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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 4441116" data-attributes="member: 63">I play music during combat, because one of my friends ran a Conan game, and showed us the power of the Conan soundtrack. Without the soundtrack, we would swing swords and stab people. With the soundtrack we'd ready to pounce onto the snout of the two-headed tyrannosaur and plunge our blades into its eyes, or swing under a rope bridge, cling to its underside with our mightily-thewn arms, and crawl under our foes in order to grab their ankles through the floor of the bridge and rip them through the bottom to hurl them into the lava below.So I came to like combat soundtracks, and I noticed that whenever the really cool parts of certain tracks were about to come on, people would hurry to explain something awesome, and we'd get cool combat scenes.Now I've started my fourth edition game, and on Sunday I had what should have been an epic combat (I think). A waterfall-carved cave with multiple side tunnels, infested with dog-sized carnivorous beetles, all controlled by a huge stone elemental in the shape of a praying mantis (basically it had the stats of an umber hulk). I'd made sure to figure out how I'd handle it when the PCs decided to climb the thing's back to get away from its claws, and how they could briefly cripple it by targeting its legs, and I made sure the terrain provided lots of ways to get above the monster and jump down on it without actually letting the PCs stay out of its reach and snipe. But when the combat actually occurred, every player paused on his round, shuffled through his power cards, pondered, and said, 'I'll use this X to do Y, and you get 3 temporary hit points' or stuff like that.No jumping, no climbing, no dropping stalactites on its head or ducking between its legs so it couldn't use its gaze attack on you.Has anyone else noticed powers getting in the way of originality and heroic moments in 4th edition? Do you have any suggestions for how to encourage players to think like an action star, instead of a video game player with a move list?(To be fair, in a different combat the same session, the eladrin warlord did chase after a flying angel that had grabbed an NPC, then teleported next to the angel and in mid-air used some warlord power that let him trade places with the enemy on a hit, causing the angel to lose its grip on the NPC. I thought that was cool.)</blockquote>

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