Quote Originally Posted by delgondahntelius View Post
I think it was a choice of bogging down the game with hard coded rules... or hitting it fast and loose ... which 4e pretty much does... once a DM gets his bearings that is...

Those who loved all the rules of movement and combat and how the mechanics of 3.x covered everything from sneezing to water hockey ... are going to have the hardest transition into 4e (and probably whine the most ... you hide and watch) this time at least they got the part about fast play in ... (not fast character creation... )

As a DM ... I found that Monsters are a bit harder to deal with ... its a lot of info and things changed up .. vastly in some areas... I can't open my MM and find Kuo Toa's to throw at a couple three second level players... cause they level off at 15th .... ?? things like that... I don't care much for their Encounter Generation Method... (confusing at first, buying your creatures like you would buy an army ... for a miniatures game... ) ... still its all mechanics ... just a different way to deal with game functions...

I"m just gonna come up with my own System.... Market that.. lol

I will admit, the game is FAST, way FASTER to play than previous editions. I tried to create a 1st level Paladin PC last night, and I will admit, I scratched my head a few time to try and find correct answers to some internal questions as some things just did not seem very Intuitive.

As to the Monsters and building encounters based on an 'XP Budget' as they called it. It makes an internal sense to the game concept. The game is built around 10 encounters (on average) providing enough experience for a PC to level up. You take the number of players in your group and multiply that number by the XP value for a standard monster of their level to get your encounter budget.

So, if you have 6 1st level players, an average 1st encounter should provide 100 XP to each PC, so each encounter should have 600 XP worth of monsters. I too took a few minutes to digest that, but it became clear when I sat down to adjust the encounters for my players knowing that sometimes not all of them show up, so I needed to figure out how to scale each encounter based on their being anywhere from 4 to 7 players.

I honestly think this new game is at first glance mush more balanced than previous editions. I still have a hard time figuring out the 3.5 Challenge Rating versus Encounter Level concepts to build challenging encounters for my PCs.