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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cerebral Paladin" data-source="post: 5313719" data-attributes="member: 3448">I completely agree that Umbran is asking the right question, but the way I would answer it is "I think it would make the game as a whole more fun."  The current situation in my game is that every combat takes forever, including ones that are not hugely important or tactically interesting.  That means that I'm left with three choices:  cut many of the combats altogether; just accept that sometimes we'll spend an hour hacking through combats that are less fun than the combats around the corner; or come up with some way to eliminate the time spent dealing with some of the combats while retaining them for purposes of world, plot, and resource expenditure.  Option B is by assumption not a fun one, because my starting point is that I'm spending too much time playing out combats where I don't really care about the details and I'm not having enough fun.  So the question is whether to go with Option A or Option C.  Option A is often a good one--in many of the con games I right, I design in a very small number of fights.  Maybe there's only one fight in the four hour game.But sometimes I want to include more combat for reasons of versimilitude or story or so that other choices the PCs make are more meaningful.  Do we fight through the guards or try to distract them and sneak past?  Do we spend extra time searching for secret doors, or do we move quickly so that we can avoid the risk of encountering a guard patrol?  Either could be a good option; having that choice can be fun for the PCs.  Fighting the guard fight and running out of time to fight the big bad in this session, not so much.  And my players rarely face the choice between pressing on when they're low on resources, or cutting and running--my sessions don't last long enough for them to run out of resources, which means they don't ever get to make what can be a fun and interesting choice.So, sure, plenty of people have fun fighting out every fight.  I assume that there are some people who enjoy 4e hack fests which are fight after fight after fight.  But I want to have more time for other aspects of play, and more time for big fights and less time spent on small fights.  In some games, cutting the small fights altogether would be a good option, but I think that the possibility of those fights can make my game more fun... but only if we don't have to spend an hour on them.  That's where I see a "kill challenge" sort of system coming in handy.(I agree that making the system less purely mechanistic would be a good thing, provided that it remained fast.  I'd happily take a system that takes 10 minutes but is filled with interesting choices over one that takes 5 minutes but is mechanical.  But I'd rather have the option of one that takes 5 minutes and is mechanical instead of having to use 4e's core rules and fight an hour long fight every time.)</blockquote>

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