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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5201089" data-attributes="member: 2067">I keep trying to figure out what the goals with 4e combat actually were. I don't really like it personally. I'm not a fan of minis, tactical positioning makes me groan, and a "deck of powers" is less appealing to me than a "suite of tools."So I'm left trying to puzzle out why 4e combat is the way that it is. I didn't have any major problems with 3e stuff, or 2e stuff, or GURPS stuff...why does 4e choose to be the way that it is? What goal were the designers trying to accomplish? The 4e design team was (and is) pretty good at accomplishing their explicit goals (it's in making the goals the right ones that they sometimes suffer). What were their goals with combat? What did they want to do?It's speculation, but if I figure it out, it can help me better tinker with it, and with my home games.As best I can figure, the noblest goal they had was that they wanted somewhat to address the "20 minutes of fun in 4 hours" problem, where there wasn't a lot of action around the table. Combat is action, so long combat is more action, so if combats are stretched into hour-long things, it's an hour of fun in those 4 hours, rather than 20 minutes. It's an attempt to reach flow, to keep everyone in the zone, to keep tension high at all times, and to make the game more action-packed.And what they failed to take into account was that combat isn't what everyone wants to do with most of their D&D time. They figured combat was the heart of the game, that more combat =  more fun, that detailed combat was what people were clamoring for, that focusing on combat could sell more minis (which was a major part of the strategy from Day 1 with 4e), that the combat engine was the most important thing to balance, that it was where the classes differed, and where the races should, too. There would be other stuff, of course. But Combat was the most important. This is even reflected in the adventures, which are mostly strings of combat linked by a fabric of a plot. I could compare it to a Super Mario game: everything is just a set-up to run and jump and fly. In many WotC adventures, everything is just a set-up to fight. One of the big revelations of 4e to me was that my games aren't about fighting monsters. That's absolutely a key part of them, but that's not why I play D&D. I don't want to spend my whole night fighting monsters, I don't want to take an hour to fight some monsters, I don't want fighting monsters to be the goal. My games are about being a hero, which is sometimes about kicking ass, and sometimes about coming to grips with mortality (Gilgamesh, the Illiad), or giving up control (LotR), or returning home (The Odyssey), or true love (the Divine Comedy, Inuyasha), or growing up (Paradise Lost, Star Wars, Naruto), or a thousand and one other simple psychological challenges, cast with steel and blood and fire and gold. Being a hero is more about metaphor than minis. So I, personally, don't want long, involved, tactically complex, option-overloaded, minis-based combats. I need there to be variety and interesting things to do in combat, because combat is certainly a big part of the game, but I also need there to be variety and interesting things to do when confronting your father figure, or when realizing that you will die, or when you see your wife for the first time in a decade, or when choosing to remain weak because power is corrupting, or when falling in love. I need combat to not try and be the reason I play D&D. 4e combat tries to be the reason to play D&D, in part because it hand-waves other stuff as DM fiat (which is deeply unsatisfying to me), and in part because it is so complex, especially by comparison. If the characters get to be heroes, I don't need to spend 90% of the night chosing powers and pushing little pieces of plastic around a grid. That doesn't make a hero. It's not in the slaying of a dragon. It's in the destruction of evil. It's not in the fighting of the army. It's in the achievement of glory. It's not in the fighting of a rival, it's in confronting your own capacity for evil. Combat is not the only fun part of the game, and when combat is overly complex, for me, it's not even a fun part of the game.</blockquote>

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