by theTrav » Mon Nov 09, 2009 6:38 am Jackard wrote:4e owns qtiyd
played 4th ed for a bit over a year.
Mechanically it's fairly solid, although a few items in the adventure vault are broken and others need DM house rules to keep them in check, also their default skill challenge system is mathematically flawed... in the but... Also minions become irrelevant after you hit paragon.
The core combat rules however are fairly solid, and the skill progression and individual skill checks are solid. The whole system however harms immersion by focussing characters on the rules, the numbers, the tactical positioning.
Also if you play with the recommended balance the party will always win and characters will never die.
We found that we were pretty unenthusiastic after playing it for about 6 months and by the end we were basically just rushing through to bring the plot arc to a close.
We've since started a 1st ed campaign and suffered about 5 player character deaths (our dm is generous and lets us keep 1/4 of our XP but no material wealth) and almost had TPK's maybe 3 sessions out of 5. We're about 4 months in and loving it. Combat with over 30 combatants take us less than 15 minutes as opposed to the 3 hour combats of 4th ed, and skills are far more natural without tying them to a numeric system
