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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 6262150" data-attributes="member: 58416">I mean several things.  One of the things I mean by that is that -unless I do something incredibly stupid or use rather horrible tactics- it's pretty rare for me to feel that my character has been threatened during Encounters.  An easy example is one of the sessions from this season.  We decided to attack the pirate hideout head one.  Despite the fact that there was something like 30 pirates, we (as the PCs) just sorta steamrolled them.  To be fair, with two barbarians, a fighter, and a monk, we were a very melee heavy party, so that helped.  However, later, we also pretty much annihilated the Ice Witch.  Though we then struggled against one PC.  In the same encounter, I witnessed a change from "this is kinda easy" to "I think this might be a TPK" simply due to PC math being different.  What I said at the end there is one of the primary things I mean.  So, I suppose it's a little bit of everything you listed?  I'm not quite sure.  With such a drastic difference, it's hard for me to give worthwhile feedback.I might propose that there seems to be little middle ground to the game.  I say "might" only because it's difficult to point to one thing right now.  I'm open to the probability that the math of the finished product will be much better, but I cannot look at that, so I can only consider what I have seen. edit:  I said it was rare for me to feel threatened in 5th.  I want to explain that a little more because I suppose that's not 100% accurate.  Most of the time, I do not feel threatened.  However, when the game does reach a point where someone can seriously harm the party, it seems that people die quickly.  There's very little middle ground; it goes from one extreme to the other.  One thing I noticed is that everybody and everything in 5th edition seems to be very accurate; most things hit what they're aiming at most of the time.  The bad part to that is an occasional feeling of rocket tag where one side wins initiative and proceeds to stomp the other side.  Another problem with that is that multiple attacks become even better because it gives more opportunity to hit more things with the same amount of actions.  This is another area where I feel a more normalized set of game maths would help.Right, things are weighted.  So, if one option is weighted, is it really balanced to have one class be focused on a pillar which gets used 75% of the time and a different class be focused on a pillar which gets used 25% of the time?  Even if the class focused on the 25% is twice as good at its particular focus, that's still not necessarily equal with the class which is focused on the 75%.  If we can instead change those percentages to say 60/40, it's still not perfect, but it's close enough that I likely won't mind.  Otherwise, I feel as though you run into the problem 4E sometimes had where you could focus on other things, but, in reality, doing so hurt the effectiveness of your character.  Gee, do I take linguist for my feat or versatile expertise?  I think, as much as possible, I should be able to make choices concerning my character based on what I think is cool rather than what the game says is the 'right way.'  Even if there is a 'right way,' I don't like being beaten over the head with it so much that my experience turns into some 3E situations where I realize that I'm basically playing the game wrong if I choose certain classes and expect to be competent beyond a certain level.Yes, I also agree that pre-game talk helps.  I am a big advocate of that.  Right now I'm running a super hero game.  Prior to making characters, I sat down with the group and emphasized that, while there would be combat and many of the other tropes of comics, they should not ignore some basic mundane skills; at least have some thing that your character is good at outside of just fighting.  It worked.  I think that's part of the GM's job -to communicate game expectations to the group.  What's difficult is when a game system is built in such a way that one option is weighted, but the options are generally presented as though they are not.  Again, this is an area where I felt 3rd Edition did very poorly (despite the fact that I highly enjoy 3rd.)  I think 3rd has a lot of 'trap choices' which look like they're really good on paper, but actually are not very good at all.  As far as weight goes, 4th Edition is a good example too; why would I ever take a situational feat that gives me a minor bonus while holding a sword on the winter solstice during a rain storm when I can instead take a feat that gives me a flat bonus all the time?  When it comes to weight, if the system assumes I'll be doing a particular activity most of the time, then focusing on something outside of that primary activity (because the game presents itself in a manner which says I can pick whatever I want and all choices are equal) gives me a worse character by no fault of my own.  If you're telling me the game has a broader focus, but then actually building a game which primarily focuses on one area, I feel as though I'm not getting the proper 'pre-game talk' to help me align my expectations with what the game actually intends to do.  Unfortunately, I do not have a specific example which currently comes to mind.  Encounters hasn't exactly been the best venue for pushing the boundaries of the game.  As I gain more experience with the game and try different classes, I should be able to answer that better.  I've made it a point to try different classes and options with each season so as to gain a broader view of how things work.  After the fight against the pirates, I was expecting Shang Tsung to walk through the doors of the game store and announce "Flawless Victory."  I'm willing to accept that as some sort of fluke of luck perhaps.  Maybe we were just simply very well suited to the task.  There have been other combats which were not so one-sided, but then I also have to consider that I'm orchestrating combat plans with people I've largely never played with before and who have varying degrees of tactical sense.  (Which is in no way meant to belittle or demean anyone; some people simply grasp tactical concepts better than others.)  In my mind, I've tried to consider how some of the encounters (little e) might have gone with my home group; a group that I feel does very well when it comes to tactical thinking and working together as a cohesive unit.  I suppose what I want to avoid is how things were in the prior two editions.  In 4th, it's pretty rare for my primary group to take the enemy seriously.  In fact, the last three 4E campaigns have ended when the guy who typically DMs 4th for the group was so frustrated over how easily his encounters were getting crushed that he knew not what else to do.  It's not that he was trying to kill us; he just tired of spending a lot of time creating interesting and dynamic encounters only to have the PCs (myself and the other people of that group) win most encounters with nary a scratch.  In all fairness, I'd say the most recent 4E game was better in that regard, but it was better because the DM so heavily weighted encounters against us that the group was essentially facing the same challenges that a much larger group should face.  However, once we hit level 8 (where the last game ended,) things started to look pretty much how they usually do for us.  This became a problem for the group because some of the players felt that -short of the DM using 'god powers' to punish someone- they could typically run roughshod over most non-PCs without much fear of the game world being able to stop them.  The problem got so bad at one point that the DM (same guy I mentioned above) stopped trying to run social encounters because it usually ended with some of the players simply deciding to kill of maim NPCs to get what they want.  I've talked to him about it, and he (the 4E DM) expressed that he could sit and come up with PC-killer monsters every week to keep things in check, but doing so wasn't fun.In 3rd, the town guard example I used isn't something which specifically happened, but it was a brief summary of how I sometimes looked at the game world.  As a player, I'm someone who enjoys doing activities like building a castle; having followers, and other such things.  When I first learned 3rd edition, it seemed like those were valid options, and, for a while, they were.  However, there very quickly came a point when I realized that none of my followers could really contribute anything to me, and that I could likely kill all of them single-handedly without them ever taking even one HP from me.  So, naturally, I then think "well, then what sense are armies in this world?"  "If I can kill everybody in this town by myself, I don't understand how this town continues to exist."  In contrast, if I then went to a 'higher level town' where the guards and NPCs were better, then it really didn't make any sense why someone of my lowly abilities would be hired?  "So, wait, the king has a platoon of epic level guards, but he's paying level 4 PCs money to kill goblins?  Why not just send one guard?"Yeah, I know, I'm supposed to ignore that when playing D&D.  Often, I do.  I just accept that's how the game is played, but there are times when it's really hard to make myself ignore that.  I like the idea that I advance.  I like the idea that my character gets better and cooler powers.  I dislike the idea that my PC can very quickly reach a point where I'm immune to the world.  In that regard, I think 5th is better.  Despite the lackluster performance of the playtest and Encounters adversaries, the game at least appears to want to be closer to what I want.  You hit the nail on the head by saying higher level characters aren't immune to lower level creatures; that's part of what I want.  What I want, is, as I've said numerous times already, is for the PC side of things and the non-PC side of things to more consistently interact with the Game World Math. In 4th Edition, it's a little silly to me that I, as a PC, could quite literally use at-will powers to blow a hole through the gates of hell (something which happened in a campaign,) but a supposedly feared demon or other such creature had virtually zero chance to break a pair of handcuffs (dimensional shackles.)  I'm starting to babble I think and talk and circles, so, I'll try to sum up my point.  In 3rd Edition, it seems hard for me to believe that the fighter and the druid are designed to be anywhere close to being equal.  In 4th Edition, the PCs are very obviously so far beyond the bounds of the world they live in that it's hard to take the game world fiction of 'Points of Light' and the reputations of the villains seriously.  What I want from 5th edition is a set of math for the game which fixes both of those problems.  I should be in the same general ballpark of usefulness as other PCs, and I also believe that -while I'm ok with PCs being beyond what average people can do- PCs should be designed as part of the world instead of designed as being set apart from the world and operating on a completely different scale.  I think, in many ways, 5th edition has made strides toward that, but I think further work toward that should be done, and I hope that the finished product is much closer to what I want.  Unfortunately, it seems that what I want quite often is at odds with what the vast majority of people who have participated in the polls want, so I don't expect to get what I want.</blockquote>

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