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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6657031" data-attributes="member: 82106">OTOH, to play devil's advocate, there seemed to be a LOT of lazy 4e DMs. I'm not sure that had much to do with the SCALING though. It was just very easy to toss 5 monsters in a box-shaped room and go. When I hear people here talking about how their encounters were repetitive and didn't engage anything except the combat powers of the characters, that SCs were just lists of skills that you min/maxed your way through, etc. Well, I can only conclude there was certainly a pattern of DMing that lead to that. My personal feelings on it are that you need all the designers and writers for a system on the same page about what that system is, how it works, and what sorts of material to present. 5e definitely has that. Whatever else the process that spawned it was, it was good for explicating the system. Its presentation is consistent, the adventure material seems consistent with the games sensibilities, etc. They sure never got that right with 4e, and maybe not even with 3e really. Thus 4e suffered from horrible adventures that played to the weakest parts of the system for instance, and its core books often presented material that was great, but failed to explicate how it would be used, or gave misleading impressions like &quot;just scale all the DCs&quot; and such. I think fundamentally this is what makes 5e so much more palatable. People understand it, both because it leans more heavily on older conventions of play, and because its messaging is more consistent.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 6657031, member: 82106"] OTOH, to play devil's advocate, there seemed to be a LOT of lazy 4e DMs. I'm not sure that had much to do with the SCALING though. It was just very easy to toss 5 monsters in a box-shaped room and go. When I hear people here talking about how their encounters were repetitive and didn't engage anything except the combat powers of the characters, that SCs were just lists of skills that you min/maxed your way through, etc. Well, I can only conclude there was certainly a pattern of DMing that lead to that. My personal feelings on it are that you need all the designers and writers for a system on the same page about what that system is, how it works, and what sorts of material to present. 5e definitely has that. Whatever else the process that spawned it was, it was good for explicating the system. Its presentation is consistent, the adventure material seems consistent with the games sensibilities, etc. They sure never got that right with 4e, and maybe not even with 3e really. Thus 4e suffered from horrible adventures that played to the weakest parts of the system for instance, and its core books often presented material that was great, but failed to explicate how it would be used, or gave misleading impressions like "just scale all the DCs" and such. I think fundamentally this is what makes 5e so much more palatable. People understand it, both because it leans more heavily on older conventions of play, and because its messaging is more consistent. [/QUOTE]

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