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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6924069" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I agree that 4e doesn't particularly have anything beyond "be a creative DM" in terms of supporting interesting failure modes. It is rather implicit in SCs that they have a sort of fail-forward aspect to them, but even that isn't really anything beyond some rather inconsistent advice to not have failure block progress. Contrariwise it seems that the whole theory of 4e balanced combat encounters goes the other way, it posits essentially that every combat is a life-or-death affair which better not end badly for the PCs because that will be the end of their story. There's a slight mitigation there in that 4e's system does make escaping from a lost cause at least feasible (whereas in classic D&D this was nigh impossible).In some sense what I would call 'thematically interesting monsters' makes all this a bit more feasible. That is to say a reasonably weak monster can present a sort of challenge, particularly in a situation that isn't focused on a fight to the death, etc. Here 4e's stuff really is pretty good. Can you blast past the minions to block the guy from escaping with the McGuffin? What if they're not minions but some sort of monster that can be largely bypassed with some specific technique? You could still win by a variety of tactics, but there's one fun option that could become feasible if you did some sort of homework, think out of the box a little bit, etc. Heck, another way to play that is to let the players invent such things and inject them into the scenario! "Oh, Choker tribe goblins, they're deathly afraid of the sign of Imotnoi!" Of course using said sign has to lead somewhere interesting, either in terms of what it says about the character, or in terms of some consequence etc.</blockquote>

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