Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5763549" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I agree that 4e's sort of default mode is that you can muddle through with your inherent resources. Any given encounter is likely to be balanced such that at worst you can go full out and you should win, and the DM isn't encouraged to go beyond that point. The DMG really should have talked about this (amongst other things, gosh that thing should be 1000 pages, eh). My solution is that you often run into encounters that simply aren't beatable by whacking things on the skull harder. You've got to get across the chasm of fire before the endless droves of skeleton minions from the black cauldron overwhelm the party, or you have to rescue the princess and the only way to do it is to cut the rope, slide down the ramp, and jump in the boat, or whatever. Now, players will find ways to use powers or (if you get them to gather some intel ahead of time) rituals, etc to get around those things, but that's fine too. The funny thing is that while combat works brilliantly in 4e, all the best fun is still had when killing stuff isn't really the main aspect of the situation. THAT IMHO is where good old AD&D was at. You really didn't want to solve problems with your sword. It wasn't that you couldn't. It just wasn't efficient. It was a fallback plan or at most one element of something more elaborate. The rules could be tweaked to make this more the case in 4e, but at the same time, it is not really necessary to do that. The DM just has to understand what to focus on. There is just very little real guidance there, and frankly it is a lot easier to put together 5 encounters of melee combat and call it a day than to make a really good action adventure.</blockquote>

Verification