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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7749207" data-attributes="member: 996">well, then you missed jillions of gigapoops of......nah, you didn't miss anything. Skill based systems go all the way back to Traveler & RQ, but skill-challenge-like structures were more a 90s new-wave innovation, not even Storyteller quite went there, so by D&D standards, adopting a radical new idea after less than 20 tears was wildly innovative..<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> It also changed conceptual access to the niches, you didn't 'need a cleric' anymore, if the odd player out 'stuck' filling the role was allergic to religion he could play an Artificer or Warlord......or the party could do without - everyone still had surges & second wind. I ran Encounters for years, and introduced many brand-new players to the system.  Without preconceptions, it was startlingly easy to do so.  The presentation of the characters, whether off-line CB or Encounters pregen seemed intuitive enough (It wasn't to me: if it wasn't a dense form on goldenrod, it wasn't a D&D sheet!).   It did add up.  Every character had something useful/interesting, and sometimes a bit involved to do most rounds.  Until Essentials, nobody took as long as prior-ed casters could, but everyone took longer than "I attack, hit/miss, n damage."You mean MC'd humans? Well, even humans had the character-with-two-classes option... it assumed more than it nerfed, really.  I've run a long 4e campaign that's mid-Epic at this point, and they haven't had a defender in like 12 levels or so.  The controller role was broadly accepted as dispensable, everyone had surges, and everyone did damage, so niether leader nor striker functionality was ever entirely lacking.And, each class had a 'secondary' role - a party with a WIS cleric wasn't that hurt'n for control, a paladin could do quite a bit of healing &buffing, warlord builds could off-tank, and so forth.Again, many years experience with Encounters: even at low level, when secondary roles were least developed, you could throw together parties if whatever folks wanted to play, have different players each week and generally do fine......though there'd be times a role was missed, it wouldn't lead to a TPK or adventure-halting hard fail the way niche protection could  Again, every edition had niche-protection, and absolutely needed certain classes (and, often, magic items), MMOs /coppied/ that. The key trick of surges was that they powered most healing, so you could do without the cleric, and if someone actually wanted to play one, they never had to choose between a cool spell and yet more healing... The poor bard, it had such a long slog to viability.  At least it made progress every ed ..</blockquote>

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