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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 5937305" data-attributes="member: 6669048">I've DM'd a lot of 4e and I have to say I'm not sorry to see encounter powers go. While it fixed some problems, it really changed the way you had to approach adventure design. In order to create an effective, interesting, and challenging adventure; you had to make sure that every single encounter was challenging in and of itself. No more trying to sneak up on the lone low-level guard keeping watch 50 feet away. Roll for initiative and move-charge and use your encounter. Repeat until it's dead. It rolled high enough to get an action after the first attack and shift-runs? Ranged attack encounter power.Because of this shift, burnout sets in a lot faster on a DM. Because not only does every encounter have to be challenging, it also has to be interesting and different or else it's boring. I'd quickly run out of interesting ways to build encounters, especially if the ongoing story required a lot of enemies of a particular race (since I'd only have a dozen different variations on that monster at most).In defense of Encounter Powers, the players really loved them. It gave them something interested to do and more tactical options, especially for the newer or more inexperienced players who are more prone to playing their character sheet rather than playing their character. They really liked having a trump card on top of basic attacks and their at-will powers to pull out in any encounter.Also, 4e did simplify adventure design a lot. Because I didn't have to spend a lot of time adding class levels to monsters or re-reading the specifics on the spells and spell-like abilities to make sure I understood the rules around them, I had more time to come up with creative and interesting encounters.If Next can find a way to take that pressure of encounter-heavy design for adventures without sacrificing the plug-and-play monsters and NPCs (which they haven't done yet but it's still early in the design cycle for monsters), we'd get the best of both. And if they can find a way to use the Race/Class/Theme/Background character design system to give players those useful options (even if they're an optional rules module) without also forcing me as DM to scale up combat too much, I think we'll have hit just the right note.</blockquote>

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