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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 4473382" data-attributes="member: 18280">I should note that this is not what I meant when I said that what can challenge the PCs without killing them has become narrower.The way I see it,X = what you can recover from after a fight.  This includes not only hit points, but also ability uses and resources (equipment)Y = what you cannot recover from after a fight, but that which does not kill you (including expended abilities, resources, etc.).z = what it takes to kill you.In general, X + Y = Z.The broader the band of X, the more fights you can have in a single day.  But, if the fight doesn't threaten Y, then it is ultimately a speed bump.  Therefore, it is the width of Y that determines the range of potentially meaningful fights.  The more Y you can strip away from a character, the more the character can be meaningfully "hurt" from the fight without necessarily being threatened by death.IMHO, the X band in 4e is wider than in earlier editions, meaning that you can have far more fights, but the Y band is narrower, meaning that there is a smaller range between "meaningful" and "dead".As the shine wears off, I predict that players will begin to discover that fights threating only X are speed bumps, and will not be interested in them.  They will want fights that threaten Y.  And they will learn tricks (as gamers do) to broaden the band of X, encroaching on what was Y, to increase their chances of "winning".And I suspect that there will be splatbooks to help them do that, because that's what sells.The neat thing about this is that it is a prediction, so whether I am right or wrong (while being somewhat subjective, as we seem utterly unable to register the number of complaints made as a community until WotC does it for us!) is at least theoretically knowable.RC</blockquote>

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