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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 8272807" data-attributes="member: 58416">I also remember complaints about Skill Challenge math in 4E.Yes, it is true that Monster Math was the most common gripe. However, it was far from the only issue, simply the most visible one.The Skill Challenge math in DMG1 was a little wonky; the "fix" in DMG2 could make things a little too easy, so neither was quite right. I vaguely remember sitting down with both books and eventually coming up with my own set of PCs which used both to inform my choices but matched neither.Personally, one of my main issues with 4E was that there were three sets of (for lack of better words) Physics Engine Math in 4E: PC Math, Monster Math, and World Math. I disliked that PC Math and Monster Math interacted with World Math in drastically different ways. To clarify, I was okay with monsters being constructed differently than PCs, but it was weird to me that supposedly epic horrors of the world could sometimes struggle to do things which were trivial for a PC interacting with the world around them.In time, I also learned that some of the weapon math was a problem. A lot of small ones and twos could lead to a PC failing to keep up. Choosing something like an axe (which had less of a bonus to hit) seems like it shouldn't be a big deal, but I've been at tables where that choice at first level put a player behind where the rest of the table was at when the group made it to level 10. A lot of things in 4E worked really well, and much of the math was finely tuned. However, there were odd quirks of how it was built too. Side note: I may be misremembering how this works because it has been a while, but I think this is accurate. I thought that the later way of doing resistances was weird. In the early books, if my character had Fire Resistance and I was hit with a power which had the Fire and Acid keywords, my resistance would apply to half of the damage. Later, that was changed to saying that the resistance didn't work at all; my PC would need both resistances to resist the damage. I understand that, in theory, this change was to make math easier at the table, but I believe it was a change which lead to a lot of late 4E shenanigans in which a PC could collect obscure keywords as a way to circumvent monster resistances. The need for system mastery was supposed to be lessened in 4E.Somewhere, I have a notebook in which I started to redo a lot of the math for the game. It wasn't a drastic departure from how the game was already built; it was more of sitting down and figuring out how I could keep the idea behind how the game was built but also fix things I saw as problems. Things I had finished were encounter XP guidelines, changing how elites and solos were built, and skill challenge structure and math.I stopped working on it because the group started to play other games. By the time we had thought about trying 4E again, 5E was being released.</blockquote>

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