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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9574668" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I can say, if you use Roll20, there is an implemented character sheet, and you can code your own powers for it--simple ones aren't even that hard to do directly, actually, without any coding at all. It took me a while to get fully fluent with it, but (from experience) I can get back into the swing of it with a bit of time.No kidding.Certainly. This was one of the pretty major mistakes the 4e design team made early on. They did it for reasons that seemed sound at the time, but it was a bad move. Specifically, they aimed for most combats to resolve in 4-6 rounds, leaning to the top end; monsters didn't do as much damage with each hit, but lasted longer, and many early Leader things were more about sustained output than about being a force multiplier (with the Cleric being particularly so...as one of the first two Leader classes.) The point was to let the opponents have plenty of time to show off their Cool Trick(s), and plenty of time for the PCs to rally from any initial setbacks and power through to the finish. Unfortunately, in practice this meant many combats, especially those done purely "by the book"--as many people do early on in an edition when they don't know what the system is capable of!--tended to be slow and kind of grindy and, oftentimes, less "threatening" and more "logistically expensive."Turns out, that's not what most folks wanted from D&D combat anymore (and the folks who would want it were never going to touch 4e to begin with, outside of the later 4thcore development). Of course, we have to be careful about presuming that what folks want is, in fact, a rational thing to begin with, because that isn't always true. In this case, there's an inherent tension between wanting fast combat and wanting rewarding combat, as is the case with most things. Stuff you can breeze through too quickly can't matter very much, except in the biggest and (in D&D's case) often the most frustrating ways. Most folks want both fast and rewarding, and that's...often a real challenge. OSR-type games certainly give fast and dangerous combat, but usually its combats aren't rewarding--often explicitly so, e.g. you don't get XP for fighting, only for GP value of loot collected, but sometimes only implicitly, e.g. combat is brutally lethal and it's expected that a "smart" player will figure out that rolling for initiative when you haven't won the battle in advance is a sucker's game. Getting combat that is simultaneously fast, and dangerous, and rewarding...that's a lot trickier, and the 4e designers erred pretty heavily on the wrong side.By the time the MM3/MV math had come out, the damage was done, and even that measure only mostly fixed the problems, and even then to progressively lesser degrees as the characters got into high Paragon or Epic.Players prefer snappier, more "dramatic" combat in many cases, though not all. That's part of why my "what would you do to update 4e" answer included my "Skirmish rules" concept. Some folks who love tactical battle mechanics might never use them. Other folks might almost exclusively use Skirmishes, with few to no standard combats. More or less, the idea is to drop down the granularity and time investment of regular combat, while still (a) having meaningful costs, (b) giving players some choices, just rapid-fire and simplified, and (c) making it so that experience at least can be "part of this balanced breakfast" so to speak.The analogy I like to use is that Skirmishes are to proper Combats what "party skill checks" (like you have everyone roll stealth, and if a majority succeed then the party succeeds) are to Skill Challenges. Or, at least, they would be that, because I've never written up any rules attempting such a thing. It would be probably my third-highest priority for a "4.5e", after Novice Levels/Incremental Advance rules and the general cleanup of unnecessary, crufty powers.</blockquote>

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