That's what I was getting at, though. Because numbers scaled so quickly with level, a high-Paragon party against a low-Paragon encounter could very possibly get through it without spending any healing surges at all. Instead of spending 3-4 rounds, where you make attacks with 50% accuracy, against enemies who hit back with 50% accuracy; you spend 2-3 rounds, where you make attacks with 80% accuracy, against enemies who hit back with 20% accuracy. And it will still take at least half an hour to run through the combat, because you still have to make decisions that are tactically sound, because a hit against you could cost you a healing surge.
I would say there's just no question that GM who is insisting on this sort of encounter is playing 4e sub-optimally. Why not have an encounter with slightly higher level enemies? Or create some minions of the correct level (a minion of level+8 is IIRC the same XP as its standard equivalent). So if you have a level 12 encounter and a bunch of level 20 PCs, minionize the standards, and bulk it up with some level 20 standards, or a level 20 elite, or something. Now you have a more fun encounter.
Alternatively simply brush it off. Throw a low complexity SC to see if the PCs suffer any damage at all, which should run in 5 minutes (it is going to play a lot like a trivial 1e encounter, toss a couple dice, eyeball it, call it good).
It just doesn't seem like a reasonable use of time at the table, given how long it would take, and how little attrition it would cause. You could cause more attrition in less time by using at-level encounters, which would also probably be more dramatically satisfying.
Exactly. Seeing how easy it is to relevel things there's little reason not to just increase the level of monsters in this situation if you need to run it with 'the same monsters', and you don't think that dramatically it makes more sense for them to just be trivial and basically run away after a couple hits (the SC above basically).
To contrast, I will say that just about every single rule in third edition makes sense to me. For every design decision that they made, I can understand why they did it. Most of it's just because they were trying to bring order to the patchwork kludge which was AD&D, and they didn't have enough design experience to see where it might break down. (To be fair, at the time, nobody had that experience. Third edition was revolutionary in many ways.)
3e was a pretty significant redesign of D&D, yes. I think it was idiosyncratic for early 2000's RPG design, but it wasn't in any sense ground breaking. MUCH of 3e draws on Rolemaster actually, though it hews closer to AD&D in terms of some specifics like spells. RM is a late 70's design itself. Games like GURPS and various others did all the things 3e did at least a decade earlier. Revolutionary games at that time were things like Sorcerer (which was a late 90's game).
I don't disagree though, 3e is basically a way to take late 2e's unstable and unworkable mass of kits and special rules subsystems, MCing, dual classing, and various other bits and parts, and weld it together into a fairly consistent whole. 3e IS consistent, it pares the mechanics down to largely d20s and roll high with a standard ability bonus, etc. Feats rationalize various sorts of class features and kit-based 'stuff'. The problem is it is heedless of the actual overall effects of its own rules. It has no concept of what sort of game it is, and its parts don't come together cohesively. Full casters are massively stronger than in AD&D, non-casters get utterly boned, the class system effectively ceases to exist, but no alternative mechanism of making things work together replaces it. Its a hot mess really.
Of course, just because certain pitfalls were real in any given edition, that doesn't mean everyone encountered them (or found them problematic, if they did). To me, healing surges were a solution to a problem that I never experienced in the first place; which also means that, to me, the solution was worse than the problem it was trying to fix. Likewise, with the segregated rules for monster creation, it was a solution to a problem that I never experienced.
HS were just genius though as a pacing mechanism. Let the PCs go into each fight at 'full power', but ALSO be weakened. At the same time divorce healing from being a burden on one type of character, and yet don't just give it away to everyone in a way that negates resource management. Its actually HARDER to manage your HS and hit points in 4e in a tough tactical game than it is to manage the stock of CLWs, potions, and (assuming your players decide to be strategic) wands that make up 3e's single large pool of 'extra hit points'.
Nothing in 3e is possible in terms of encounter pacing that works at all like the 4e version. The monsters come in hard on round 1, the PCs are knocked back! On round 2 they regroup, heals are dispensed, the monsters try to keep the party off its game, but on round 3 its the PCs turn, the weaker bad guys are down now, its the turning point, and round 4 is over the hump, pump out a daily if you're still not sure of victory, and then clean it up on round 5. It works like clockwork too!
I guess that's just one of the inherent difficulties in creating a new edition, is that everyone had a different experience with the previous edition. They kind of just had to play the numbers, and try to fix the biggest problems that affected the most people.
Yeah, that's very true, which is why I roll my eyes at the people who can't say a good thing about 4e, its silly. I don't see the point. I'm not a 5e fan. I don't see it as some big departure, but as more of a throwback to some mix of 3e and 2e basically. I didn't see the slightest point in diverging from the direction that 4e was going in. I want to see MORE of it! As cool as 4e is, its only 50% of the way to the game I wanted to see.