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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(contact)" data-source="post: 3739695" data-attributes="member: 41">One of the phrases we hear over and over from 4e designers regarding choices is "______ isn't fun."It isn't fun to have to retire the whole party for the night because the single fight (that was fun) drained all of the party's healing.  Save or die effects aren't fun.  The list goes on.But an <a href="http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo" target="_blank">an article from Wired about Halo 3</a> had a sidebar that intrigued me, particularly in light of all the RPG design thinking we've all been doing around the 4e announcement.Good to know about laparoscopic surgeons and cheating gamers, but I'm really interested in the "fun to die" aspect of the game.  The 3e encounter design (one monster at the party's CR, repeat x 4 then rest) was balanced to provide scaling challenge without the constant threat of death.  But after watching the way people actually played D&D, they saw bigger fights, with more going on, and interpreted this as a call for . . . bigger fights with more going on.  Hence, the new encounter paradigm (one monster per PC).But something about this otherwise great idea nagged me, and when reading the article quoted above, I got it: it's not about the size of the dog in the fight, it's about the lethality of that dog.  What I think I'm looking for when I play and when I DM is a strong sense of legitimate risk; I want to know that there is a chance that if we go A Door Too Far (apologies to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bridge_Too_Far_%28novel%29" target="_blank">Cornelius Ryan</a>), it's dead hero time.In fact, if we're exceptionally dumb, or fail to adequately prepare, or do our intel gathering, or any one of the myriad of ways my PCs have thrown their lives away over the years, we might have ourselves a bona-fide TPK.Now, I don't think this issue of lethality is entirely in the designers' hands-- it's ultimately a DM and player choice, but it struck me that maybe <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=25093" target="_blank">my Killer DM</a> isn't as big of a bastard as I've thought.  It's fun to die, and I'm hopeful that 4e will take this into account.</blockquote>

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