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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7720451" data-attributes="member: 6873517">There was always a mixture of play styles in my experience (all the way back to 1E). Smart players fought as a team and focused their fire. Showboat players fought as a group of individuals. Think of it like the difference between the Roman legion (all about the team) and the heroes in Homer's Illiad (all about the individual). Of course most people are a mixture of these types to some degree and games do need to take that into account. Most people who play want to feel like they contributed to the victory in an important way. I did notice that in 4E especially people would often make the &quot;party of strikers&quot; who maximized their individual DPR. This party works OK against certain kinds of foes but it's definitely a glass hammer. I've also played with less tactically savvy groups who don't do things like focus fire or else go for the most proximate target regardless of the tactical soundness of it. IMO it's challenging to run for those groups because they are often much weaker than you would suppose unless the group of players managed to coalesce on a powerful strategy somehow, in which case they became way more powerful all of a sudden. In short, they were very spotty. 4E did really encourage tactical play, almost to a miniatures game level, but IMO the more tactically interesting and potent character types often had the flaw of being boring to play. While the strikers took long turns and rolled buckets of dice, you'd sit there waiting and have to take solace in the fact that the super short thing you did was crucial for that to happen. Turn speed really matters, especially if you want to have characters with less damage-dealing abilities and more tactically important things like buffing or healing.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7720451, member: 6873517"] There was always a mixture of play styles in my experience (all the way back to 1E). Smart players fought as a team and focused their fire. Showboat players fought as a group of individuals. Think of it like the difference between the Roman legion (all about the team) and the heroes in Homer's [I]Illiad[/I] (all about the individual). Of course most people are a mixture of these types to some degree and games do need to take that into account. Most people who play want to feel like they contributed to the victory in an important way. I did notice that in 4E especially people would often make the "party of strikers" who maximized their individual DPR. This party works OK against certain kinds of foes but it's definitely a glass hammer. I've also played with less tactically savvy groups who don't do things like focus fire or else go for the most proximate target regardless of the tactical soundness of it. IMO it's challenging to run for those groups because they are often much weaker than you would suppose unless the group of players managed to coalesce on a powerful strategy somehow, in which case they became way more powerful all of a sudden. In short, they were very spotty. 4E did really encourage tactical play, almost to a miniatures game level, but IMO the more tactically interesting and potent character types often had the flaw of being [I]boring[/I] to play. While the strikers took long turns and rolled buckets of dice, you'd sit there waiting and have to take solace in the fact that the super short thing you did was crucial for that to happen. Turn speed really matters, especially if you want to have characters with less damage-dealing abilities and more tactically important things like buffing or healing. [/QUOTE]

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