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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6308800" data-attributes="member: 18">It started in 2E, for me with, I remember, the players loudly complaining that they never got any random encounters any more (I had, in fact, been forgetting to check for them), and they just needed a little XP. I also saw a lot of "Let's go kill it for XP/treasure!" in 2E, or "Let's take the dangerous route!". Whereas in 4E, because you explicitly get XP for bypassed monsters, this was no longer a thing (3E actually had a similar deal, but I think it was couched so much as a suggestion that a lot of people didn't do it).I find that in 4E I often do put in "potential combats" that only add a little to the story, with a number of ways to avoid them - hell, last major adventure arc, the PCs managed to bypass about a half-dozen encounters, and ran from another one (because their goal was achieved, so why hang around?), which in 2E would definitely have been a "fight to the finish", all of which seemed very dramatically appropriate and cool.Again though, it's certainly "not how D&D used to be!", for better or worse.The big gap, for me, was that they didn't balance non-combat abilities the way they balanced combat ones. There's no reason, in 4E, that a Fighter should have less non-combat potential than a Rogue - different, certainly, but not less - yet he did, because of unspoken sacred cows - this sometimes undermined the "action-adventure" feel.Yeah - I actually think 4E could have had "the best of both worlds" if they'd decreased HP all round (monsters and PCs), and reduced PC Healing Surge numbers (not values - how many you have, not how big) by 30-50%. Thing is, I don't feel like 3.XE was very close to that, either, and it felt like 4E was an attempt to progress D&D towards what they thought then was the future of gaming, rather than to move back to 2E-style stuff, which wasn't something being wide-ly begged for in 2007/8 (again, they had no reason to believe this was wrong, given the reactions from fans - like the massive GenCon cheer when Vancian casting was said to be dead). Still, insufficient market research and playtesting, I think, WotC!</blockquote>

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