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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 5509178" data-attributes="member: 38357">That's one way to handle it. I've been thinking of running it as a fight "off the grid", myself, and I think the two have the same big issue for me: Players pick their powers (or feats, etc.) because they want their characters to be able to do the cool stuff that power represents. Powers are written in a very specific way in part because that gives them "truth in advertising"; they work the way they say they work and the players know this.For example: if a player takes a power that knocks an enemy prone, I expect that to be because the player wants to be able to apply the prone condition, as it is written, to the enemies their character hits. If that power is appropriate to use in a skill challenge, or other situation where it can't be applied as written, you end up with the DM deciding how it's going to be applied. You end up undermining the player's ability to make informed choices about how they spend their character-building resources and you turn the game from players vs. system to players vs. DM.Also, one of the big reasons why I play 4e is the expectation that it makes the battlemat useful, worthwhile, and fun. The big argument for using the battlemat has always been that it "allows" some people to "visualize things"; unfortunately I find that it pretty much has the opposite effect for me. Once you put the battlemat and minis out in front of me it's much harder for me to view things from the characters' eyes, I have a hard time not just seeing a bunch of plastic figures on some cardboard tiles. 4e makes the position of those figures and what's on the tiles actually matter in a fun way.Without that benefit I don't feel like a lot of other stuff 4e does to produce structure in the game is actually beneficial to my play. A big example would be skill challenges (and note that the majority of players I have gamed with do not want to deal with SCs in any kind of a mechanical way, and I think that would make a huge difference) - some may like the mechanical structure they provide me for running non-combat encounters, but I feel that it has really only hurt my game. I don't feel that I actually need a count of successes and failures to determine when the scene is over or what the outcome is.So I think that I could run an encounter like this pretty well if I just relied on describing the scene instead of playing it out on the battlemat, but it would waste some of the advantages of playing 4e in the first place. I think that a good start towards running it "on the grid" would be to make the players aware what the goal & purpose of the encounter is. State plainly that the encounter is not about killing monsters, that they aren't "worth XP" in this case, maybe even make it clear that there is no actual limit to how many monsters will show up - so that taking them out in general isn't useful, although taking out one that's in a bad spot for the PCs still would be...Then I think you also want to reward the PCs for moving forward. Something like a SC, but with a determination of how far the PCs have advanced in place of actual skill checks. Then set up obstacles in the PCs paths so that they have to choose between different routes... IDK, this is turning into an awful lot of work, and that's been part of the problem for me - making that work pay off enough that it's "worth it". It would be a lot easier if I just set up the situation and then tried to model it within the system, but I also feel like the results would tend to be unsatisfying.</blockquote>

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