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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zustiur" data-source="post: 4513888" data-attributes="member: 1544">It all boils down to options.To achieve homogeneous balance 4E has instituted a fairly clear formula.[taking 1st level only here just for the sake of brevity]4 at wills, each dealing [w].4 Encounters, each dealing [2w]4 Dailies, each dealing [2w]+effect or [3w]Yes I know it's more complex than that but follow on for now...How do you fit an illusionist into that pattern? You need to create 12 1st level spells that use the illusion keyword to... deal damage.One of the things I've been looking forward to playing in 3E is a utility wizard. One that has very few if any damaging spells. I was thinking illusion would be a good way to go, but that's just one option of many, including a non specialist wizard that happens to choose non damaging spells. Please explain to me how I can create a utility wizard in 4E? How can I choose spells that aren't 'damage + effect', or just plain damage?Where are the options to play characters that can incapacitate an opponent without dealing damage?I feel that this is the essence of KarinsDad's responses. Sure you can be creative with the spells provided. You can recolour them, reskin them and do all sorts of wonderful things with their effects, but ultimately they (almost) all deal damage to grind the creature down to 0hp. Imagine the pacifist spellcaster in a roleplay heavy campaign - Need to get past a guard? Hold person.Need to win friends and influence people? Charm personNeed to slow the angry mob without killing or maiming (and thus making them an angrier mob!)? Entangle works well.All of these options are missing. Not by total omission, but by generalization. The pacifist is an extreme example, and not the crux of the argument on it's own. I recognize that pacifists are not what DND is about. I merely pose it as a way of underlining the point. Some of those spells still exist, but you're restricted to using them so rarely that they may as well not be.Much as in the threads about craft and profession skills; The point is not that those skills are especially useful in the generic DND game, it's that they provide options to move away from the generic DND play style. More room to move = more potential for fun.The rules of 4E focus much more heavily on 'find monster, kill, loot' than recent editions (I can't speak for 1E and earlier). That rubs a lot of players up the wrong way. DND has moved from a roleplaying system towards a combat simulator. This is where the MMO feel kicks in. It's an inevitable comparison given the prevalence of such games at present. Personally I prefer the boardgame comparison, because it's a better representation of the balance we're dealing with here.The massively boosted hitpoints for monsters goes a long way to exaggerate the problem. In my second session of 4E I was already sick of having to wear down kobolds. They're kobolds for goodness sake! Why aren't they dying? Maybe we can get rid of them some way other than knocking down their HP... Nope.</blockquote>

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