Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chzbro" data-source="post: 5170789" data-attributes="member: 83964">As I said before, I'm quite sure that some people do experience grind in their games, but I simply don't agree that it's "hard-wired" into the game. Honestly, if you already believe that the system mandates grind, you're going to "experience" it each and every combat because you've already determined it's there.Instead of asserting that grind is inherent to 4E, a much more productive discussion might be to take all of that analysis and determine how to use it to build encounters that don't result in (what you personally define as) grind. I won't claim that I've never seen encounters get "grindy," but for the most part I viewed those as mistakes that I could learn from.Today, I played in a session where my group of 4 level 26s took on Yeenoghu (after 3 other fights). We only had a few dailies left between us (3?), and the demon lord had an elite soldier backing him up, but the fight still only took us 4 rounds  and around 45 minutes to finish. Rather than grind, it was actually kind of easy. We could talk at length about why this was (I believe in one round the rogue dished out about 300 damage), but my point (anecdotally, I admit) is that there really isn't any reason to assume that fights are going to last 6-7 rounds at minimum. And while there is a lot of bookkeeping, if you play with the same characters over and over you ought to quickly get pretty familiar with what everyone can do and figure out ways to make that bookkeeping trivial. Observations about hit points and bookkeeping are exactly the kind of thing that we should be talking about in a thread like this, but they should at least be couched in a helpful manner.It's simple enough to say that some people experience grind and some people don't. If you do and don't wish to discuss ways to avoid it or don't believe such ways exist, what can be said? I'm fairly certain that I could build grindy 3.x or Pathfinder encounters too, but that doesn't mean such encounters are a product of the system. Isn't it at least as likely that the reason the Pathfinder encounters run quicker is because the individual building them is good at doing so? Most of us had a lot of time to practice it, after all. Unfortunately, I don't think those encounter building skills translate well between the editions as the games as the combats are just much, much different.</blockquote>

Verification