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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 4282703" data-attributes="member: 21673">I no longer have the time I did in college. I'm working 9-10 hour days (at a job I love, don't get me wrong, and I am well-paid on top of it) plus commute time. This means it is vital to me that the system be built for the "designers". They have no way of knowing what my party is like. But in 4E, they can assume a much smaller range of mechanical variability. This is a Good Thing (tm). When the designers set up a skill challenge, they can set the DC for an average skill check at 13+1/2 level and it will "just work" for the vast majority of groups. Even if no character in the group has training in that skill, they have a roughly 50/50 shot of making the check; without it being a stupidly easy task for a character optimized for the task.That was my epiphany months ago when the skill system rumors first came up.  This is the obvious example - but the entire system shows that paradigm. The adventure designer doesn't need to know anything about the party other than their level; and only has to make one assumption - that the party consists of 5 PCs with all 4 roles covered. And even then, the way encounter design is now, a GM can scale the adventure by multiplying the XP "budget" for the encounter by x/5 (where x is the number of PCs in his party); and by encouraging smaller groups to follow the guidelines for a "less than 4" party in the DMG.There's a doubled paradigm in 4E design. "is it fun?" and "Does it decrease the DM's workload?" (which is really a corollary of the first statement specifically for the DM). I don't need help coming up with fluff - I do that in my head every day. Sometimes I even write it down on a PDA that I alway shave with me (a notepad will work too). But turning that fluff into fair mechanics is very hard in 3.5Ed. I've had adventures run out of Dungeon go pear-shaped on my players because the designers made an assumption about my party that was not true at all, and the results were killer.</blockquote>

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