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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 5890894" data-attributes="member: 11999">I agree completely, and I think this is perhaps the major contributing factor to the whole "time in the spotlight" balance issue.In AD&D or Basic D&D, combats were a lot faster than in 3e or 4e.  At low levels, most battles are over in 10-15 min.  If your character isn't very good in combat, that isn't too much time to be a minor contributor.  When a typical combat encounter starts to take 45 min to an hour or more, you're getting into "20 minutes of fun spread over 4 hours" territory if your character isn't very useful in combat.This goes for low-level wizards/magic-users as well.  There are countless ways to actively contribute to the party's success outside of combat which don't involve casting spells.  It just requires some creative thinking and a willingness to immerse oneself within the fiction of the game.  When 80% of the session's time is spent in combat, one or two spells and an ineffective crossbow don't really add up to much fun for the player.In a lot of ways, 4e is very close to what I want out of D&D.  The focus on tactical combat scenarios is ultimately what ruins the experience for me.  Nobody is forcing us to play it a particular way, but I find it to be a lot of work to not play it with a heavy tactical focus.  Adventures presented in delve format are part of the issue, as I tend to read them as a sequence of important combat encounters and gloss over the connecting bits even though I know that I don't have to run it that way and that I don't like running it that way.   When running an encounter, I get so caught up in reading power descriptions and making sure that I don't forget about monsters auras and triggered actions that I forget about things like checking morale.  When the combat ends 45 min to an hour later, it's not uncommon to have a discussion about "so... what were we doing again?"4e has a lot of fiddly bits that are directly connected to the tactical combat aspect of the game.  I spend a lot of mental energy on tracking short-term conditions, applying floating minor bonuses or penalties, and shifting a square or two on the grid.  Yeah, they are some neat tactical options, but I don't know that they make a big enough difference in the grand scheme to be worth what they cost in paying attention to other aspects of the game.I love the streamlined core of 4e, and the skill system strikes a great balance of being playable without too much fiddling.  One could build a pretty sleek modern incarnation of BECMI upon the core mechanics of 4e.</blockquote>

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