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<blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5850212" data-attributes="member: 2067">It's odd. He apparently sees players using Save Or Die as &quot;I win&quot; buttons, which doesn't match up with my experience. Sure, they can take the teeth out of an encounter that is meant to be a one-on-one with a big villain (and so such villains should be able to prevent save-or-die effects), but in a 4e-style multi-on-multi combat, the most it does is take out one enemy quickly. Assuming they can't spam such abilities (e.g.: it uses up their daily or encounter slot somehow), such things are not dramatically powerful in the player's hands. Mearls also has a bias towards a slow ramp-up, which is generally a good instinct, but his focus in this is too narrow. He's looking at the individual monster, rather than at the context it is embedded in. The adventure as a whole can have a ramp-up that consists of encounters of many types, some fast-and-dirty, others strung out like a 4e skirmish. That variation in pacing helps maintain the flow of the game, and if EVERYTHING is going to need a ramp-up in order to overcome, we're just going back to 4e's slogfests. In fact, that's part of the reason I'm not a fan of his hp threshold as he presented it. I WANT some encounters to be over with quickly, some monsters to fall like wheat before the chaff, some powers to be very, suddenly, binary. Bypassing the HP system is a feature, here, not a bug.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="I'm A Banana, post: 5850212, member: 2067"] It's odd. He apparently sees players using Save Or Die as "I win" buttons, which doesn't match up with my experience. Sure, they can take the teeth out of an encounter that is meant to be a one-on-one with a big villain (and so such villains should be able to prevent save-or-die effects), but in a 4e-style multi-on-multi combat, the most it does is take out one enemy quickly. Assuming they can't spam such abilities (e.g.: it uses up their daily or encounter slot somehow), such things are not dramatically powerful in the player's hands. Mearls also has a bias towards a slow ramp-up, which is generally a good instinct, but his focus in this is too narrow. He's looking at the individual monster, rather than at the context it is embedded in. The adventure as a whole can have a ramp-up that consists of encounters of many types, some fast-and-dirty, others strung out like a 4e skirmish. That variation in pacing helps maintain the flow of the game, and if EVERYTHING is going to need a ramp-up in order to overcome, we're just going back to 4e's slogfests. In fact, that's part of the reason I'm not a fan of his hp threshold as he presented it. I WANT some encounters to be over with quickly, some monsters to fall like wheat before the chaff, some powers to be very, suddenly, binary. Bypassing the HP system is a feature, here, not a bug. [/QUOTE]

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