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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6007820" data-attributes="member: 82106">4e fights almost always should have other things going on besides 'fight to the death'. Not all of those things might be termed 'victory conditions' but many of them could be. Sadly people spent far too much time taking the basic formula of 4e encounters seriously and FAR FAR too little time taking all the other advice seriously (I really suspect the vast majority of people never even read past how to use XP to build an encounter, and then they complain). DMG2 has a wealth of advice on more advanced topics too. Once you stop seeing encounters, and DEFINITELY boss fights, as simple iron cage death matches the whole game starts to take on a very different cast. Push it even further and put fights in more interesting context and you have something that works REALLY well. All of a sudden the 'sloginess' that people have complained about turns into a positive aspect of the game (your opponents aren't trivial and you have to work at defeating each one). Every encounter should BE a story. It should have PLOT and CHARACTER, and MOTIVE.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 6007820, member: 82106"] 4e fights almost always should have other things going on besides 'fight to the death'. Not all of those things might be termed 'victory conditions' but many of them could be. Sadly people spent far too much time taking the basic formula of 4e encounters seriously and FAR FAR too little time taking all the other advice seriously (I really suspect the vast majority of people never even read past how to use XP to build an encounter, and then they complain). DMG2 has a wealth of advice on more advanced topics too. Once you stop seeing encounters, and DEFINITELY boss fights, as simple iron cage death matches the whole game starts to take on a very different cast. Push it even further and put fights in more interesting context and you have something that works REALLY well. All of a sudden the 'sloginess' that people have complained about turns into a positive aspect of the game (your opponents aren't trivial and you have to work at defeating each one). Every encounter should BE a story. It should have PLOT and CHARACTER, and MOTIVE. [/QUOTE]

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