Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8681359" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I dunno. I mean, one of the attractions IMHO to older D&D was the very hairy edged nature of most play. Even a 9th level fighter, on average in D&D or B/X, has 4.5 x 9 hit points, or 40.5 hit points. While that's far from nothing, you can fall 40' and be VERY close to dead with a small amount of bad luck! A tougher monster could easily hit you a couple times and deliver 20 points of damage, no problem. a 9th level fireball won't kill you, but again you're not going to take 2 of them (unless you save twice, which is less than likely). When it comes to 4e there's a good bit less of that swingy luck of the dice, but it is NOT gone! And there's plenty of chances to have bad luck which results in a lack of resources that leads to high tension or whatnot. This is going to be true of all versions of D&D. I can't answer for your taste of course, but in my games that I GMed (which was most of the 4e I was involved in) killing a character was a not incredibly unlikely happening. It wasn't routine, but PCs did get ganked. Once or twice a whole party got TPKed. I mean, they could have turned back and probably survived, but they didn't. It wasn't SAFE by any means. Yes, you could usually tell if you were in likely danger, but once you got to say where the fighter was down to one HS, anything could happen. Usually that was about when the BBEG showed up! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I mean, the flip side is the way older games would regularly deliver "we were just bopping down the corridor and 2 orcs showed up, rolled really well, and cleaned the whole party."</blockquote>

Verification