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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5201878" data-attributes="member: 2067">Yeah, I'm basically in agreement with the ideas in your LJ post. I do wonder how "combat should take about an hour" became a design goal, because it would seem that the problems in that would become evident in playtesting, even for "lunch hour games" and the like. ...and then you have Skill Challenges. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I think there's a fertile middle ground. Consider Skill Challenges at one unpleasant extreme for me, and 4e combat at the other. Closing the gap between them would improve both. I should have powers I can use that aren't combat-related (personally, I've been giving Rituals a close look for this). I should also have fewer choices to make when beating the face of some goblins in (personally, getting rid of the grid and using abstract battlefields with binary melee/ranged powers makes a lot of sense). 4e making many conditions more codified, and reducing the buff effect, was a great thing. But there's still a lot of fiddly moving parts. As it ramped down the random +1's, and clamped down on sim-style moves like disarm and grapple, it ramped up the "pull, push, shift, slide" and the "cover, concealment, difficult terrain," and the "minor, free, standard, move, reaction, daily, at-will, encounter, burst, blast, close," and simply upped the quantity of stuff to do (more powers! more stuff in a turn!).4e slightly diminished bookeeping overall, but also ramped up the raw information that you need to juggle overall. Which is part of what the OP was griping about. For me, I'm comfortable making one choice on my turn, and seeing the results of that choice.A simple cause-effect.Even if that effect can be quite varied, only being able to do a single thing, from a limited list, makes deciding what to do quicker, which streamlines combat overall. I don't care about the raw quantity of conditions in existence, really. There can be a new specific condition for each individual power, if you wanted. The trouble comes when you're juggling more than one condition per creature over different durations. When the moving parts increase. When it's less "fire and forget."This helps to approach that middle ground I was talking about, where you have some interesting options, but where you don't loose the momentum picking a card from your deck of a dozen, deciding 6 different times which squares to occupy, carefully parceling out actions to different abilities, and doing at least 4 other things, all on one turn. Long turns, I think, grind combat more thoroughly than long combats. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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