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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Revinor" data-source="post: 4110456" data-attributes="member: 25037">You asked what makes 4e harder to play without a board. 4e is more focused on big fights, big fights are harder without a board, so 4e is harder without a board.  I have never said there were no big fights in 3e, I just said they were less common.</blockquote>Well I guess that your characters never used spells that had effects like cones or area burst either.  It is pretty important to keep in mind where your opponents and allies are in those cases.  If you were able to keep track of who was flanking pre-4e.  I'm pretty sure that you can use the same mechanism to determine who is adjacent or not.  Maybe just saying, I'm adjacent or flanking, etc. will continue to work the same way.[/QUOTE]For the cones/bursts, you can just describe the situation to the wizard (you can hit A and B, or ABC but also your friend Z) and he can decide. In fact, I have mostly ruled that you were not able to aim the fireball on two normal sized combatants in melee to affect only one of them (which is trivial with board, but would be horribly hard in real dynamic combat) - but this is not important here. As for the adjacent as flanking - sure, just instead of tracking 2-3 variables (as flanking was not being on the opposite square, but result of the action "I flank him so my friend is on the other side"), there will be 10-15 variables (who is adjacent to whom in combination of 5 players versus 5 monsters). Not impossible, just harder.Sure, but there is small difference between 6th level 3e spells using arcane energy and 4e 2nd lvl goblin powers using small harpoon or shouting really hard at enemy.Not really. 4e is a boardgame, because it requires a board to get even basic support for the combat, while many other systems, including 3e, allow quite advanced board-less combat, with minimum amount of house rules. Having powers driven by game needs instead of 'simulation', make it harder to narrate the combat (while making it a lot more interesting to play on the board at the same time).And just to let you know - I love boardgames and I would be more than happy to play/DM 4e games with board-base combat and RPG between the combats. I'm just scared that this switching will decouple the character-in-rpg from miniature-on-board in everybody's minds a lot more than 3e character-in-rpg versus character-in-combat. And I think that boardless 4e is a harder to pull out that boardless 3e. Not impossible, harder.[/QUOTE]

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