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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 7651919" data-attributes="member: 58416">I get that, but it was still a bit anti-climactic when the group  I game with (I was a player at the time) stomped Strahd into the dirt  so hard that I don't believe he even got off an offensive move during  the encounter.  That's really not even the point I'm trying to touch on  though.  I'm getting off track.As I said earlier, my experience  with the older editions is limited.  When I look at the adventures, they  seem to be written in such a way that worldly concerns are still  concerns.  That is to say that I'm given the impression (which may very  well be wrong) that the gondola encounter I mentioned earlier would have  taken a little more work than a few at-will encounters.  When I say  that 4E PCs have the potential to break the world around them, I mean  that quite literally.  In time, I had gained enough of an understanding  of the game to find ways to tweak the experience, but it was a bit of a  shocker when I was first learning the system.I have a weird relationship with 4th Edition.  Despite what many of my posts may sound like, I do enjoy it.  However, I still tend to have a love/hate relationship with it.  I feel that there truthfully are things it fixed about D&D, and fixed them so well that I really can't go back to 3rd.  At the same time, there are some odd problems that 3rd didn't have that 4th does.  As an aside, I'll say the one thing that worries me about 5th Edition is that I believe the designers don't understand what someone like me didn't like about 4th...  I didn't hate it; I just think there were things that were "fixed" that didn't need fixed, and (much like what I see from 5th now) a lot of early ideas that were abandoned in favor of a direction I didn't care for.A death spiral is always hard to judge in D&D.  In GURPS I don't mind it because I have active defenses.  I have a chance to dodge, parry, or block.  In D&D, if my opponent beats my AC, I have to take the hit, so mechanics which make my passive defenses worse (in my experience) turn out to be especially harsh and unfun in D&D.  For me, what I had in mind for the condition track was just having conditions that last longer than a simple save.  I also believe that some of the broken ways to manipulate 4E saves (like the original version of the Orb wizard) would work better in a system where success and failure weren't such a binary thing.  When I was running 4E, I handled skill challenges in a similar fashion.  Often, I didnt have a set number of failures in mind.  Instead, I might have a set number of rolls in mind, and the margin or success or margin of failure would determine results.  It was more of a sliding scale instead of pass/fail.</blockquote>

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