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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6640134" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, 4e is really oriented towards story-based action play, so it doesn't heavily favor the "one lucky shot" sort of theory of death which was so prevalent in AD&D play. Its true that a 2e or even a 1e fighter MIGHT well outclass his melee opponents a good bit, he should, but it was still not TOO hard to have something like a troll, an ankheg, or any of a variety of other monsters with some fairly gnarly claw/claw/bite or specialty high damage attacks to gank you in a round, even at mid-level. 4e DOES largely avoid that, you have to either make a bad mistake or just push yourself over the edge to go down hard and fast. OTOH you certainly CAN go down, even to some relatively easy-looking encounters at times. I've avoided issuing any TPKs in 4e, because its an easy game to balance, but I've killed PLENTY of PCs. I don't know that all my groups were tactical wiz-bangs, but none of them was idiotically stupid and they all generally built moderately good characters. Anyway, the point is its a GREAT system for the dramatic sacrifice. If the fighter wants to stick in the door to give the wizard time to break the secret code and figure out how to work the ritual to close the demongate, he can do it. Even certain death won't happen before he buys a couple rounds, if he pulls out all the stops, so its worth it. The problem with something like 1e is you'd probably just get ganked on the bad guys initiative and that'd be the end of it. 4e isn't so much coddling the PCs as giving them a chance to shine. When you die you generally didn't go down to a bad die roll, it was "OK, now I'm going to up the ante to max and risk death, if I go down it won't be for nothing"Now, maybe that's not everyone's cup of tea. If you enjoy the bathos of the meaningless meatgrinder type casual death of classic D&D, by all means play it. I think 5e's model is the odd man out here. Its much more forgiving than even 2e, yet its still not geared towards drama and action as 4e is. I find it rather neither fish nor fowl personally.</blockquote>

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