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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 5205924" data-attributes="member: 3586">No.As I've said on more than one occasion, the goal of 4e wasn't to speed up all combats. It was to make combats last a more predictable length... and (especially) speed up high-level combat.From my experiences with 3rd edition, 16th level combat could take two or three hours to resolve, and only have a handful of rounds. (Two hours for three rounds? Entirely possible). The only way the final session of my 16th level Ulek game got played in a reasonable amount of time was because everyone had a lap-top, and pre-rolled their dice on it so that when their turn came around they just announced the result of their attack.That was a system that was broken at the higher ends.Meanwhile, at very low levels, combat would last a very short time with a great deal of swinginess. One hit and your PC was dying. One set of unlucky rolls and your character was dead. There was one infamous combat I ran between a 1st level orc and a 3rd level ranger in a gladitorial arena. First round, the orc won initiative, charged the ranger, critted, and did over 50 points of damage, killing the ranger stone dead.The other problem with low-level 3e combat just related to the abilities of the wizards: Do I fire my crossbow (which I'm awful with) or cast my one spell for the day.The design behind 4e was to extend the "sweet spot" of 3e (levels 5-12 or thereabouts) and apply it to all levels in 4e. Combats wouldn't be entirely swingy, they wouldn't be over in a round, nor take forever to resolve.The way they did this has caused other problems - related mainly to tracking modifiers and overly high defenses of the higher-level monsters they seem very happy to put in their adventures. Elite Soldiers of two levels higher? Urgh. To be fair, they've realised a few problems and they've modified later monster manuals, but I'm not quite happy with where they've pegged a few values.However - in general - the system has worked pretty well. I'm currently running an 18th level game, and the combats are taking about 50-80 minutes to resolve... without people prerolling attacks on laptops. And this is against some of the insane monsters of the official adventures; when I run my own encounters against more level-appropriate foes, they take less time.Is 3e minicentric? Not at all. It does something new, which is provide rules to enable the use of miniatures within the core game, but the game isn't really that dependent on the use of miniatures. Not more than earlier editions, at least! 4e, on the other hand, is quite definitely minicentric. You don't make that many powers that force movement without needing minis. It certainly can be played without minis, but the default method using them.I find it  amusing - with a touch of sadness - that the DDM line has failed in 4e rather than in 3.5e. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Cheers!</blockquote>

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