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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Oofta" data-source="post: 9438992" data-attributes="member: 6801845">The biggest issues were conditions, interrupts, reactions, auras, aftereffects. When I first started DMing and a PC was affected by a condition I would just put a token on that PC's min and ask the player to remember.  Every time it came around to that players turn and I'd ask what the condition was they'd develop amnesia and couldn't remember what it was.  Eventually I had a chart with more than a dozen different markers indicating what the conditions were.  But it really slowed down the game and made it difficult to keep track of everything.  Not just what the monsters were doing to the PCs, but everything the PCs could do to my monsters.There were so many interrupts, reactions, auras.  You really had to pay close attention to every monster.  A person enters an aura? Something happens.  The enemy triggers something, what is it?  Having a monster now and then that had a special attack and special aftereffects of that attack, recharge abilities and so on, but it was very wide spread.  Then we have PC interrupts, etc.  At higher levels a single round of combat could take more than an hour (we timed it once).Then there was the restrictive nature of the rules.  Maybe this was something that varied, but especially when you're running a public game you're supposed to more-or-less adhere to the rules.  That could really limit creative solutions.  There were many times when I was playing and the DM would tell me that I couldn't do something because there was a power that did something like it and I couldn't steal their cheese.  I regularly had people question my DMing because I would have the monsters do things that were within their capabilities that I just did for descriptive flavor.  I like running a more free-form game but I always felt like I was handcuffed by the rules.Last, but not least, complicated powers and outright cheating. Maybe this wasn't wide spread, but I ran a lot of LFR (public games).  Because every power was so unique and there were so many powers spread amongst multiple books.  I couldn't remember them all so I would ask people to explain what the powers did.  Thing is, a handful of players would just flat out lie and make their power into something it wasn't.  Like the guy who would say that his power "ate the action surge of an enemy" when it did nothing like that.  I generally want to trust players and give them the benefit of the doubt, but I never let that player use another power unless he could show me the original text from the book.  But even if people were trying to be open and fair, you really had to read some powers to understand them.  Will likely always be somewhat of an issue but 4E increased this type of complexity dramatically.So that's it off the top of my head.  Obviously other people had different experiences and some of the issues were because, as I stated, I ran a lot of public games where we were expected to stay pretty close to the rules.EDIT: typo</blockquote>

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