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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mustrum_Ridcully" data-source="post: 4546458" data-attributes="member: 710">Thasmodious, it is not about being unimaginative to dislike Encounter powers. Just like it doesn't have anything to do not willing to manage an expensive spell list or count power attack variables in head or recalculate attack bonuses based on ability score modifications.ExploderWizard, it's not lazy design to use encounter powers instead of a more involved method that achieves similar results. It is about deciding what you prefer from your game. Some people like to think of every rule element as representing something clearly defined in the game world - no fancy "narrative control" of players involved, just saying: I want to hit harder (maybe even make a called shot) - sure I expect this to be more difficult, but I always want this option. I want to see them, I don't want it abstracted by saying "this is the round where you might actually have a chance to pull of your hard-hitting attack". Even if this means I need to crunch a few numbers and spend a lot of time working out the math to play effectively - or just the character I envision to play. Or it's about choosing a high degree of usability and a fast playability, without taking away gameplay depth and tactical challenges. It's about making things more predictable, evoking a certain theme by rules (without the ability to change the theme with easy modifications), it is about making the play quick to learn but hard to master, but without loading people with statistics or number crunching - even if this costs us some "close to character immersion"...There is no unimaginative and no laziness involved. It's all about preferences and the goals the player has and the goals the designers had with their system, and whether these goals match and are achieved. But it wouldn't be the same kind of gamist fun. That's the difference. In the end, it all comes down to taking your enemy out. You could resolve this with 250 die rolls, or with just one. The goal is to find something that's neither too complex, nor too easy, so there are "tactics" in playing effectively and good and bad decisions to be made when selecting from options. In 4E, part of the approach is to make decision at play time more important then decisions at creation time and decisions during combat more important then decisions at "start-of-the-day-spell-selection-and-buffing" time.</blockquote>

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