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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 6000492" data-attributes="member: 63">In 4e's conversion of War of the Burning Sky, a lot of quick battles we had beforehand became chunky 'epic battles of epicness,' because that's what 4e does. 4e wasn't really built to let you sneak up on a couple of goblin sentries and kill them, then sneak up on a room full of 5 goblins and take them out in 2 rounds, and so on until you clear out the whole warren.4e does dramatic fights well. It doesn't handle dungeon crawling as well, though, because you want to get fights over in a couple minutes.Now, because 4e did not give a damn about justifying how NPCs and monsters get their powers, you could design really nice, dynamic combats. Bosses could do stuff like weave through the party attacking everyone once, then creating a wall of fire in the path they ran, splitting the party in two. You didn't have to create a chain of 10 feats or a special spell to do that. You just came up with something that seemed interesting, looked at a table to gauge about how much damage it should do and with what attack bonus (lower the damage if you want it to not be a threat, raise the damage if the enemy is more powerful than the PCs), and voila. Unique villain, designed in less than an hour.I made a Four Winds Dragon that, whenever he lost 20% of his HP, would split into four smaller dragons with different powers, to harass the party. Each had a small amount of HP, and when they were all destroyed, the big dragon would reform and switch tactics with new tricks and magic. The battle was epic and fun.Likewise, with novel design of smaller monsters, you could have an 'evil adventuring party' without going overboard with the prep. The final fight against the goblin chieftain and his bodyguards might involve a goblin witch doctor who has a few spells, two scoundrels who scamper around and are hard to corner, the chieftain himself, his pet warg, and a dozen minion goblins who die in one hit. The other foes would require 3 or 4 hits to take down, and would have a nice mix of tactics, but you could fit everyone's stats on one page, and they'd require much less brain processing power than a fully-fleshed-out NPC using player character rules.</blockquote>

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