D&D 3E/3.5 Does 4e sound more D&Dish to you than 3e did?

[pemerton]

Dr. Awkward: I find your responce to be internally contridictory, which I suppose is a natural result of wanting to have your cake and eat it to.

On the one hand you admit that 1e fights were easy and you want to recapture that feel, yet you say that you also want them to be challenging. How can they be both? Either they are challenging or they are not.

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It's impossible to make the mooks both absolutely weaker and absolutely stronger at the same time.

The last sentence is true. But it does not entail that the easy cannot be challenging, provided that (i) the ease and challenge in question are not absolute, or (ii) the ease is for the PCs, but the challenge for the players.

I guess the goal is this:
A fight against dozens of mooks, that still have a reasonable chance of hurting and possibly overpowering the PCs (at least one of them), but still favouring the PCs if they fight smart enough.

I think that notion of "fighting smart enough" is the key. My impression is that one of the design goals of 4e is to make both (i) and (ii) above true: the ease/challenge of an encounter will be non-absolute, and it will be challenging for the players to make an encounter easy for their PCs.

The idea I have in mind is that effective play will bring it about that an encounter is easy (ie poses no real threat of death/defeat to the PCs). The challenge for the players, then, will be of engaging in that effective play - which doesn't mean training their dice to roll 20s rather than 1s, but rather deploying their abilities (both of each individual PC, and with effective integration across the party - introducing per-encounter abilities will be an important part of this) so that the numbers never tip in favour of their foes.

I'll admit that the above paragraph is a fairly abstract description. The game that I am most familiar with which comes somewhat close to this design goal is Rolemaster - an encounter between high-level PCs and mook-ish foes is somewhat challenging to the players (they have to make sensible decisions about attack vs parry, about positional considerations, about optimising spell use and adrenal moves, etc), but played well is easy for the PCs. I GM such encounters on a regular basis, and they are fun for the players because they require the players to think about how to use their PCs' abilities. I wouldn't recommend a game in which they are the only sorts of encounters faced, but I don't think the 4e DMG will recommend a game with nothing but mook encounters either.

For a fighter in 3E, I would say that the aspect of the game that comes closest to this sort of play is the Power Attack decision, which gives the player of a fighter a chance to alter the probabilties within the encounter in her/his PC's favour. I expect that 4e will have much more of this sort of thing, which interact with movement, position, to-hit and damage chances, hit-point recovery and so on, all of which will be intended to give the players something interesting to do in bringing it about that their PCs have an easy time of it.

Of course, I may be wrong about this design goal, but to me it makes the most sense of all the announcements I have heard. And even if I am right, the designers may not pull it off. And even if they do, it will further change the character of D&D from what it once was, by further driving a wedge between the metagame experience of the players (mechanical challenge as they deal with the game rules), and the in-game experience of the PCs (easy combat as they wipe the floor with mooks).