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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6773198" data-attributes="member: 42582">Being on the other side of the world, I'll refrain from the Florida jokes. (Here it's called Queensland.)But back on topic, and prompted by a comment a little bit upthread - what does optimisation look like in 4e Oriental Adventures? I'll start answering my question with some musings on the GM side, thinking about encounter/scenario design. [MENTION=6696971]Manbearcat[/MENTION]'s ranger/monk hybrid kensei is built to have a single-foe duelling capability. But dueling in 4e has its own limits as a part of the game. I know that there are 4e players who post here who have had success with duelling/arena-style encounters, but I've never had great success in making them work, precisely because they tend not to exploit the synergy/mobility elements of 4e's combat mechanics. (Contrast, say, duelling in RM or BW which can be quite dramatic, because of the choices between attacking and active defence that have to be made, and create the requisite suspense and sense of danger.)When I've looked at 4e Dark Sun, I've wondered whether there's enough there to support 30 levels of play, in the sense that 30 levels consumes a lot of story material and I don't know that DS has the requisite depth and breadth (contrast default 4e, which in my own experience has a terrific set-up for this, with the way it integrates the planes and cosmology through all the levels, but has the fictional depth to allow the growth/expansion that are demanded by paragon and then epic tier play).I wonder if classic OA might be a bit like DS in this respect. I have run an OA game that exhibited the sort of cosmological integration combined with expansion that is found in default 4e (and over 11 years the game made it to RM 27th level), but by the end it was OA only in flavour (samurai, Celestial Bureaucracy etc) but it didn't feel very much like Hero, Tai Chi Master or a Kurosawa film. It felt a lot like my 30th level 4e game is feeling at the moment!</blockquote>

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