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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5633799" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yet they all monotonically increase in to-hit. Sure, some details are different but all classes do it. More than that the classes that are not expected to even bother with melee go up the slowest, so it is really not as relevant as it seems. In 9 levels a fighter will get +9, a cleric +6, and a rogue +6. A wizard will get like +2, but if your wizard is making melee attacks at level 9, well... Now, given that you don't have quite the clear roles that you do in 4e look at the fighter as a striker, and 1e's way of pumping him up is ONLY increasing his to-hit and adding more attacks. In 4e he'll tack on a dozen-and-a-half combat feats. The cleric is really far more of a caster than anything else as well. For all intents and purposes there's a pretty uniform overall advancement there in terms of attacking things. Certainly if you were a fighter you were very much on a treadmill. Yeah, I dunno. I think the problem is people look at the encounter design guidelines etc and they assume "these apply to all styles of play and situations", but they don't. And again they aren't RULES you have to follow. The encounter design guidelines build balanced encounters. It is up to you to decide if that is what you want. In a dungeon crawl you simply aren't going to face an endless stream of balanced encounters. That would be boring regardless of the speed of combat. Looking through my stuff what I find is that most encounters in 1e dungeons were either a couple of weaker monsters, sometimes an even fight, sometimes a big pack of weaker monsters, or some more singular stronger/more deadly monster that was not an overall threat but could take someone out.You can do all those types of encounters well enough in 4e. The last type, the equivalent of the cockatrice you stumble on by accident is the toughest. You can use a solo of course. I'd say for a dungeon crawl a modern design equal-level solo, especially a brute or lurker is ideal. It will go down, but it could easily take someone out.I'm not sure I understand what you find problematic about power recovery rate. In effect resource use is the same as ever. Encounter resources are basically a detail, it is the daily and HS that matter. At the level of 'traversing a dungeon' they work as well as they did in 1e IME.As far as XP goes, since XP is used for what, nothing, it hardly matters. You can say "see, this doesn't work" but just give out all XP for quests and make the quest whatever you want, like 'getting rich, 1 XP per GP you find', which will work reasonably well. Personally I never was fond of XP for treasure, but it works OK for dungeon crawl. Well, it may depend on what you call 'house rule'. I find that bending a few guidelines works pretty well, and I don't think they COULD make universal guidelines. I suspect even the devs didn't know the game well enough to make really precise guidelines for different types of play in 2008.Yeah, it doesn't have to suit everyone. I think, knowing myself, I'm a sort of glass half full type of guy and don't fret about things. If something seems a bit off i just do it a bit different. Remarkably I haven't had to actually house rule 4e yet, though I freely admit I may use it a bit differently from your average DM.Well... yes and no. It is a little more complex than that. For instance I did a perfectly good fight with a level 1 party (their 2nd combat encounter) against a Carrion Crawler. Worked great. Sure it was a good bit higher level monster, but one that had weakish defenses for its level and it was one elite vs a whole party. You really can get away with those kinds of things pretty easily. You could delevel some monsters too if it looks like it would be too draggy, but you can also throw in a bit of interesting features to the encounter. A pit to knock the monster in, a barrel of oil that can be used to attack it with, some advantageous terrain, etc. Likewise a swarm of somewhat weaker monsters DOES work too. Again, I'm not sure what the problem with recovery rate of resources is. Sure, in AD&D a party that was low level and got beat up might have needed 3-4 days to recover vs 1, but I don't really see the problem there with crawling. It just means instead of 'you pay for 3 days in the inn while you heal' with 'you spend the night at the inn and feel refreshed'. 5 minute workdays are pretty much as always, though at least a party can generally push on without it being suicidal in 4e. Not sure where you got that impression. However you can't discuss what monsters you get more powerful than if you're going to talk about leveling up the monsters too. Obviously if you're upping the level of your kobolds to keep pace with the PCs then, well, you get what you pay for, lol. A monster's level IS a definite statement of its difficulty. The world is not made of numbers and you can certainly make an 11th level Kobold, it just probably isn't that useful (but hey, you never know). You could certainly make an 11th level minion kobold which is a 'dragon shield'. Note though this SHOULD adequately portray how much of a wimp this monster now is.I mean overall I don't think dungeon crawls are the best way to show the strengths of 4e, but they do work. It is really just a matter of getting familiar with the system so you can know what the adventure design guidelines are aiming at and be able to tell where to adjust things a bit.</blockquote>

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