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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3840229" data-attributes="member: 42582">The problem with this advice (as others have also noted) is that combat takes up a lot of time at the D&D table. So staying out of combat means not playing the game.I've never played a computer game, but I have played quite a bit of 1st ed AD&D. And this post rung true for me, with one exception: at high levels UA fighters were capable of doing serious damage, with their 5/2 attacks and +3/+3 from double specialisation.Yes, just as The Dying Earth is build hardwiring repartee into the game. The hardwiring in of combat is no great departure from earlier versions of D&D - it was a huge part of AD&D (to the extent that the 1st ed MM contains little more than combat details for monsters) and Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert. The balance of class utility is more recent.I don't really understand your reason for this opinion. Why should the game not offer all players a roughly equal likelihood of enjoyment during combat, the most frequent and time-consuming of challenges that PCs face in D&D?It is simply not true, in my experience, that parity leads to blandness. Just as one example: a melee fighter who specialises in multiple attacks can be balanced (on a par) with one who specialises in single attacks dealing large amounts of damage. But the two will play very differently, and have a very different feel at the table. I know this because, in the RM game I GM, there are four fighters: a multi-attack specialist, a difficult-terrain and defender specialists, a single-target pounder with self-healing buffs, and a single-target pounder with flight and other enhancement buffs. All are able to contribute meaningfully in melee. And there is no blandness.As for the issue of choice: choice is displaced from the action resolution mechanics back into the character build mechanics. (Although per-encounter abilities, if well-designed, will also give rise to an interesting range of choices of action within an encounter.)As someone else said, encounters are the constituents of adventures and campaigns. But, and more pertinently, levelling and incremental advances are essential if choice is located at the character build end as much as (if not moreso than) at the action resolution end.In the end, as far as I can tell your complaint is that character build mechanics are becoming as important as action resolution mechanics, and thus the proportionate importance to the play experience of "play and the ongoing game" is reduced. This is as true of 3E, relative to earlier editions, as it will be of 4e relative to 3E - perhaps even moreso. Just as it didn't appear to hurt 3E, so I doubt it will hurt 4e.I don't get this. Why should playing a game not be gratifying? Isn't that the point of playing a game? The real question, AFAICT, is whether or not resource management is a sufficient source of gratification for sufficiently many RPGers to make it worth including in D&D. And on this point I assume that WoTC has done its market research.</blockquote>

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