D&D 5E More Rock/Paper/Scissors/Lizard/Spock in Combat

[pemerton]

What 3E is is very strategic.

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So if we were ranking them, 4E starts out at a 3 and goes to 10 in tactics (tactical concerns are basically necessary to get anywhere). 3E starts at a 1, and goes to maybe 6. In strategy, 4E starts at 1 and goes to maybe 4-5 (power conservation, a few potions, etc.), 3E starts at 1 and goes to 10.

The change can be seen in how easy it is to wear a party down. 3E, long-term resource management is huge. And that's all strategy.

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4E, wearing down the party's resources is tough, and even a party bereft of daily attacks and low on healing surges can find lots to do in an encounter.

For me, the comparison to 4e is not 3E but Rolemaster, which I GMed for nearly 20 years before GMing 4e. But your comparison rings true for me. Mid-to-high level Rolemaster really rewards strategic planning and resource management. But tactics are limited. Whereas 4e is hugely tactical, and has only limited strategic/resource dimensions to play. As you say, even a low-surge low-daily party in 4e can still do a lot of interesting and surprising things once an encounter starts.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I hate to necro this thread, but I haven't been around for a while and was interested in responding to this.

Until you run into one of those 5% that are immune, and then you're dead. But the DM must use those creatures, even if it means a TPK. Otherwise, specialisation just becomes a straight power-boost.

You may be better than me at balancing encounters. I've never been able to create one that was balanced well enough that without the help of any ONE character in the group it is a TPK but with his/her help the party survives without a single casualty.

And, again, the key there is that those fire giants shouldn't be easy enough for the party to handle minus the Wizard, or at least not without the encounter being vastly harder, and the victory therefore much more costly.

See above. I can't seem to balance that way. If I try to balance that way and even one member of the party has an off day and chooses poor strategy, someone decides to "roleplay" being scared(and thus cowers instead of attacking), or one player doesn't show up to the session, it causes the same effect as if the monster was immune to one players attacks.

I tend to balance encounters such that if any one member of the party is useless in some way the fight will still be fairly easy(in fact, I pretty much assume at least one party member will be useless...there's a couple people in my group who are likely to pick poor options every round of combat without one of the more tactical players telling them what to do).

The reason for this is because of the difference in power level between the weakest and strongest members of the party. The weakest are poorly created(having lower stats, worse feats, lower hitpoints) AND are poorly played tactically. These characters can do almost nothing during a battle and the party loses about 10% of its effectiveness.

But 2 out of the 5 will play characters that are worth about 35% of the parties power.

I don't want to cause a TPK...ever if I can help it. It isn't fun for me to start a new game. It also feels like I'm punishing the rest of the players for something that wasn't really their fault. One player decided to over specialize and now the rest of you have to die because of it. Otherwise that one player could just hose over the rest of the party simply by not showing up or not helping for a combat.

Yes, that is a very significant problem - the game allows for, and indeed encourages, ultra-specialisation: pick one thing to be good at, and then throw every other advance into becoming truly uber in the use of that one thing.

But I addressed that in my previous post. I did say it was a two-part fix, with the first part being that the game should not allow that sort of ultra-specialisation. (Or, if it absolutely must, then it should very definitely be a case of diminishing returns - take a "tier one" specialisation and you get a largish boost for a relatively small cost, take a "tier two" to get a smaller (additional) boost at a higher cost, then "tier three" specialisations give yet smaller gains for ever-increasing cost, and so on.)

I agree completely. I think ultra-specialization needs to be discouraged...or at least equally effective to being a generalist. I don't think this can be solved simply with encounter design.