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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3754547" data-attributes="member: 30001">IMO that's not exactly and even swap.  AFAICT the short-term situation requires more contrivance by the DM.  Granted, I guess it's a matter of style but I'm not accustomed to having BBEGs show up miraculously at just the right time for no reason - which is how I interpret this.What you're saying matches the snippets of what I've seen from WotC, so AFAICT we at least see them saying the same thing.  My problem, as I alluded to above, is that I think it narrows the range of interesting encounters.  In the current paradigm, the BBEG showing up just at the right time can still happen, but it's not *required* in order to make the battle with the mooks meaningful.It's not so much the matter of escalation, it's the *possibility* of escalation that's present in the old paradigm.  You had to burn a spell to heal the fighter after an unlucky hit by a kobold, and the question hangs over your head as to whether or not you'll need that spell in the future.  In the proposed 4E paradigm, the question is settled after "the encounter is over" (whatever that actually means, but I guess that's another topic)Are you saying the paradigms require this?  I can't quite tell what you mean here.  In the case of the 4E paradigm, are you saying that an easy fight must be followed by a tougher fight in order for things to be interesting?  One of my issues is that I can't see how the easy fight has any meaning at all once your resources have all reset, and given that an easy fight is likely to utilize only encounter-level resources.Some of this might come down to gaming style:  I like to run a fairly open-ended adventure.  I don't run a story-telling style per se.  I don't know that the BBEG is going to show up at a particular time, it's often the case that NPC actions are contingent on events in the game that I don't know the outcome of until we play.  In 4E apparently, my judgements are going to be pressured by the fact that certain situations that weren't so boring in the 3E paradigm are boring in the 4E paradigm.  I have to string together even more contrivances in order to make the adventure interesting.  If I don't have the BBEG show up after the mook battle, I shouldn't have wasted everyone's time.  Granted, for a few seconds you might not know how it goes, but that's it.Granted, this is a continuum.  I don't play out uneventful travel time across great distances.  I don't play out trivial battles between 20th level characters and a few low-level bandits.  But according to the proposed 4E paradigm, they're actually increasing the list of uninteresting things that I'll have to skip over, and so far shortening the list of interesting things.  Resource management IMO was an interesting part of the game, and it keeps me from having to rely on battles that constantly threaten the lives of the PCs in order to make things interesting.Maybe I should cut to the chase - healing magic.  It might all come down to hitpoints and healing magic.  If you can't insta-heal after encounters, then I suppose it's back to a more 3E paradigm.  I don't particularly think that giving wizards magic spells instead of a crossbow to rely on makes much difference to the game flow.  I like the idea for flavor reasons.  I'm not exactly ready to give people a pass on their habit of blowing all of their high level spells in a first few rounds of combat, but I think there could be a decent comprimise.</blockquote>

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