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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4860859" data-attributes="member: 40961">Given five or six consecutive sessions, I experience this in a lot of game systems. Temperamentally, I am a competitor gamer.  I don't mean that I compete with the party, I just mean that I want to win.  Whatever the goal is, I want it to be challenging and I want to win at it.  If we're playing a game where the goal is to figure out who murdered the Duke, I want to win at that.  If we're playing Paranoia and the goal is to pin all failures on my party members and stab them in the back without getting caught, I want to win at that.  And so on. Combat is a sort of sub goal in most games.  You want to win in combat. And my problem is that most RPG combat sucks.  All too frequently it boils down to making up a description of what your attack looks like, then tossing a dice.  Its got all the challenge of playing a slot machine, albeit one with an imaginative element. Now, I generally can have fun for a while describing combat with a particular character and a particular game system.  So this problem doesn't crop up instantly. But over a period of time (a shorter period the more fighting in the game), I stop having fun with combat.  This doesn't mean that the whole game starts to suck, there may be other fun things to do besides combat.  But inevitably we get back to combat, and there I sit, finding my combat descriptions more and more repetitive as time goes by, and finding a significant portion of the game to be actively unpleasant. In contrast, character building isn't a thing you can "win."  At most, "winning" in character creation, for me, is effectively tweaking the system to make whatever it is I'm imagining.  So I might still have a lot of fun making characters for a game system that I've grown sick of. And with a break, and some time spent in another game system, I can usually go back to the one I've grown tired of and have fun again.  Its not a permanent thing. Ultimately that's a big part of why I like 4e.  Combat is sufficiently tactical that it provides a challenge, even if the challenge is just to demolish a particular set of enemies as quickly as possible in a fight that I, looking at the board and understanding the game as I do, know I will inevitably win.  And meanwhile the stuff in between combat is just as freeform or rules based as it is in most games.</blockquote>

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