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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6644558" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, any RPG is as easy or hard as you are desiring to make it. You can play 4e as an easy-going story game where 'loss' is just a setback and the PCs almost always win fights regardless. Or you could play it as a completely hard-assed survival game, like 4th Core, using exactly the same rules. The same is true of every edition of D&D. If you want you can make it tough, or you can go pretty easy and just play to have a few laughs. So I guess the question is why is the tactical depth not a 'chimera'? I think the reason is because its how the story plays out that matters. In a 4e game the DM has a lot of control over the difficulty, and the players have a lot of control over the amount of risk they're willing to take. Assuming your DM is capable then you can have a quite interesting time finding out HOW the player's win all those fights. THEY (the players) can also choose NOT to win in the narrow sense, they are masters of their fates and they can choose what victory means for them. If the Paladin chooses to go down blocking the door so that the refugees can get to safety, that's COOL! Its not so easy to do that in classic D&D where relatively fragile characters make it difficult to count on your sacrifice being meaningful. At higher levels it MIGHT work, but by then the game is too unpredictable to employ that sort of plot, the wizard will likely blow the whole thing up with some clever use of Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion or something.Well, as a DM, I went a lot further. I have crazy action terrain. Basically go watch any of the classic action movies of the 1980's (or whenever) and you see scene after scene of people falling, running, jumping, things burning, collapsing, flying, etc all over the place. That's what 4e does so well its just not even funny. It kills at that stuff.Eh, I think you COULD do combat-as-war, but I don't like the distinction that much. If the players want to go poison the orcs water supply instead of charging in the front door of the orc cave, then great, 4e is certainly not getting in the way of that. It maybe never developed some of the equipments and utility magic quite to the same degree as classic D&D, but the possibility still exists. I've seen players do some of that in 4e and we worked with it. It was fun. OTOH at least you CAN do 'sporting combats' in 4e, you REALLY wouldn't have wanted to do that in say 2e, or 3.x! 5e is a bit more forgiving I will admit, but it lacks the romping action stuff that 4e comes with.</blockquote>

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