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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7010621" data-attributes="member: 82106">I'm just still having trouble absorbing this. I consider it to be a misunderstanding of the function of combat in D&D (generally, not even 4e). Combat can ALWAYS be arranged so as to be arbitrarily dangerous in any edition of the game. 4e is built around interesting tactical combat scenes where the characters and monsters use a lot of tactics and do interesting things. In this sort of game fights will obviously be assumed to be frequent and engaging in them is the most common situation. This mandates that they be pretty consistent in their difficulty, otherwise random tosses of the dice (as would be the case in say low-level 1e combat) will simply end each character quickly by chance. DIFFICULTY in the more general sense of how much tactical acumen, rules knowledge, clever inventiveness, or story-telling ability is required to insure victory is a bit different. Its reasonable to believe that most players can overcome most encounters, otherwise most games would be short and brutal, but its not inherent to the rules that this always be the case (and it shouldn't always be the case I would think). In 1e survival was probably not much less likely, but it was a lot more random, and that fed into the skilled play narrative of avoiding hazards that could be avoided. So your 1e average encounter (one with an encounter of a dungeon level equal to your PC level, roughly) can be pretty difficult, but survivable. Just how difficult, and if it engaged a lot of skilled play (say to avoid something like a basilisk vs risking death) or not depends on the encounter.I think that the way people play 4e, they expect less characters to die, but they don't expect less challenge in play. Certainly I made my games pretty challenging. Often parties were thwarted in their aims, though this always led to some further development that created even more interesting situations, of course. Now, if you create a port of some 5e module into 4e, then the question might be more like how much is it reliant on skilled play and how much is a story-based adventure? I'd guess that most of the 5e adventures are pretty close to 4e in that sense, and not so much like 1e. I base this on the number of character options you get at start in 5e and the way 5e's rules generally work. Its not a game where you'd want to die from a stray arrow and roll a new character.</blockquote>

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