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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 7651922" data-attributes="member: 58416">In the case of my gondola encounter, the PCs won initiative.  They targeted the suspension cable and the mechanism which supported the gondola.  The encounter was over.I was not upset they used that as a tactic.  I expected it would be one.  However, as a new 4E DM at the time, I expected to have at least a round or two of fighting back and forth across the two gondolas.  To touch a little more on what I meant when I said I started to run 4E as though it wasn't fantasy, I'd have to fast forward to the last 4E campaign I GMed.  I completely ditched the Points of Light concept and much of the assumed D&D world.  Instead, I created a world which embraced many of the "problems" I saw with 4E.  I built a world in which some of the gonzo powers and concepts of 4E were part of rather than creating a world that is/was seemingly unaware of what someone like a PC could do.  It was common for some red shirt type enemies to have magic wands; I fluffed them as arcane powered sci-fi laser blasters.  I had a chase seen what was pretty blatantly ripped off from the old Battle Toads video game; the PCs were riding hover bikes powered by a magic.  The plot somehow involved one of the PCs being both the hero of the story and the villain of the story... offhand, I forget the exact details.  I had an excellent time running that game, and the players highly enjoyed it.  I believe -based on that game- I've had the most success with 4E when I went with a vision which is not how I usually imagine fantasy.  That's not a knock on the system; just my observation of how things played out for me.In the event of the Strahd encounter I mentioned, I remember it going something like this:  The GM had the party facing Strahd, a group of what I believe were some kind of minion ghouls, and two portals which generated more ghouls on their initiative count.  Memory of the party composition is fuzzy, but I am pretty sure I was playing a Warlord at the time, and I believe we also had a fighter, a rogue, a ranger, and possibly a sorcerer.  I remember that we didn't have a controller, but we had a lot of strikers. I remember we won initiative; I remember that because having a warlord in the party (my character) gave us a rather significant boost to our initiative.  The rogue used a power which was able to hit Strahd and slow his movement.  I remember stunning him somehow, and the striker heavy party pelting him while we largely ignored the minions because the fighter activated a power which did automatic damage when they got close to him.  Strahd tried to turn to mist and flee,  but his movement was still slowed due to an effect on him, and being insubstantial meant he took more damage from one of the characters due to a feat or a power they had, so he died before he could move.  The reason I remember that encounter is because it prompted the GM of the game to start granting solos multiple initiative counts in hopes that they'd actually get to do something.  Neither of those issues are things I believe would be fixed by the suggestions in the OP.  It wasn't healing and healing surges that created the problems I noticed.  It was that some of the underlying math of the game seemed so heavily weighted in one direction.  Later books made steps toward fixing this, but there are still some changes I would make if I were still playing the system.  I had been working on a different encounter budget guideline, but I never finished it due to not playing 4E as much anymore.  One of the primary reasons for the project is because I built elites and solos differently when I was running my later games.  Without going into too much detail, the basic concept was that elites had the benefits of being an elite, but had HP values which were somewhere between what a normal monster and an elite would have; solos still had the benefits of being a solo (save bonuses and extra abilities,) but had HP more in line with an elite.  I then just added more creatures and features to each encounter.</blockquote>

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