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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7023187" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, each to his own on that one. I find 5e books modestly readable as books, but not greatly more so than 4e ones. I found 4e powers to be a fairly tedious to wade through in quantity, but then there wasn't really a NEED to do so, you could just read the powers of the class you played at the levels you had picks from and that was enough. I certainly wouldn't even think of reading the 5e spell lists either.I think the trick that we found to 4e combat was dynamicism in encounter building. If you build fairly 'flat' encounters, much like the majority of what is in the dungeon in KotS for instance, you will be sorely disappointed, but then you're missing the actual strong point of the game! (And it is QUITE telling that Mr Mearls utterly missed it, almost beyond utterly in fact). Every combat I set up and ran in 4e brought with it some real element of conflict into which players had bought their characters. Something mattered to them. At the very least the combat had significant implications for the tactical/operational situation. Usually it included some degree of internal plot, things DID NOT remain static. This obviates the potential issue of a bogged down slugging match, which otherwise could easily happen in 4e despite the plethora of ways to gain mobility. You didn't just stand around fighting the hobgoblins, because the dike you were all fighting over was crumbling! You didn't stop to reduce the level+1 soldier to 0 hit points, because the object of the fight was to get past him before time ran out, not to fight some kind of steel cage death match. I freely admit, there were a few notable times when things did devolve into a slug fest. I can remember two encounters from my first campaign in particular. Once a party got ambushed by an owl bear in a dark cavern, which was supposed to be a frightening sort of hit-and-run blind fight, but they pinned the stupid thing in a corner right off and it became a long bloody slugfest. It actually WAS tense, the party barely survived and almost lost 2 characters, but that fight taught me in spades to make sure there was some way to avoid that kind of fate in the future. So, MY 4e campaigns, turned into a sort of super heroic crazy Indiana Jones style thing over time. Something was coming out of left field, or the whole place was coming down around your ears, or the clock was ticking, etc. It just never let up, at least in action sequences. Luckily 4e provided SCs which were a pretty nice way to handle the other kind of significant scenes where combat wasn't involved.</blockquote>

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