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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Victim" data-source="post: 4353354" data-attributes="member: 78">I think that the baseline fight in 4e is more dangerous than the standard fight in 3e.  On the other hand, we didn't do too many standard 3e fights.  But I think that many 3e fights were dangerous in terms of spike damage - comparatively, 3e characters were usually like glass cannons.  It's not unreasonable for many characters to self kill on average (in terms of hitting and not just raw damage) in 2-3 rounds; some would drop themselves in a single round.  Combine that with a few people acting in concert on a side, you have groups losing at least one character (PC or monster) every round to focused fire.  Even in a fight the group quickly wins, it's easy to lose someone to a focused or lucky attack early on.  On the other hand, in 4e it seems like individual PCs are at less risk of death (since it's easy to heal up KO'd people and buffer from KO to death is bigger), but the party as a whole seems to have a bigger risk of losing.Another issue is that so far it leasts like PCs exist in a narrower range of power for their level.  In 3e, some characters could defeat foes that vastly outleveled them, especially with group support.  This power disparity makes many fights easier (because the group is powerful), but some really hard since the GM is trying to create a challenging encounter for the powerful characters but doesn't exactly know how to adjust things - it's easy to go too high.  It looks like 4e encounters will generally be closer to the expected level of challenge.</blockquote>

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