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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rhenny" data-source="post: 6984228" data-attributes="member: 18333">I really like the Millennium Falcon example, [MENTION=6785785]hawkeyefan[/MENTION].  To me, what it foregrounds is the idea that players need to know more clearly what is a "winnable" combat encounter and what will require more than just combat to survive, succeed, escape, etc.  In 4e, there were more options for DMs to provide for a varied experience (with orcs for example), than core 5e, and minions did account for some of that.  The thing is, because a party could see a group of orcs, and not know whether or not they were minions, lower level orcs, higher level orcs, etc. it could muddy the waters, making a situation seem ambiguous to a party.  This required DMs to make sure they described the situation well enough to hint at the power level of the encounter, which is not always reliable.  Yes, out of the box, DMs could use more variety in 4e, but ultimately, I think it led to more players just charging into combat even when the situation was actually more dangerous than it looked.  The game (and the encounter design) seemed to rely on DMs setting more balanced encounters.  I think this was one of the reasons why WoTC decided to start 5e with a limit on monster variety within species.  BA and AC that doesn't scale with level (and other scaling statistics) make it much more clear,"what you see is what you get."That said, I definitely like 4e monster design when it comes to giving more interesting powers/abilities to creatures, and making some higher level creatures basically unfightable for lower level PCs.  That in itself fulfills the "what you see is what you get" criteria.  I agree with some that 5e requires DMs to tinker to get the level of power of monsters up to the scaled values of 4e, and to perhaps provide more challenge when using less foes and less encounters per day.  But, 5e does not hide any of this.  It is very transparent, thus easy to futz with.  4e was much harder to futz with.</blockquote>

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