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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zustiur" data-source="post: 4498040" data-attributes="member: 1544">Not enough. Mind you, spending more than 50% of our time in combat has a lot to do with it. Seems 2 defenders, 2 strikers, 1 controller and one leader doesn't have enough hitting power.Hardly. I'm saying the flip side of the same thing. Poker is balanced, that doesn't make it a childrens game. But when making a game for children you should endeavor to make it as balanced as possible, if only to save their poor parents. DnD feels like a boardgame in that sense - it's been altered in such a way as to indicate that the target audience is now much younger than before.DnD, being a roleplaying game first, and a combat game second, needs less perfection in the balancing. However 4th edition feels balanced to the point that it feels (to me) bland. Gone is the interest in keeping the wizard alive at first level. Gone are the tide turning spells that he used to command. With regard to staying power, I think old fighters were better defenders than the new ones are. We find ourselves protecting the wizard out of habit, rather than need.Granted, but that was done while maintaining a sufficient discretion between classes. Exactly. That's what hero quest et al are for. And when I refer to boardgame, that's what I mean. We're not talking about snakes and ladders here. We're talking about talisman, hero quest, warhammer quest and games of that ilk. They're dungeon crawls with 'lite' rules, miniatures and defined maps. Chess is a totally different type of game altogether.Turn based effect have a huge part to play in this. The effects have become "You've been hit by the ghoul. Miss a turn" which just screams boardgame. Where as "you've been hit by the ghoul and paralyzed, you will remain so for 1d6 minutes or until 'cured'" promotes story over mechanics. 1d6 minutes promotes fear, where missing a turn is just a yawn.All the movement, shifting and dancing has the same issue, but to a lesser extent.I think what I'm driving at is that DnD has crossed a line (for me) where it now focuses too much on rules over flavour. All previous editions have been flavour first, with rules to describe the situation. Now we have rules for the sake of balance, regardless of any story or explainable purpose.We have 'you miss a turn because the rules say so' rather than 'the ghoul bit you, so now you suffer the consequences, which incidentally means missing a turn'. We have 'deal 2d4 + int damage by casting magic missile' rather than 'you hurl bolts of force at your enemy. Incidentally this is determined by rolling 1d4+1...'</blockquote>

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