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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The-Magic-Sword" data-source="post: 7704847" data-attributes="member: 6801252">See, this is actually what makes it's 4e design so brilliant- a mark is a punishment and a penalty, but not a compulsion- back on the WOTC boards and on here, we would occasionally get stories about how DM's would always or never obey the mark and about how it caused problems. In reality, every time the DM selects a target they have a choice to make- should i attack the person who has me marked (potentially wasting my attack on a defender with high HP and Defenses) or do I want to attack his friend who's destroying me (at the risk of the mark punishment, whatever that may happen to be) and it gave the player a really interesting dynamic: you don't want your HP and defenses too high, because otherwise the informed monster will always ignore the mark and you're not much of a defender and you don't have the features to be good at anything else, but you also don't want your mark punishment to be too brutal, because then they'll never trigger it by even trying to attack an ally, which is how you do your damage in some cases. It quite naturally makes players balance the two factors in such a way that neither is completely dominant.</blockquote>