KD, seriously you cannot tell me that the conditions are more complex and frequent in 4e. I played and DMed a LARGE number of 1e and 2e games and this stuff was a total tangled mess. I'm PRETTY sure it gets MUCH more involved even in 3.x as I see there are a lot of spells that do all sorts of crazy types of buffing. The durations in 1e and 2e were also totally all over the map from stuff like '1d4+level rounds' to some number of turns (and how do you track THAT exactly? especially in a longer sequence of fighting mixed with other related activity). There were all kinds of other craziness like having to roll to see how many creatures were effected, etc. Overall spells were a royal mess to track. The worst part was a lot of them effected core numbers of the PCs, forcing you to do massive amounts of recalculation (the famous dispel magic catastrophe that stops the game for an hour is NOT a myth, I've seen it).
Yup. I played from the blue book through 3.5, from levels 1 to 20, and I too once in a blue moon saw some of these issues. But, they weren't as common nor as catastrophic as some people claim and they could be handled by having a good character sheet with modifier columns on it.
4E condition handling is nearly every single round. Every single encounter.
No comparison.
Most monsters in 3.5 did not have Dispel Magic. The only time one ran into it is if the DM threw a spell caster at the group and it doesn't take much for the DM to realize that doing this if the group is buff heavy and does not have most of the buff spells pre-calculated on their character sheet is just as bad as throwing a bunch of 4E Stun monsters at the party.
The difference between 4E durations and 3.5 durations is that 4E durations are mostly dynamic from round to round. In 3.5, the players cast their long duration spells while the DM was going to the bathroom at the beginning of a game day and/or at the beginning of an encounter, marked them on their character sheets, and rarely changed them.
There were often more buffs in 3.5, especially once one got to level 7 or so, but smart players had the frequently used ones in their group already written on their character sheets.
Note: a pickup game with higher level PCs that buff in 3.5 could become problematic, but this rarely happened if the players were organized in a campaign.
4e's durations and effects are just about 100 times easier to deal with. The effects are all well defined and everyone understands what they can and can't do with them. There are actually only a few durations and each power (which should be on cards, if they aren't then THAT is the problem) clearly spells out which duration it uses. Yes, effects are more common and I don't disagree that that offsets a good bit of the time gained from simpler book keeping, but the book keeping IS simpler.
Sorry, but this is totally erroneous.
In 3.5, the only time the bookkeeping got in the way mid-combat (outside of Dispel Magic) at all is for a one round per level spell at really low levels. But since the PCs had so few spells at low level, it was not an issue.
Once the PCs got to level 5 or so, the one round per level spells became "until the end of the encounter spells".
The "one minute per level" spells became 1 or 2 or 3 encounters, based on what the DM considered time between encounters.
The "ten minutes per level" and "one hour per level" spells became most of the adventuring day, especially considering that 3.5 was plagued with 3 or 4 encounters and the group rests up at 9 AM syndrome.
In 4E, there are 6 different "in combat" durations (start of user's next turn, end of user's next turn, start of foe's next turn, end of foe's next turn, end of encounter, until save, plus until healed of bloodied) compared to the typically 1 "in combat" duration (it is either on or off for the entire encounter) of 3.5.
Again, no comparison.
Sure, if a DM wanted to be anal about time and durations in 3.5, he could have the minutes tick down, but I never met a DM who ever did this. One minute per level spell and you are level 5, guess what? The spell is down after encounter 2. Move on.
The real issue is that 4E has a plethora of one+ round powers/effects with differing durations. 3.5 had a plethora of one+ encounter spells with differing durations. The latter is easier to handle in combat bookkeeping-wise than the former.
Yes, if a battle is pointless its a DM issue. Maybe a module designer creates a pointless encounter, but any DM that is so unfamiliar with the module he's running that he can't tell its pointless is at best inexperienced. I don't consider that a justification for bad module design, but if you constantly have pointless encounters then something is wrong on the DM side of the screen. If the players initiate an encounter, then I would never consider that pointless as obviously it was pointed enough to the players to make them want to engage (like if they turn a social encounter into a fight or just pick fights).
I guess it depends on your definition of pointless.
To me, having 50 encounters (or however many of them there are) in Revenge of the Giants is kind of pointless. I threw away 2/3rds of them when I ran that book. Another DM might run every single one of them and as a player in such a campaign, I may or may not consider some or many of those encounters pointless (note: 3.5 had this as well in module design, Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil was great fun until the PCs had to slog through the plethora of extra unnecessary encounters, just to fill the dungeon).
Module designs in general have too many pointless encounters. As a player, I want encounters that add to the plot, make sense that they are there, have the monsters actually use the magic items that the players eventually acquire, etc. An occasional random encounter is fine, but when the entire module is nothing but encounter after encounter after encounter, just to show off new monsters and new traps, that's pointless. Even when there is a monster theme thrown around it.
Many game designers design adventure modules this way, so I consider pointless encounter design to be something that many people, including DMs and game designers, just do not see when they design it. It's only after the fact that there were 5 encounters that really did nothing but add XP to the PCs that the players might notice that "Hey, why exactly did we just have 5 kobold fights? Because we were walking down a road and needed XP? Huh?".
And just because it is not pointless to the DM does not mean that it will not be pointless to a player. DMs have a lot more information than players. It sometimes just occurs that the DM has a given encounter for a reason that the players do not or may not ever see. I have a campaign over on Living Eberron at this moment where the PCs never tracked down some of the clues and so are clueless on why certain types of encounters are occurring. It happens.
Healing can work fine for monsters. You simply cannot apply the PC healing rules as-is to monsters without thought. Look at things like orcs. Orcs work fine and they have plenty of healing. Most of them don't heal huge amounts of hit points though. If you want healing that works, I'd simply apply an amount of it that is appropriate, so maybe a solo doesn't get back 200 hit points, yeah.
That being the case, then the DMG should not have Cleric Class features included with the Cleric Class template.
Beyond that healing monsters really isn't that exciting for the players. I've never yet seen a player be excited by that, they just look at you like 'you jerk, you're going to make me hit it MORE!'. Just give things hit points and leave it at that. Regeneration is much more fun, the monster gets back a bit of points and the players are all of a sudden urgent to kill it because if they don't then it WILL get ugly. That's tense and fun. Better also to do something like put in a power that throws off an effect or gives extra saves. Its much more thrilling when the monsters suddenly and unexpectedly escapes from the 'sure thing' lockdown vs it sits there locked down for an extra 3 rounds because it healed but still can't DO anything.
Healing monsters can be extremely suspenseful. It's a classic way to worry the players and add suspense to an encounter. "Why won't he just die???" is a classic theme in many genres. It can be done with Resistance X, with Regeneration, or with Healing, or just by doubling the monster's hit points. It doesn't really matter, the monster can take a boatload of damage and the players have to figure out a weakness. In the encounter I put together, the weakness was the weaker monster that had to be taken out first, or even encouraging the stronger monster to flee with a good Bluff or Intimidate check after the PCs have a good round of 200 points of damage. It shouldn't just be about doing 1000s of hit points of damage in these types of encounters.
And, some players might not like these types of encounters when they happens, but the point is to worry the players, not to excite them. You consider this the DM being a jerk??? Sure, if he does it a lot, it can be overdone. But in my case, I did significant monster Healing once in 16 levels. Hardly overdone.
The issue in 4e is that its easy to make boring encounters. If the enemy isn't tactically interesting then the game devolves down to 1e style stand and deliver, which just makes 4e boring since there's no SOD the MU can drop on everything to end the boredom.
Precisely. It is easy to make encounters boring in 4E and part of that is game mechanics.
In 1E through 3.5, I often gave my players a "go to the well" low charge item. It could have been a 5D6 Wand of Fireballs at level 2 with 2 charges, or a Scroll of Wall of Thorns at level 5 or whatever. They typically wouldn't use it unless things looked really bad. There are no such items in 4E. The players have to just slog it out. The DM has to go out of his way to pre-analyze the encounter to ensure that there are not too many Stuns or Blinds or Insubtantials, or Weakens, or whatever (note: 3.5 had this same issue with CR, 4E has it with effects and conditions, the same XP can be very swingy with regard to encounter design). There is no good way if the DM errs or the dice go cold for the players to pull a rabbit out of their hats to overcome it. Dailies won't always do it, especially at lower levels when the players have fewer of these or if the PC dice are real cold.
The game mechanics get in the way of having an occasional big ticket item help out the PCs when they are in slog mode.
