NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5982157" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, lets imagine a 1e game. You can throw a few orcs against the party, maybe they're just a random encounter, maybe they're just 1 in a series of encounters in some orc lair. There's no real embellishment you HAVE to provide. This kind of encounter is both potentially dangerous and at the same time very casual, the orcs won't do anything weird or exciting, everyone knows they're orcs. It may take a few rounds to kill them, but you can run through it pretty quickly. There are no exciting tactics that are going to make any real difference. It is basically a throwaway encounter.4e encounters are almost never throw aways. You can DO that, but it is going to be a trivial encounter in that there will be no real danger (or at most does anyone have to spend a surge afterwards) if you make it say 5 minion orcs. The game just isn't designed around that sort of thing. You can stick 5 regular orcs in a room and 4e will handle it, and you'll have a boring 30 minutes of hacking. What you really want is something more. In fact what you NEED is something more. Some goal, some purpose that exists within the plot of whatever the adventure is beyond "get past this room". At LEAST you need the encounter itself to be an interesting story in a self-contained fashion (IE with some sort of terrain and/or whatever). The focus on the overall story should always be there, or some drama or interest inherent in the situation that drives things and makes it truly interesting. At least for me the old AD&D style encounters were fun for a while but we wanted more and needed more, and at least for me I found the stuff beyond the basic mechanics of having a fight was better enabled by 4e. It isn't REALLY as easy a game to get everything out of, OTOH there is more there to get out IMHO. More flexibility and easier to access it, but also more demand to do so (maybe because of that).</blockquote>

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