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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4737536" data-attributes="member: 40961">Every fight should involve risk.  Ok. What does risk mean?  Does it mean that there's a chance that at least one character will die?  What is the source of that chance?  Does it have to mean that there's a chance that a character will die due to random rolls of the dice?  Or does it mean that there's a chance that a character will die if you don't play intelligently?  Obviously its a gradient, but some people will feel that characters dying due to random throws of the die is unfair, and will prefer to be judged by their skill and teamwork.  Other people will feel that if skill and teamwork can prevent character death, there's no real risk because they'll just do the smart thing in any given situation and no one will die. 4e has adopted a system that is very favorable for people who feel that character death due to random throws of the die are unfair, and who prefer to be judged on skill and teamwork.  It did so by creating a game where characters are regularly injured, even critically injured, even on the ground bleeding out injured, but where their team as a whole almost always has the resources available to rescue them or even to plan in advance and prevent any one character from taking more injury than can be healed. The ultimate result of this is that, if you HAVE skill and teamwork, (almost) no one will die. If you don't... then yeah, characters die.  But almost always in contexts where, looking back, you can see things you could have done differently and prevented the character's death. I guess the upshot of this is that "the beef" in an encounter in 4e is supposed to be the chance to use your abilities and work with your allies to accomplish something difficult.  Difficult doesn't mean "random odds create a chance that you will die."  It means "we worked hard to get this." So to the extent that you feel that the player's proficiency and careful play is negating "the beef" in your encounters, you may be wrong.  They may be having a fine time with everything, may be feeling the tension of having to plan carefully and work together.  The fact that they DO work together doesn't mean that doing so wasn't tense, interesting, and fun for them.  It might, but it doesn't necessarily.  Depends a lot on personality type. If you don't like this form of excitement (and if neither do your players), and you're not willing to budge on running multiple encounters per day, you may need another game system or significant changes to 4e.  Alternately, you may need to talk to your players about their builds and insistence on rest.  4e can do one fight a day gaming, but it looks like your group has carefully extracted the only way to exploit one fight a day gaming, and given it to every character.  My 10th level group, by contrast, can't nova simply because all of our best abilities are tied up in incompatible duration powers, and we can't trigger more than a handful of healing surges per fight. It sounds like what you really should want is a game where all non-at-will abilities are per encounter, including healing surges.  That would optimize the sense of danger per encounter and make the number of encounters per day perfectly scaleable.  Of course, it would also destroy the idea of resource management across the course of the day or multiple encounters.  But both you and your players seem to be carefully avoiding any use of that aspect of the game system, so that wouldn't be a loss to you.</blockquote>

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