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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 6240515" data-attributes="member: 1165">Including this, yes, this lengthens even curbstomp battles.I disagree. You can sometimes end an encounter with a single spell, although that usually requires poor saving throw rolls on the part of the enemy. You could also do this with high damage optimization for martial characters (eg cheesy archer build, cheesy rage-pounce-barbarian build in Pathfinder, etc).Poorly-designed encounters make this easier. A single very powerful monster can be dropped by a single spell, even with SR and high saving throws, if it rolls badly on a save. (Or even not badly, because cheesy high save DCs are quite possible.) This is extremely unlikely in 4e, if only because solos are always at least somewhat lockdown-resistant (but often don't have enough of this).You have two things going on there:1) A time-consuming PC. A druid that summoned stuff would take even more time, but this guy gets to move and take full attacks.2) The player didn't seem to be that good with the math. Also, I'm pretty sure you need to declare Power Attack before making any attacks, and it applies to all. I use a paper character sheet and simply note down temporary modifiers (eg Greater Magic Weapon) but I don't think electronic character sheets are capable of this, and some of my players don't even use scrap paper or bring pencils to the game. Needless to say, that will make the game take longer.I'm actually pretty bad at math, but with a few weeks' practice I now roll the attack and damage dice simultaneously. That's a bit of a bigger issue in 3e with iterative attacks. (My last Pathfinder character was a druid, and all attacks had the same attack bonus when wildshaped. I took feats to ensure this so I wouldn't slow down the game.)I believe the rules say you get XP for defeating the encounter. If the encounter was to get loot, and you sneaked past the guards and got the loot, you should get full XP. On the other hand, if the point of the encounter was to kill something, and you avoided that, you shouldn't get the XP. I don't think it's rules that promote killing, it's the plot.And yes, many players, myself included, like combat and so won't avoid encounters unless fighting is both mechanically and plotly (a real word, honest!) a bad idea.4e has builds. Any game where you gain levels (or equivalent) and have the ability to choose what you gain from those levels have builds. Never mind prestige classes, as soon as feats were introduced into 3rd Edition playtest, builds arose.</blockquote>

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