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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gorgoroth" data-source="post: 6107650" data-attributes="member: 6674889">Re: Various editions tricks to survive :  I played an AD&D evoker who used stoneskin quite a bit, and it's probably the ONLY reason I lasted until 14th level. It didn't feel like cheating, since a single arrow or swing, hit or miss, would remove one layer. That said, it was a massive buff to my melee companions, and I doled it out in return for favours and protection. But that's a good thing. I know 3e had tons of issues too, with massively broken combos and unbalanced classes. On the other hand, not only did I play a 4e campaign for three years, I also played several side adventures with various other DMs, and by and large we felt like we had death immunity. It was kind of cool for a while, thinking, ok, my character is tough and not gonna whiff as a result of a single unlucky roll, but it was too much molly-coddling, all those things combined, the self-healing to full every 5 minutes like the cat that came back (the very next day), it was almost comical how little we needed a cleric in any of those games. When we did have a warlord or cleric, we totally p0wned the monsters. Then to try and challenge it up at paragon levels, we did the whole "double enemy damage but halve their HP", and while it made things more swingy, we still made it though, it just meant I actually had to USE my inspiring word. 1/2 the time the other players didn't even really care about the extra 1d6. Case in point, using a standard action for your second wind. Nobody ever used that, because they rarely came close to dying. Running out of surges was also an annoying chore, because as a paladin, I did burn through a ton of surges, while the wizard never came close, and the warden always had 3-4 left at the end of the day. So when you have unneccessary surges silo'ed in support classes back pockets, what to do you? Comrades Succor! Then things got really ridiculous, because we just tore through enemies, even a couple levels higher than us, like nothing. Part of it was the asymmetry of tactics, we the players had just much more time to hone our battle grid tactics, and the DM was more interested in story than becoming a master chess player. Aside from all those issues, even if there are broken stuff in other editions, you can and should house rule a few things to fix them, but in 4e, you had to basically fudge so many things to make it believable and a challenge, using CR +6 monsters, drastically reducing party magic item budgets (leading to combats that dragged on and on...something I've never seen in other games. in a PF final battle that lasted 3 hours, we fought and killed DOZENS of enemies, flew through an underground drow city, controlled armies, and chased a demon out a portal into another dimension. In 4e that would have taken us probably two days of real time combat to do the same thing. It was just too much micromanagement of every little action you can do, and at the end of it what was the reward? Woo, some magic items that you're not interested in because by Paragon you're already "locked in" to your build and favorite items and don't care that much. And the thrill goes down because, hey, it's just another demon, right? Maybe other 4e DMs were more capable of challenging the PCs, but Irontooth was probably the only real deadly encounter of 4e. It's too bad, because that I remember, was actually fun. Sure we had fun other times, but not as much as other systems, in the same amount of time. Just the narrative options is like having a comic book vs an actual book. When I'm playing with my friends, I like having a comic book pace, I don't need the fine play by play. And no matter what the edition, once the PCs are too tough to be threatened, it's time to start adding in some house rules to compensate. At least we can all agree it's better if they get it right, level 1-20, from the start. Beacause then "house rules" become more like tweaks, and less like plug in gaping holes in the math-fixes. IMO the problem with Expertise in 4e wasn't that without it you were "gimped", it's that combat dragged on and that's no fun for either side of the table. The trick is, to make PCs reasonably killable without being paper tigers, and yet have challenge not be synonymous with grind.</blockquote>

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