NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 5713669" data-attributes="member: 54710">Overall, I think 5e should be a little bit scarier than 4e.  I like the fact that 4e eliminated most of save-or-die and created encounter building guidelines that generate fights of more predictable difficulty.  But I also think 4e went too far in making combat safe and predictable.  I'd like to see 5e make combat a bit swingier, but -- just as importantly -- there need to be more combat elements that frighten the players.  Maybe more conditions need to be stackable?  I think "not stackable" is probably the right default condition, but -- if the on-going damage represents a bleeding wound -- maybe each hit should produce a new wound?  (And maybe, as you suggest, it should be a Heal check and not a save to get rid of it?)  Another possibility is to create more combinations.  A medusa or basilisk would be scarier if characters subject to the petrification process suffered a vulnerability 5 to physical damage (as the flesh becomes brittle).  You don't want situations where a character dies from a single die roll, but you do want situations where one die roll can make a player think "uh oh, I'm in trouble now."  At least part of this is about monster design.  I ran a fight last month with a modified catoblepas.  With it's pull power enhanced to "pull 10" and it's existing powers, my players had a tense fight and worried greatly about letting anyone drop to 0.  There was real tension, but no sense of arbitrary doom.  -KS</blockquote>

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