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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 5984829" data-attributes="member: 1165">A much lower DM prep time. I can convert Dark Sun adventures really easily. I feel like I'm cheating sometimes. For instance, I converted the 2e adventure "Taste of Fear" into four encounters. It took me half an hour, mainly just shuffling the number and types of monsters/NPCs per encounter, not counting new monster design, which can take much longer (but at least said monsters will probably be balanced).In order to counter this, to an extent, I've built NPCs of varying levels for most widely-used character classes. I still need to work on psions and sorcerers, having a near-total lack of area-burst artillery.I'm a big fan of how some classes changed. It may seem odd to say this, but I like how the cleric got restrictions. I never "got" the cleric in previous editions. In 3rd, it seemed (beyond the healer role, which was boring) the cleric went from weak control spells at low levels to buffing at mid levels to dishing out the hurt at high levels. Every cleric had to be built the same, with the same ability scores to be useful in mid-level. (Ever tried to create a drow priestess in 3.x? Don't do it at mid-level. High Dex/low Con creatures really shouldn't be handling the buff & bash role.) In 4e, the cleric's leader role (beyond the healing) seeps into nearly everything it does.I'm a big fan of character classes that actually do their job, in part because those jobs are defined. No longer are the wizard, fighter and rogue all competing to see who can do the most damage...I'm a big fan of mini-buffs (what the cleric has), minor action healing and save ends. I'm a big fan of giving fighters things to do beyond just giving them feats that do nothing but boost their numbers.I'm in a Kingmaker Pathfinder campaign as a player, and two sessions ago we had the adventure go off the rails for half the session. Our party includes a barbarian (armored hulk)/alchemist (rage-chemist), already one of the most OP non-caster combos available. (Why did Pathfinder have to invent new bonus types?) His abilities apparently include making (but not throwing) bombs.We had trapped an enemy army in a set of caves, but these weren't humans, instead being much more powerful creatures, and there were 100-200 of them in there. (This was apparently a balanced encounter in the mass combat system, but we weren't spoiling the adventures for ourselves, so we didn't know that.) Needless to say, we weren't eager to go after them, even with our own armies. We used bombs to seal the tunnels, but the monsters could dig their way out, so we thought about hiding bombs in the rubble so we could set them off whenever the monsters came out. Another player got over-enthusiastic about the bombs, ignored the lack of infinite resources and insisted they'd kill those monsters. There were no rules for how many bombs you could make or how much damage they did.If this were 4e, the rules are already there. (Are they on page 42? I keep the relevant rules on an index card.) Each bomb would be a "minion trap" doing an average of 14 damage (2d6+7, probably) in a burst with an attack bonus of +8 vs Reflex (we were 5th-level at the time). We would get four per day.* Not a lot; there's no way one simple solution like that could win the conflict, although a monster getting hit with all four would probably want to stop fighting immediately. Perhaps that's enough to trap the monsters, but they could then make Strength/Athletics checks to dig out while we frantically try to kill them using the other PCs. However, the DM didn't have a set of rules like that, and couldn't come up with something in the space of a session. He gave up - basically made the bombs overpowered and endless, trapping the monsters indefinitely and ruining the encounter.4e seems to have that nice balance of (from the DM's side, anyway) enough rules for some things, but flexible enough for most things.*Basically making bombs like that would be a monster's daily ability, and a monster could summon four minions as an encounter ability (at heroic tier). I'd say daily because it's on top of the PCs' other abilities as well.</blockquote>

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