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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5744747" data-attributes="member: 42582">Because 3E encourages players to spend their resources in advance in order to maximise their chances of success during the encounter. (Scry-buff-teleport is the culmination of this sort of pressure, but as I posted upthread is only a special case of the general trend.)So the decisions that get made happen outside the context of the encounter - namely, before it. These can be very important decisions, and very engaging decisions - I've played and GMed a lot of this style of D&D and Rolemaster - but (at least in my experience) they are not very dramatic decisions. If I had to explain why not, I would conjecture that this is because they are decisions that are not made in the course of resolving a conflict.4e does not have mechanics that permit this type of pre-expenditure of resources. In order to bring resources to bear to change the outcome of a conflict, the players have to bring their PCs into the conflict. (I regard this is part of what it means to say that 4e treats the encounter as the meaningful unit of play.)The sort of resource management that you are talking about is not the sort of sacrifice or decision-making that I had in mind. 4e combat does require resource management decisions - particularly but not exclusively in relation to the action budget - but they are not as such the focus of the drama (although there can be some tension, just as there can be tension in watching hit points whittle away).The drama I have in mind is more along the lines of deciding which ally to help and which to leave to fend for him/herself, which can include deciding which of your allies threatened with death or unconsciousness to heal and which to revive, or deciding where and how to create a "front line"; and deciding which opponent to fight and which to leave alone for the moment, which relates to the first sort of decision - opponents left alone can make life difficult for your allies - but also takes on its own signficance - these ones are the ones who might run away, or with whom you are likely to end up negotiating when swords are lowered.Of course any RPG with a robust combat system can produce these sorts of decisions - 4e is not unique in that respect. But 4e is designed to make these sorts of decisions a constant part of action resolution in combat. A variety of features contribute to this: the need for PCs to gain access to their healing surges during combat in order to survive the damage that NPCs and monsters inflict; the movement rules, which encourage and generate a highly mobile battlefield making achieving a stable "front line" a difficult and active thing rather than the default state of affairs; and (in my view, and why I think it is relevant to this thread) PCs with tightly focused roles to play, meaning that each PC needs a different sort of help from his/her allies, and is him-/herself able to provide a different sort of help.The upshot of this, in my experience, is that 4e combat, just played out according to the mechanics as published (including a GM following the encounter-building guidelines), is likely to produce an encounter in which there are interpersonal dynamics among the players (mediated via their PCs), with rising action, mini-climaxes (eg a foe downed or an unconscious PC revived), more rising action, an overall-climax (the combat comes to an end), and then denouement - a short rest in which tactics are discussed, recriminations levied, negotiations with surviving enemies conducted, etc. The mechanics reliably produce this without anyone having to take responsibility for making it happen.What is missing from the 4e rules, as published, is advice on how to build encounters with an eye to story elements as well as tactical elements. Once this is done (following the advice in other, better, GM's manuals), then the tactical decision making becomes overlayed with a whole new set of thematic dynamics which are not just interpersonal among the players, but put at stake the goals and values to which the players (via their PCs) are committed. I think 4e monster design facilitates this really well also, because of the tight integration in many monsters of thematic fictional elements and their mechanical expression in the monster's traits and powers.A practical example from my game is <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/general-rpg-discussion/313724-actual-play-pcs-successfully-negotiated-kas.html" target="_blank">here, in the PCs' encounter with Kas</a>. I'm pretty confident that I couldn't have done that encounter in Rolemaster, or any other "first lucky strike" system (including "save-or-die" style 3E) - apart from anything else, the NPCs would have died, making the negotiation part of the encounter impossible. And I don't think it would have played very well in a pure attrition system, either, which doesn't introduce the same levels of uncertainty about consequences which make tactical decisions exciting. Running it in 4e required thinking hard about the NPCs and their responses to the PCs' actions. But it didn't require any toying with or fudging of the mechanics. On the contrary, this is the sort of thing that (in my experience at least) they support routinely and well.</blockquote>

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