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Note: This essay was written a little over a week and a half ago. Between the time I wrote it and today (as I post it), Wizards of the Coast has released errata for 4th Edition which corrects some (but not all) of the problems described below.

Since this essay still accurately describes my playtesting experience and serves as an apt critique of the rules as they were published, I have chosen not to rewrite it. However, I have added an Errata Addendum to the end of the essay discussing the changes that were made in the errata.

I’ve also talked about skill challenges before. Having completed my playtesting, here are my current thoughts on the matter:

(1) Skill challenges in their most general form are unusable as written because they’re so heavily dissociative. They are fundamentally disconnected from the game world (caring not about what the PCs have done, but merely how much they have done) and create strangely skewing probabilities, among other problems.

(2) Skill challenges in the specific form described in the 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide are unusable because they mandate railroading. If you follow the rules in the DMG you are supposed to (a) write a script for the PCs to follow; (b) tell them the script; and (c) if they try to deviate from the script, punish them for it with more difficult skill checks.

(3) Skill challenges are unusable because their probability is wacky. I’m not going to delve into the maths, but basically what it boils down to is that a 65% chance of success on a skill check is the watershed: If you have less than a 65% chance of succeeding at the skill checks making up a skill challenge, your chance of success on any skill challenge is very small and shrinks rapidly towards the essentially non-existent as you increase the complexity of the skill challenge.

If your chance of success is exactly 65%, then increasing the complexity of the skill challenge is virtually irrelevant (even though it’s supposed to be getting more difficult). And if your chance of success is larger than 65%, then skill challenges actually get easier as the complexity increases (when it’s supposed to be getting harder).

This is obviously not working properly. And, when you run the actual numbers of the system, you discover that the PCs generally have about a 10-20% chance of succeeding on a skill challenge designed for their level.

(Here’s a fix for the probability issues that looks pretty good to me as I glance over it. The author has also done some interesting things in terms of adding some depth to the gameplay of skill challenges. I haven’t fully delved into it, but it looks like it’s worth checking out. Note that, while this fixes the wacky probabilities of WotC’s skill challenges, it doesn’t address the emergent probability skewing which is an inherent characteristic of the dissociation arising from open skill challenges.)

(4) Even if you fix the probability, skill challenges are surprisingly boring in actual gameplay.

In the best case scenario, skill challenges simply duplicate the gameplay of previous editions: The players propose a course of action, the DM determines the skill and the DC, and then a check is made to determine success. In this scenario you’re tracking a bunch of extra numbers and suffering from the inherent dissociation of the system, but you’re not actually gaining any sort of reward for your effort.

In the worst case scenario, skill challenges turn one interesting die roll into six to ten monotonous die rolls. (And you’re still tracking the extra numbers and suffering from the inherent dissociation of the system.)

(5) The only potential benefit you gain from using the skill challenge system is that it gives you a structure for rewarding XP. But the wacky probabilities alone assures that this “system” is just as likely to erroneously give you a larger reward for an easier challenge.

Here’s another example of this “system” in action, from pg. 73 of the DMG: “If you use easy DCs, reduce the level of the challenge by one. If you use hard DCs, increase the levelof the challenge by two.”

When we look at the table for DCs by Level on pg. 42 of the DMG, we can quickly see that this is complete nonsense. For example, at 10th level the values are easy DC 17, moderate DC 21, hard DC 25. The guideline is claiming that if you take a 10th level challenge with moderate DCs and redesign it with easy DCs, you should end up with something equivalent to a 9th level challenge with moderate DCs. But you don’t. At 9th level, the moderate DC is 19, not 17. A 10th level challenge with easy DCs is, in fact, equivalent to a 6th level challenge.

Similarly, a 10th level challenge with hard DC 25 is not equivalent to a 12th level challenge with moderate DCs. It’s actually the equivalent of a 20th level skill challenge.

The “difference” between a 10th level skill challenge and a 12th level skill challenge actually reveals the complete absurdity of this “system”. That’s because there isn’t one. The DCs by Level table on pg. 42 of the DMG assigns the same values to every 3 levels. So levels 10-12 are all grouped together and have the same DCs for skill checks. Despite the fact that they’re identical in every way, a 10th level skill challenge with complexity 3 only rewards 1500 XP whereas a 12th level skill challenge with complexity 3 rewards 2100 XP.

This “system” is worse than useless. It’s literally just generating random noise and isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.

(6) I still think there’s some real potential in the basic concept of social skill challenges. But the extant system isn’t even a stepping stone towards achieving that: You basically want to throw out everything the DMG has to say about skill challenges and start over from scratch.

(7) I also discovered some interesting uses for the basic concept of skill challenges in structuring cooperative disabling of dynamic traps. Once again, however, this requires you to scrap everything the DMG has to say about using traps and skill challenges before rebuilding the system from scratch.

What it really boils down in the final analysis is that complex skill checks are a useful mechanic. In other words, when you have a specific task defined by a concrete goal and a single method of success — such as disabling a trap, disarming a bomb, or playing a game of Chess — that is best modeled as a sequence of discrete actions, the basic formula of X successes before Y failures is a useful way of representing that mechanically. Even the S-curve probability distribution works well for these types of scenarios (it becomes a feature instead of a bug as skill trumps luck in larger and more complex tasks).

You can even get away with generalizing this to some extent: For example, you can use this structure to say that you can disable a magical trap by making Arcana checks, Thievery checks, or by dealing damage to the structure of the trap. By allowing these disparate checks to all feed into a single complex skill check, you facilitate cooperation in a way that’s far more dynamic and interesting than just using the Aid Another action.

But the skill challenge “system” as it’s presented in the DMG? Dissociative, broken, and useless. Don’t waste your time.

ERRATA ADDENDUM

In response to the general public outcry over the shoddy and unusable skill challenge mechanics published in the DMG, WotC responded in mid-July with errata aimed at correcting some of the more egregious problems with skill challenges. I’m going to take a few moments here to take a second look at the problems with the skill challenge mechanics and analyze how they were (or weren’t) corrected.

DISSOCIATION: Nothing was done to correct the heavily dissociated nature of the skill challenge system.

PROBLEMS WITH PROBABILITY: The errata corrected the most egregious and obvious of the probability problems with skill challenges. Notably, more complex skill challenges no longer become easier for people with higher skill modifiers. However, the probability of success still varies radically as you move away from the baseline values assumed at each level. This means that min-maxing is heavily rewarded. It also means that, rather than encouraging the participation of everyone at the gaming table (the purported design goal of skill challenges), the system instead rewards the group for figuring out whoever has the highest applicable skill modifier and then having that character roll all the checks.

(This means that skill challenges are yet another example of 4th Edition providing a “solution” to a “problem” which actually ends up making the problem worse rather than better. Brilliant.)

This probability pattern also means that tackling a skill challenge a couple levels higher than your current level is much more difficult than tackling a combat encounter a couple levels higher than your current level (and vice versa).

However, with all that being said, the emergent probability skews of the system (which result from the possibility of multiple paths of succcess and the dissociated nature of the mechanic) still remain.

EXPERIENCE AWARDS: They partially fixed their inability to perform simple arithmetic by removing the XP guidelines based on using Easy vs. Moderate vs. Hard DCs. Instead, you just vary the level of the challenge to make it easier or harder. However, this ignores the fact that there remains a significant difference between a skill challenge which features Easy DCs for a given level versus a skill challenge which features Hard DCs for a given level. (Nor are any solid guidelines given for the proporion of Easy vs. Moderate vs. Hard DCs you should be using.)

They also fixed the discrepancy where, for example, 10th level and 12th level skill challenges were statistically identical but had significantly different rewards by simply limiting skill challenges to the mid-point of each level range. (So, for you example, you can have 11th level skill challenges, but not 10th or 12th level skill challenges.)

RAILROADING: They have removed all of the rules requiring the DM to railroad their players. This is excellent news, and since I was (AFAIK) the first person to post these concerns online (both here and at WotC’s messageboards) I feel like I actively contributed to having these pernicious passages removed from the rules.

SLOPPY DESIGN: Skill challenges are essentially one of the core mechanics of 4th Edition. And they royally screwed them up. I’m glad to see that they’re issuing corrections in a timely fashion, but it doesn’t exactly instill a lot of confidence in me that they so fundamentally screwed up the most basic balancing of a core mechanic like this. What does their complete failure here say about any kind of complex interactions in the system?

CASCADING EFFECTS: Because skill challenges are a core mechanic, they’re used extensively throughout the system. For example, they’re a major element in the design of many traps. Despite this fact, the current errata doesn’t correct the design of these traps to match the revised skill challenge guidelines.

DESIGN DISCONNECTS: On June 14th, Mike Mearls stated: “The system went through several permutations as we worked on it, and I think there are some disconnects between the final text, our intentions, and how playtesters and internal designers use skill challenges.”

Clearly.

What I find interesting is the evidence of this disconnect that we have now seen strewn around the handful of books WotC has published for 4th Edition to date. For example, the skill challenges presented in H1: Keep on the Shadowfell don’t match the guidelines found in the DMG nor in the errata. And the skill challenges in H2: Thunderspire Labyrinth? They don’t match the DMG, the errata, or the skill challenges found in Keep on the Shadowfell.

That means that we have seen literally four different iterations of the skill challenge mechanics coming out of WotC.

This is, frankly, bizarre. And it speaks, again, to the fundamentally (and inexplicably) sloppy design of 4th Edition.

USABILITY: It should be noted that the errata itself is fairly unusable in its published form. I know it’s standard practice in WotC’s errata to simply include the relevant changes, but in this case the changes are of a nature which makes neither the rulebook nor the errata usable.

Notably, the revision of the skill challenge mechanics also included a revision of the Difficulty Class and Damage by Level table on pg. 42 of the DMG. For those of you unfamiliar with 4th Edition, this table is the heart and soul of the system. I don’t think there’s been a table so crucial to the playing of D&D since the hit tables in AD&D1 were replaced with THAC0. And it’s been rendered unusable by the errata… which only replicates the three key columns which have been altered (without the other columns which give the information in those columns any relevance).

And since they didn’t get this problem fixed before they printed the Dungeon Master’s Screen for 4th Edition… well, that won’t fix your problem, either. You’ll need to recreate the table yourself by combining the information from the DMG and the errata.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

THE BOTTOM LINE: For me, the bottom line hasn’t changed much. Skill challenges are still dissociative, (slightly less) broken, and useless.

Continued…

Go to Part 1

Okay, I talked about dissociated mechanics before the 4th Edition rulebooks came out. I was concerned because these types of mechanics make it more difficult for me to do the things I generally enjoy doing in a roleplaying game — immersive roleplaying and world-building. In a worst-case scenario, dissociated mechanics actively impede any kind of roleplaying — when the game mechanics require you to make decisions as a player which have no analogy to the decisions of the character, the game has stopped being a roleplaying game and become something else. (Not necessarily something bad, just something else.)

In practice, I found 4th Edition to be as disappointing as I expected in this regard. The experienced players did, in fact, feel more distanced from their characters by the dissociated mechanics and ended up roleplaying less and focusing on the mechanics more.

The newbie players, on the other hand, roleplayed quite a bit. But this roleplaying was noticeably divided from the mechanical portion of the game — it was like improvising a story around a game of Chess or Life rather than using the improv structure of the roleplaying game.

This type of roleplaying is not unusual for new players. It doesn’t really matter what system you’re using: If they latch on strongly to the concept of roleplaying a character, new players will usually become very creative and think completely outside of the box.

What I discovered, however, was that the dissociated mechanics strewn throughout 4th Edition made it very difficult for me to respond to their creativity.

New players tend to sidestep the game mechanics and interface directly with the game world. When the mechanics are directly associated with the game world, this is easy to handle: You simply take what the new players are telling you, interpret it mechanically, and resolve it. But dissociated mechanics, by definition, create an interpretive barrier.

This problem actually comes from two directions: First, there’s the “you can’t do that” problem. This is what happens when something should be possible in the context of the game world but is impossible in the context of the mechanics. These types of conflicts are black marks on the game design, but are relatively easy to deal with in practice: You simply invoke Rule 0 and let the logic of the game world override the illogic of the game mechanics. Managing the huge number of effective house rules this requires eventually becomes a headache, but in the short term it’s not insurmountable.

The other aspect of this problem, however, is more insidious. 4th Edition is filled with dissociated tactical decision points. (For example, the fact that certain powers are more useful against minions than non-minions and vice versa.) These have no touchstone with the game world, which means that whenever somebody is trying to engage directly with the game world every single one of these decision points becomes a stumbling block. Dissociated mechanics, by their very nature, insist that you pay attention to them instead of your character’s world if you want to play the game.

Long story short: Dissociated mechanics are bad and 4th Edition is riddled with them.

Continued…

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Speaking of “Death of the Wandering Monster”, the 15-minute adventuring day predictably reappeared in 4th Edition.

This was an interesting thing to observe because the design team for 4th Edition swore that they had done away with the 15-minute adventuring day. But the reality is that, rather than fixing the “problem”, they ended up making it worse.

As I describe in “Death of the Wandering Monster”, the 15-minute adventuring day is the result of a simple mechanical incentive: By design, the spellcasters are supposed to deal more damage less frequently and the fighters are supposed to deal less damage more frequently. Over the long-haul, this should balance out. But the 15-minute adventuring day — in which the spellcasters go into a single encounter, nova their most powerful abilities, rest, and then do it again the next day — destroys this balance. Not only does it result in the spellcasters consistently out-performing the fighters, it also leads to the entire party being far more effective against the opponents that they face.

Some people dislike the 15-minute adventuring day because it feels unnatural to them. But the reality is that it’s actually quite natural. In real life, people rarely fight intense battles and then turn around and immediately go looking for another one. When historical armies have been forced to fight a second battle immediately after the first one, for example, it has generally ended poorly for them. And you’ll basically never see a boxer fight a second match on the same day.

It makes perfect sense, all other things being equal, for characters in a life-and-death situation to use every single resource they have available to end up on the “living” side of that equation. And if that means they have to rest up and gather fresh resources before facing the next life-and-death situation, that makes sense, too.

And ultimately, as I say in “Death of the Wandering Monster”, this leads to the conclusion that the best way to solve this problem is to create a world or story where there is a reason for the characters to persevere. And that solution will work almost as well in 4th Edition as it did in 3rd Edition.

I say “almost as well” because, as I mentioned before, 4th Edition actually ended up making the problem of the 15-minute adventuring day worse. And it did that by making the incentive for doing it larger.

To understand what I mean, let’s talk about the other solution for the 15-minute adventuring day: Removing the mechanical impetus for resting. In order to do that, you have to do at least one of two things:

(1) Completely remove any mechanical benefit for taking a long rest.

(2) Provide a meaningful mechanical bonus for not taking a rest.

4th Edition’s designers apparently believed that they fixed the first problem by making sure that every class was given at-will and encounter abilities — things they could continue doing for as long as they wanted to without ever taking a long rest.

But the nova-rest-nova cycle of gameplay isn’t driven by a character’s least powerful abilities, it’s driven by their most powerful abilities — the things that are designed to be used rarely, but which the nova-rest-nova cycle allows to be used frequently.

In 4th Edition, a character’s most powerful abilities are their daily abiltiies. Which, as the name suggests, still benefit from the nova-rest-nova cycle and the 15-minute adventuring day. But just as all of the classes were given at-will and encounter powers, all of the classes in 4th Edition were given daily powers. Which means that you’ve gone from having one or two characters who could potentially benefit from the nova-rest-nova cycle to having ALL of the PCs potentially benefit from the cycle.

Okay, so what about the other potential mechanical solution — offering some sort of mechanical bonus for not taking a rest?

Virtually nonexistent.

You can accumulate X action points by going through 2X encounters per day, but this is irrelevant because you can only use 1 action point per encounter and you get 1 action point whenever you take a long rest.

You can also accumulate X daily uses of your magic items by going through 2X encounters per day. This is more useful because, unlike action points, you can use all of your accumulated daily uses for your magic items in a single encounter. But in order to gain that advantage you have to make sure you don’t use the daily use for your magic items in your first Y number of encounters in the day.

And that’s it. So, on the one hand, you have the ability to occasionally use more than one daily use of a magic item in a single encounter. On the other hand you have the ability to use all of your daily powers (including your daily use of a magic item) in every single encounter. It’s not hard to figure out which one represents the larger incentive.

Aggravating this problem even further, there’s the issue of healing surges. Characters have a certain number of healing surges per day, and virtually all healing in 4th Edition works by activating and using up these healing surges. Once you’ve used up your healing surges for the day, you basically can’t be healed any more and you have to rest.

In 3rd Edition, a group who wanted or needed to continue adventuring could invest in resources — like a wand of cure light wounds — that would allow them to do that. In 4th Edition, however, that same group will find itself literally incapable of pressing on.

Take, for example, my experienced gaming group. Because of the way our 3rd Edition campaign is structured, this group rarely experiences a short adventuring day. In fact, they’re usually scrambling to figure out some way to pack even more activity into every single day. This same group hit 4th Edition and, despite my efforts to jack up the sense of urgency in Keep on the Shadowfell, quickly fell into the 15-minute adventuring day. This was partly due to necessity (they were using up healing surges), but it was also largely because the pay-off for doing it was so much greater than it was in previous editions.

Continued…

Go to Part 1

RANGE AND FLEXIBILITY: The range and flexibility of the game has been significant reduced.

(1) Although you can now go from 1st to 30th level, the scale of actual power wielded by your characters is significantly smaller than it was in previous editions. Both the low-end and the high-end has been lopped off.

(2) You have far less ability to customize your character.

(3) There is a much narrower range (an almost nonexistent range) of play-styles supported. In “Death of the Wandering Monster”, I talked about how there was a huge difference in previous editions between the ways in which clerics, fighters, rogues, and wizards played (for example). This could lead to “balance” problems if a particular group’s style of play catered to one style of play over another, but it also meant, in my experience, that different players gravitated towards their preferred style of play and, if they got bored with that style of play, they could switch to another style and keep the game fresh.

4th Edition, on the other hand, only offers different gameplay within the context of combat. And, even there, the differences are not as significant as in previous editions.

ROLES AND CLASSES: On this topic, however, I also want to suggest that you consciously toss out whatever preconceptions you may have about how the different classes play based on previous editions. They are almost assurredly wrong.

I also want to encourage you to go one step further and toss out whatever preconceptions you may have formed about how the different roles will play.

For example, in our experienced gaming group we saw that fighters are defenders. Based on how fighters had played in previous editions we had, unconsciously, ended up with some preconceptions about what it meant to be a defender and how a defender should be played.

We were wrong. Not horribly wrong, but wrong enough that until we sat back and re-analyzed our preconceptions the group was meeting with some frustrations.

Continued…

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Running low-level combat encounters in 4th Edition is considerably more complicated than in previous edtiions. I would roughly estimate the level of complexity as being equivalent to a difficult 15th level encounter in 3rd Edition.

In my experience, there are three factors which determine how complicated an encounter is to run: The number of abilities the monsters have, keeping track of hit points, and making stat-block adjustments as a result of buff and buff-like effects.

MONSTER ABILITIES: In 3rd Edition, high-level creatures frequently featured many different abilities. Part of the complexity of running encounters was knowing what these abilities were and how they could be used to best effect. Part of mastering the system meant learning how to quickly discriminate between the abilities which were combat-relevant and which weren’t, and revised stat blocks helped make that distinction clearer.

In 4th Edition, the designers intentionally stripped monsters of their non-combat abilities and worked to reduce the number of combat-relevant abilities, as well. Their theory, as expressed by David Noonan, was simple: “We wanted our presentation of monsters to reflect how they’re actually used in D&D gameplay. A typical monster has a lifespan of five rounds. That means it basically does five things, ever, period, the end.”

Their logic was fundamentally flawed when it came to 3rd Edition, for reasons which I’ll only briefly summarize here: First, it ignores the fact that you’ll frequently meet the same type of monster more than once (in which case having some variety in what the monster can do is valuable). Second, it ignores the fact that monsters need to be able to react to the unexpected actions of the PCs (in which case having a wider array of tactical options is valuable). Finally, and most importantly, it neglects to consider that D&D is supposed to be a roleplaying game, not a tactical miniatures game. In a roleplaying game, even if you’re fighting, the reasons why you’re fighting are frequently important.

(As I’ve written before: “It’s often the abilities that a creature has outside of combat which create the scenario. And not just the scenario which leads to combat with that particular creature, but scenarios which can lead to many different and interesting combats. Noonan, for example, dismisses the importance of detect thoughts allowing a demon to magically penetrate the minds of its minions. But it’s that very ability which may explain why the demon has all of these minions for the PCs to fight; which explains why the demon is able to blackmail the city councillor that the PCs are trying to help; and which allows the demon to turn the PCs’ closest friend into a traitor.”)

All of these flaws in WotC’s reasoning remain equally valid when it comes to 4th Edition, but we can also add another one to he batch: Due to the “padded sumo wrestling” nature of the system, monsters in 4th Edition tend to have lifespans much longer than 5 rounds. Since their tactical options have been limited, 4th Edition monsters tend to do the same couple of things over and over again — they don’t have any other choice, after all. This is not only the result of the “padded sumo wrestling” combat, but also contributes to it by making the longer combats boring.

These problems with WotC’s design ethos, however, are relatively tangential to the issue at hand: Reducing the complexity of running combat. Reducing the number of abilties a monster has would, in fact, accomplish that… if the number of monsters in each encounter were the same.

But they aren’t. Not only is 4th Edition designed to have more monsters in a single encounter, but the system is specifically designed with the expectation that you will have a greater variety of monsters in each encounter. In 3rd Edition you might have a battle with 8 ogres, but they’d all have the same abilities. In 4th Edition you might have a battle with 8 ogres, but they’ll have five different stat blocks.

For example, demons and devils are generally agreed to be the most complicated 3rd Edition monsters to use in an encounter. A horned devil in 3rd Edition is a CR 15 encounter. They have roughly 14 abilities that could be used during combat (if you count both their different attacks and non-combat abilities which are relatively easy to ignore; in practice the effective number of abilities you need to keep track of is considerably lower).

Encounter A3 in Keep on the Shadowfell features 5 different types of kobolds who have, between them, 12 different abilities that could be used during combat. (And that’s not counting their different attacks, which — in an apples-to-apples comparison — would increase the number of abilities to 18.)

Making things even more difficult is that many abilities in 4th Edition are immediate actions: They take place during other characters’ turns. In 3rd Edition most creature abilities can only be used on the combatant’s own turn — which means that simply taking a few moments to look over a monster’s stat block on their turn was generally effective. But in 4th Edition it’s not enough to simply be able to quickly parse a stat block, you pretty much have to keep a large number of abilities in your head at all times so that your monster’s can take advantage of the triggers for their actions as they occur.

TRACKING HIT POINTS: One effect of the minion rules is to eliminate the number of monsters the DM needs to track hit points for (since any hit kills a minion). This is fine as far as it goes, but — once again — 4th Edition encounters are generally designed around larger groups of monsters. Which means, in practice, it appears that you’ll have just as many hit point totals to keep track of.

For example, looking at the first few encounters in Keep on the Shadowfell we find in the first encounter three creatures; in A1 five creatures; in A2 three creatures; in A3 seven creatures; and in A4 four creatures that need to have hit point totals tracked.

BUFFS: One of the things I hear people claiming is that there aren’t as many buffs in 4th Edition. This is not actually true. It’s true that there are fewer “permanent” buffs (in the form of equipment giving flat bonuses, for example) and it’s also true that there are fewer buffs to ability scores and the like.

But short-term bonuses and penalties? They’re all over the damn place. And, to make matters worse, they’re largely situational bonuses — by which I mean that you get things like a +1 for each ally adjacent to your target; -2 for being marked; +1 to a particular skill check if you’re within 5 squares of one character; -2 to a different skill check if you’re within 6 squares of another one. Marks just add to the laundry list of such abilities.

These situational buffs are the worst type of buff when it comes to adding complexity to battle. Permanent buffs from equipment, for example, are calculated into a stat block at character creation. And for oft-used buffs (like a barbarian’s rage or always casting bull’s strength on the fighter before a big battle), there are tricks and work-arounds (like prepping a second character sheet or stat block).

But for situational buffs you pretty much have to keep on your toes. You have to both (a) remember that the situational buff exists and (b) make frequent on-the-fly adjustments to multiple stat blocks as the buffs come and go (or move around).

THE BOTTOM LINE: I was always fairly comfortable with the level of complexity you’d find in high-level 3rd Edition encounters. It took a certain degree of system mastery, certainly, but it’s a level of system mastery that flowed pretty naturally into my blood the first time I ran a group from 1st to 20th.

So, for the most part, 4th Edition combat looks just fine to me. But if you’re someone who disliked the complexity of high level 3rd Edition encounters, you should be warned that this is par for the course in 4th Edition.

I’ll also say that I have little confidence that I would ever get to a point where I would be able to run 4th Edition encounters flawlessly. The multitude of situational buffs and marks are something that I’m likely to get more right than wrong, but I suspect there’ll always be something getting overlooked at some point during a session.

THE GOOD NEWS: I can’t vouch for this through playtesting, but it looks like this level of complexity stays pretty constant from 1st level to 30th level in 4th Edition. Like many things in the system, if they’ve hit your sweet spot then you’re going to be fairly happy for the duration. But if they’ve missed your sweet spot — or if you had many different sweet spots (and liked the variety of having different styles of gameplay) — then 4th Edition is going to be continuously problematic.

Continued…