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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 3987655" data-attributes="member: 5143">But then it eliminates the fun that most people have of being near death and the feeling of "just barely pulling it off".  The most fun combats for me and my friends are when we think the enemies might kill us and we can see the numbers slowly coming off our character sheets and doing the math we know that we have a chance of losing in a round or two if things don't go well.We live in fear of having to cast that Delay Death in order to save someone's life knowing that we only have 1 or 2 prepared and after that, someone really will die.  But also we fear the fighter dropping since we can do the math in our heads and we realize that if he isn't attacking for a round or two the rest of us won't be able to kill the monster before he drops the rest of us.  But we have ways to stop the fighter from dropping or to bring him back up when he does.  We can use wands, potions, and spells.I think it creates more tension when I have to use my actions up in order to keep the fighter from dropping this round than it does if the fighter was just about to take actual wounds if the battle lasts a round longer.Sure it improves the game.  In 1st and 2nd edition getting the levels higher than about 10 didn't matter since you stopped gaining any real hitpoints.  Might as well dual class to wizard than keep going on in fighter.Damage kept going up at the same rate, however.  But your hitpoints didn't.  So the game got harder and harder and harder as you went up levels.  Plus, it seemed rather arbitrary when you stopped gaining hit dice.  And it happened at different levels depending on what class you were.So, they fixed that.  You gained the same amount of hit points at all levels.  Win for the game so as to balance out the level curve.  Plus, it was easier for new people to understand since it was consistent.  You knew you gained one hit dice worth of hit points at all levels.However, in the process damage increased dramatically.  Mostly because of stacking bonuses and the standardization of stat modifiers and removing the caps from the stats.  If you could have a 50 strength and you got +20 to hit and damage and you could get 1.5x that amount with a two handed weapon(plus feats, magic, etc) then you could do WAY more than the max damage of around 20 damage in 2e.Suddenly you may have had PCs with 200 hitpoints rather than the 80 of 2nd edition, but you had monsters who were doing 40 damage per hit with 3-4 attacks per round.  This actually caused combats to become much quicker(in terms of number of rounds, not the actual time taken to play them).  They are sometimes 1-2 round affairs due to the fact that damage scales up at the same rate or faster than hitpoints do.  Instead of 8-10 round combats in 2nd edition, you have 1-2 round combats.So in order to fix that problem, I see that 4e is carefully controlling damage and hitpoints in the game.  I actually think you'll see damage for both PCs and monsters drop off from what it was in 3e.  The designers said that 5-7 rounds seemed about right for a combat and that each PC should essentially be fighting one monster by itself.  If you assume that is correct, it means that if PCs get 4 times normal hitpoints at first level and everything else stays the same then at 10th level the average fighter should have around 121 hitpoints.  It should take the monsters around 6 rounds to take that to 0.  So at 10th level the monsters should be hitting for around 20 per round.Sure, the monsters are likely to hit for 30 in one hit, unlike 3e.  However, they are unlikely to get more than one attack per round.  You'll also note that even if all 5 monsters attack the one fighter, they don't drop him in a single round.  They always leave him(on average) with 20 hitpoints left.  Thus, giving the party one round to heal the fighter up to full and be ready for the next round of combat.Then if you set the PCs damage to what would, on average, defeat the monster in about 5 rounds, you know that the PCs will almost always defeat the monsters 1 round before they get defeated themselves.</blockquote>

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