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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abstruse" data-source="post: 5944578" data-attributes="member: 6669048">Wow, that was a well thought-out and reasoned response to my umpteen million posts on this topic. I would love to respond but my attention span just isn't there for going through that point by point. And I'm glad to see I'm not the only overly-verbose person around here as well <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />In general, though, I still feel that using encounter-based resources over daily-based resources really forces your hand as a DM. You have to craft every single encounter to be both challenging and interesting, and it can wear on you. It also puts a damper on exploration or sandbox style play because each encounter has to be balanced. It's two completely different styles of play and I really think a lot of the complaints about 4e are actually complaints about this style of play being "forced" on you by the game design rather than whatever random thing in the game that people complain about.Because the rules are heavily based around combat encounters, exploration takes a back seat. You can't do something like Caves of Chaos in 4e (or any of the older-style modules) because it becomes boring very quickly. Because of the combat-based focus of the rules, the "utility" out-of-combat encounter powers become spamable - "I use this for my +10/+20 bonus to the roll, wait five minutes, then do it again." Balance is far more of an issue even without 4e's "on the head of a pin" level of game balance because easy encounters are boring while difficult encounters are next to impossible due to the lack of being able to use powerful combat abilities in concentrated fire.I also really don't like that killing the guard or taking out the sentries becomes a skill challenge rather than combat. Even if it's treated that way in other editions as well, there's still that element of chance - your hit may not be hard enough to take out the guard quickly and quietly. Using the Encounter Power/Action Point/Encounter Power, that's not an issue anymore. So it becomes solely an issue of "Did you make your Stealth check?"It also forces you as DM to use more artificial-feeling methods to control pacing to prevent that sort of problem. You want to run the "eliminating the guards" encounter as combat? You have to add in a time pressure. Someone checks in with them every 10 minutes, so you can't pull EP (AP/EP) on them. Or imposing limits on short rests that can break game logic.Now, all of these issues can be dealt with using enough experience. I'd like to think I got a good handle on the game before I switched to Pathfinder for my current campaign and if I ran another 4e game, I would be able to use the encounter-based design to my advantage. It has a lot of storytelling power behind it if you approach it the right way. And honestly, I'd probably be playing 4e right now if two of my most vocal players didn't have knee-jerk reactions to the system and threw fits when I suggested it as an option, using rhetoric to convince the other players the system was "bad". The issue I have isn't with that style of gameplay itself or with 4e as I do enjoy both. The issue I have is when the entire system is designed around that style of play without the flexibility to do both. In Pathfinder, I've found that I was able to design adventures both in an encounter-based sense and in an exploration/sandbox sense. I specifically tested out this theory with this week's session, designing an adventure for the session that I could easily turn into a 4e adventure just by playing "swap the monsters". It worked beautifully. The rest of my campaign, however, is based around very story-based and sandbox style gameplay. My players have come across both very simple encounters and incredibly difficult ones depending on their actions and which plot threads they decide to chase. They've even been forced to retreat a few times (something a couple of my players loathe doing and one of the reasons I think those players would like 4e if they gave it a shot).I want a system that's flexible enough to give me both options. Adding one or two encounter-based abilities for various classes isn't going to do that. Giving pretty much every class that ability will do that. A fighter who gets to do double damage or knock an opponent prone before an attack to gain advantage or can do two attacks a round, but then has to have a short rest before they can do it again...no big deal. Give the rogue those abilities, still not really a big deal. But give them to the wizard and the cleric and the paladin and so on, suddenly everyone's got those resources and you have to work that much harder as a DM on each and every encounter to make sure combat works.Again, I don't hate 4e and I don't hate encounter-based design. But I've already got 4e as a great system for that style of gameplay. I don't want Next to reinvent the wheel or try to fix something that's not really broken. I want it to give me more options as a DM for what stories and adventures I can cover in my games, not less.</blockquote>

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