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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5374530" data-attributes="member: 82106">I agree, daily powers and APs are a great pacing mechanism. They are a great mechanism not just for the players either. 4e seems exceptionally good at dramatic combats where first the monsters come on strong, dropping their single-use powers and burning their APs. Suddenly the party seems to be on the rocks! Then the wave crests and the characters push back. The leader shores up the bloodied fighter's hit points and drops a big buff against the nasty brute, etc.All the things that people decry so bitterly is exactly what makes the game so great (well, one of the things). The surge based healing system? Perfect for depicting comebacks. Action Points? No more awesome way to show the character pulling out all the stops for that last heroic effort. Daily powers? If you're going down, you aren't going down easy!The same is true with the monsters. The entire asymmetrical way that they are structured compared to the PCs really feeds the game. Monsters are tough but you constantly make progress against them and they don't (usually) heal up and make you do it all over again. Their powers are either one-shots that knock back the characters (almost always at the early stage of a combat), bread-and-butter moves, or unpredictable wackiness that pops back up again at random (recharge powers). Really, the basic structure of this whole portion of the game obviously was thought about a lot from a standpoint of what would create drama and tension. It hasn't always panned out perfectly, some of the knobs weren't quite tweaked to their best settings in the first few books, but the machine is really good for what it was made for. It just keeps getting better too. Even after running 4e since it shipped and having 30+ years of DMing experience I still keep finding ways to make ever more interesting and exciting encounters.</blockquote>

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