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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6066340" data-attributes="member: 2067">This isn't a contest for the Most Fiddly Game Mechanic Ever In D&D History. It's just a statement that I find 4e combats personally more fiddly than combat in previous editions. If you think that's a fair opinion that a reasonable person could have, then we're on the same page. Some people have always seen that as a flaw. Some people have always worked against escalating hit points. Some people have used special rules to add lethality and grittiness to their games. Those people were playing D&D, still, and D&D can make it easier to play like that than it has. They can also not be used at all, used in lower amounts, used with rules enhancing overall lethality of the game, etc. If you're just looking at the rule as a pure function of what they do at the table during play, HP are a combat pacing mechanism, nothing more. Some people want a faster pace, some people want a slower pace, some people want back-and-forth, others want all-or-nothing. There's no reason D&D can't allow for all these styles. A particular combat pace is something that should be easily allowed to change with the preferences of the group playing. And to make the example concrete, this was easier to change in a game like 1e than it was to change in a game like 4e. In 1e,  you decide that everyone has 1d4 hp and that never increases, and you're done. The game is grittier. No one survives a sword wound. It's not balanced, but 1e is comfortable with imbalance. In 4e, you make that choice and you need to interface with healing surges, and the leader role, and Second Wind, and healing potions, and monster recharge abilities, and the "bloodied" status, that's only if you don't care about toppling that carefully built house of cards that is 4e encounter design or about being "gritty" in other ways (such as with death saves). But none of that really needs to stop you, it just makes it a bigger hump to get over. And it's nowhere near the hump you might need to get over if you wanted to strip magic items out of your 3e game (which 4e makes comparatively quite simple!). Which is just to show that you can make design decisions with a game that encourage or discourage tinkering with it in certain ways, and that there's no reason that D&D cannot be designed to be tinkered with in EVERY way.</blockquote>

Verification