Quasqueton said:
So how did this concept work out?
Quasqueton
Did 4e give us a better encounter design/CR/EL system than 3e? It sure thinks it did. That is, by 4e's standards, it did. On the other hand, by 3e's standards, it did not.
Here's what I mean by that. 4e had several goals for encounters. Some were:
A) Make encounters easy to DM at the table.
B) Make encounters easy to design.
C) Make encounters long enough so that the big bad survived until everyone (including the big bad) had a chance to do something cool.
D) A lesser goal of the design team, in my estimation, but one pertinent to this thread, is to make encounters more easily able to accommodate many creatures.
I'd say that A-C were accomplished by making monsters have tons of hit points and PCs do a lot less damage per swing. Unfortunately unstated goal E) Keep encounters threatening and exciting was, arguably, not met by virtue of that same solution (the grindspace problem).
Goal D), clearly, was addressed by minions. By 4e's standards, minions have succeeded. They allow players to do cool stuff, they are easy to DM, they are relatively easy to develop or select and place in an encounter.
But by 3e's standards, minions fail. Why? Because they don't make sense. Orcs don't die from stubbing a toe. This is an old argument. 3e says the combat rules must follow the physics of the game world. 4e says the game world's physics don't matter one iota in combat, and things that happen in combat are completely impossible, meaningless, or ineffectual outside of combat.
In a similar way, the 4e solution to A-C (high monster hp and low PC damage) is a failure by 3e standards because it sacrifices dynamism for predictability. But 4e specifically wanted predictability (to make it easier to design and build encounters), so by 4e's standards, the solution is a success.
Just pick which standards you like, I guess. I like 3e's standards. I play RPGs in part because they have an element of fiction in them, and for me, the fiction is ruined by inconsistent internal world logic. (Was 3e perfect in this regard? Nope. But it tried.)
Please note that it's particularly ironic that Mike Mearls is complaining the 3e rules commit the crime of preventing him from replicating the greatness of
The Keep on the Borderlands in light of his previous comments about that module.
RPGnet : The Inside Scoop on Gaming
Irony, thy name is Mearls.
Yep. Although, to be fair, everyone is entitled to change his opinion, and that review was written eight years prior to the design article. Still, with such a large opinion swing, there should have been some explanation of that preceding the design article.