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<blockquote data-quote="FourthBear" data-source="post: 4091028" data-attributes="member: 55846">I do think we may need to rethink what we mean by swingy combat.&nbsp; From the design notes, it seems as though the writers wanted to eliminate encounters that simply resulted in resource management issues (i.e., the explicit equal EL should deplete 25% of resources rule of thumb).&nbsp; This would supposedly result in three encounters being uninteresting until you get to the fourth encounter where your life is on the line.&nbsp; Oversimplified, sure.&nbsp; So they've attempted to rejigger the math such that the standard combat gives the feeling of the threat of failure/death, without necessarily bringing you that close to it in actuality.&nbsp; I think this may mean that we may see characters drop more often in 4e in &quot;common&quot; combats, but perhaps see less actual character death due to the rules for healing surges, taking care of fallen comrades and the downplaying of save-or-die.&nbsp; Of course, as noted, the dragon encounter was placed specifically for the design team to show that encounters in 4e aren't somehow nerfed to eliminate character death and TPKs (a common fear, as it was in the early days of 3e).&nbsp; We'll see if it's &quot;too&quot; swingy in actual play.&nbsp; It would be ironic after all the hand-wringing over nerfing and unkillable characters in 4e if in actual play the dice create more deaths and TPKs than previous editions.&nbsp; <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="FourthBear, post: 4091028, member: 55846"] I do think we may need to rethink what we mean by swingy combat. From the design notes, it seems as though the writers wanted to eliminate encounters that simply resulted in resource management issues (i.e., the explicit equal EL should deplete 25% of resources rule of thumb). This would supposedly result in three encounters being uninteresting until you get to the fourth encounter where your life is on the line. Oversimplified, sure. So they've attempted to rejigger the math such that the standard combat gives the feeling of the threat of failure/death, without necessarily bringing you that close to it in actuality. I think this may mean that we may see characters drop more often in 4e in "common" combats, but perhaps see less actual character death due to the rules for healing surges, taking care of fallen comrades and the downplaying of save-or-die. Of course, as noted, the dragon encounter was placed specifically for the design team to show that encounters in 4e aren't somehow nerfed to eliminate character death and TPKs (a common fear, as it was in the early days of 3e). We'll see if it's "too" swingy in actual play. It would be ironic after all the hand-wringing over nerfing and unkillable characters in 4e if in actual play the dice create more deaths and TPKs than previous editions. :) [/QUOTE]

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