of the whole game, work pretty well. They simply fall into too narrow a range of possibilities.</blockquote>

Verification