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="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5134298" data-attributes="member: 2067">Well, that's not what I want. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> 4e did make it paramount for every player to uniquely contribute in each combat in each round, and I think that's a positive development. I think it's important to turn that back around to the dungeon, rather than the combat.5e should make it paramount for each player to uniquely contribute in each decision in each challenge in each dungeon. So the dungeon itself provides a challenge against the entire party, that the entire party can participate in every action needed to "overcome the dungeon."I don't quite agree. I don't think skill challenges or rituals as they exist now are really good mechanics for handling exploration, or out-of-combat problem-solving in general. There's bags of issues with both. I don' think the clock needs to be turned back, I think we need to keep going forward, keeping 4e's advancements, and applying the lessons learned.I think one of the lessons I've learned is that I don't care about individual encounters, I care about entire adventures. That it's not beating up monsters that makes my character heroic, it is accomplishing heroic deeds. That includes beating up monsters, but it also includes exploring new regions, gaining new items and powers, saving villages, leading armies, thwarting machinations, romancing princesses, and a million other adventures. And when I do beat up monsters, it is not just a group of kobolds, it is the king of kobolds, whom I fight in an epic battle in a trap-filled lair, surrounded by his minions. It's not a hit-and-damage-and-effect slog, it's a dynamic, skill-filled, tricky, multi-talent-testing, epic, scene. The last thing, 4e can do, but has some problems with.This change in focus changes so much about how the basic game of 4e plays, so many core assumptions, that it really needs its own system. It changes powers lists, roles, XP, class and race, things like OAs and shifting and teleporting, skills, rituals, possibly defenses/saves, certainly HP and healing surges, likely item inventory, and a host of other cascading effects. You can start to get at it as 4e sits right now, but, heck, you can start to get at a lot of 4e decisions in 3e, too. That's kind of what an evolving system does, in my mind.So I don't want to go back to other editions, but I do want to bring the idea of "Dungeons and Dragons" back from the game of "Encounters and Elves" that I may have been playing since 2008. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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