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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7218465" data-attributes="member: 996">Sac made an absolute claim speaking for literally everyone, and then spoke for everyone who left 4e: That kind of sweeping generalization can't help but be wrong.When he restricted himself to making only claims about his own subjective experiences and motivation, of course, there's no means short of telepathy to contest them.Same applies to your experience.  I'm not about to tell you you didn't have it. I'm often accused of blaming the DM when I respond to a complaint about 5e with ways a DM could flex his empowerment to fix it, and I know others take it further.  So, please, don't take this that way, but: is it such a difficult time-management challenge to have fewer combats per session to get in all the exploration & interaction scenes you want?Even when I was running in a pre-encounters time slot, with players coming in late after work and a hard stop time, I'd simply run the occassional session with no combat at all.And, really compared to what I suggest to 5e critics, that requires very little skill or effort. More involved 'set piece combats can be a lot of fun  - they provide more potential for depth and repeated play.  That's not just in games that are good at delivering them.  The best, longest-running 3.x campaign I played in (it went the full run, from when only the 3.0 PH was available, until months after 4e has dropped, and even though it was grating against the usual high-level play issues at 13th, I was sad to see it end), tended towards larger, set-piece, tactical battles rather than quick bouts of rocket tag.  The DM really lived  up to the 'M' he was a long-time gamer, not just of D&D but wargaming, video, strategy, board, card,  and he put tremendous effort into it.  Our sessions back then ran 8hrs, and we'd get in as many as 3 combats. He was also a little avant-garde in that he had a 'get to the action' attitude, and we did less (or more abstract) dungeon-crawling and more interaction & combat as the campaign progressed.OTOH, the same goes for short attrition-based combats, they can be fun in a different way, and can be run in systems that don't default to them by design.  When I decided to convert an old-school module to Essentials for a convention, I hybridized skill challenges and mini-combats (by 4e standards, they were what was in the module: a giant snake here, a wandering troll there, a patrol of guards, a horde of killer frogs - converted to a standard if alone, a swarm for a horde, or minions otherwise).</blockquote>

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