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="Jer" data-source="post: 7454176" data-attributes="member: 19857">It was probably me over the in "essence of 4e" thread.  And I stand by it.  Compared to previous editions of D&D it was very easy to throw together an encounter using the monster books and/or even to create a monster on the fly using the tables in the books (which I would have copies of at the table for the relevant levels of my table's PCs so I didn't have to fumble with the actual books).  The encounter building math worked better than 3e (and I would argue than 5e) mostly by virtue of the fact that player resources were mostly per encounter instead of per day - modulo a daily power they would likely be hitting every encounter at basically full strength, so it was pretty easy to judge what the stats needed to be.  You probably did need a bit of system mastery to make it work (or a head for algebra, I suppose) but all of the pieces were laid out on the table with nothing obscured and that made it easy to work with.  (Also all of the creature's spell-like attacks were laid out in a nice format that didn't require me to find the appropriate spell in the PHB when I needed to figure out damage or whatnot, which is a giant step backward in 5e IMO).Of course 13th age took all of these pieces parts of encounter building and simplified them ever further, so 4e doesn't look quite as elegant to me as it did when we were playing it.  Still, it was easier to run an improvised battle in 4e than it ever was in 3e.</blockquote>

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