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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ydars" data-source="post: 4264540" data-attributes="member: 62992">I haven't played 4E properly but have got KoTS and ran through a few of the encounters to test out the system, playing all the characters and monsters myself. I ran the first three encounters 3-4 times, trying out different tactics, adding in monsters occasionally to gauge the effect.A few thoughts;1) Low level combats go on a long time compared with those for 3.5E (I mean in terms of number of rounds); some encounters were lasting 8-15 rounds and though I have seen many combats this long in 3.5E, they were all at much higher levels. Some of this was the fact that the PCs missed alot. Those people who have played many encounters; do you think the battles go on longer than the average 3.5E encounter? The battles feel more like chipping away than epic somehow because the HPs are so big. This might lead to the temptation to use daily powers at the wrong time......................2) Concentrating attacks on one character is LETHAL. In 3.5E, this rarely occured because many of the monsters were solos. In 4E, it can be the reverse of the "whole party attacks the lone monster" syndrome.I would not like to be playing the cleric or Palladin in this game; though everyone can heal, the soundest tactic for a monster appears to be to drop those two PCs as fast as possible (I mean kill outright) so that the party cannot heal more than once (using second wind). Once they are dead, the party becomes alot more fragile. I proved this to myself by adding in two extra slingers in the first KoTS encounter and killed 3 PCs; the other 2 had to run (fighter and Rogue) and had both used all their encounter and daily powers. Only the slingers survived out of the monsters (I had them use a round to climb onto the rock stacks before combat began and also allowed the monsters surprise to see the effect) but it was purely down to killing the cleric and Palladin. If I didn't kill them then the party always won.I cannot see how people can say that 4E is less lethal than 3,5E; if a PC is down then they are much more likely to be killed because of the automatical critical hit rule. I also feel that, despite second winds etc, PCs will go down more frequently if the monsters concentrate their attacks. I also feel that missile weapon wielding monsters are much more deadly than the strict XP cost would suggest, when used in combination with a few melee monsters.I am not complaining, as I like PC death; it just seems that one of the design goals falls apart if you use any sort of tactics or am I missing something? I guess some might say it is GM metagaming, but since the players do this sort of tactical gaming all the time, I don't really see that this is a valid argument.I guess that one thing against this is the idea that although the monsters "win" the fight (PCs dead etc) the monsters themselves have been pasted and so realistically they would not behave like this. Yet, if they don't kill the PCs, there is much more chance that they will die.Any thoughts on this from those of you lucky enough to have played a few actual games?</blockquote>

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