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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6292634" data-attributes="member: 37579">I'm getting this from a couple places.1)  The many people who agree that 4e does not do incidental mook fights well (include people who are otherwise fans of 4e)2)  The year of running, and year plus of playing 4eIn both my games, the number of times we rested because someone was low in surges happened maybe two or three times. I can count the number of times people ran out of surges on one finger and most of the time people got low we continued on and just shifted tactics. Healing surges had zero impact on when we decided to rest. As for attrition, because of readily available healing, PCs always started fights at full health. So there was no gradual reduction of actual health with PCs starting fights at 3/4 or 1/2 hitpoints after a few small fights. There’s no nickel-and-diming of hitpoints in 4e. You’re either at full hp, or above 85% hp and saving a surge.Fair point on the milestones. My 4e RAW is rusty.Still, while mook fights will run down surges, the PCs are very, very unlikely to enter any given fight below 80%hp. The moment they are hurt enough to use a surge, they will use a surge. Which is the point. Thus the lower level mooks will never be threatening enough to damage or scare the party, because they’ll never be able to deal enough damage. The number of mook fights needed to bring a character down to near death is, well, a lot.Just because you’re talking in character during combat in a game of Battletech, doesn’t mean it’s not a tactical miniature combat game. When I play Clue or Monopoly I roleplay, talk in voices, and make decisions based on what “Professor Plum” or “Scooge McDuck, Land Baron” would do. That doesn’t make them roleplaying games.(Try this sometime as a warmup before gaming. Break out Clue, do some RPing, have a blast.)If you’re not telling story then the game is just a series of unconnected encounters. That’s not a campaign, it’s playing a board game with different scenarios. Like Castle Ravenloft. To be a roleplaying game there needs to be a connected narrative between the encounters. A direct continuity. And the players need to be playing the same characters, or have some continuity between the current and past characters. Which is why I highlighted it. Because flavour text in 4e means absolutely nothing. There are lots of great examples. An extreme one being Sly Flourish <a href="http://slyflourish.com/extreme_reskinning_young_white_dragon_into_cyborg_assassin.html" target="_blank">reflavouring</a> a large white dragon into a medium cyborg assassin for a Gamma World game. Or someone changing the tone of each and every one of their powers. The only bit of flavour text that means anything in 4e is the damage type, and that’s one bit of DM approval away from changing.I don’t read threads without participating. If I’m saying the same thing as someone else, that means that we both came to the same conclusions independent of each other. This is actually pretty important. If you’re seeing the same arguments and concerns again and again, maybe it’s not people quoting each other, maybe it’s people having the same reaction? The very first thing I did when I got my 4e books was try and update Keep on the Borderlands. I never ran, as it was just some theorycrafting to get a feel for the edition. Try it sometime. Run it straight, just updating monster statblocks. See how well it works. I had to regularly combine rooms and encounters to get the right number of adversaries. The entire dynamic changed. Not to mention the tone of having every encounter be a balanced challenge for the party. And none of the traps worked just right, being the quick gotcha traps that did a bit of damage and then were disarmed, which would have a negligible effect on a party, being the kind of minor attrition doesn’t work as well. Especially since the party could easily back-up and rest. You mean other than the dozens of interviews and articles they wrote on game design, and entire preview books devoted to the creation of 4e?It’s really, really easy to look back at the thought processes and chain of events that led to most of the 4e designs. There’s a LOT of changes that were heralded by complaints on message board. But where does it say that in a book? Your argument seems to be “there isn’t a problem with the flavour, because you can just adjust the flavour.” This is a fluff-variant of the Oberoni Fallacy (aka the Rule 0 Fallacy).</blockquote>

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