Winnah wrote:Roxolan wrote:Every 4E class contributes meaningfully, barring contrived scenarios. Yay for repeating myself.
Experience tells me otherwise. Unless you mean that a meaningful contribution does not have to be equal or particularly useful.
Not equal? Yes, that's what I've been explicitly saying for the last three posts. Not useful? No, and you're going to have to support your claim with more than undefined anecdotal evidence.
Novembermike wrote:Koumei, I just read what you wrote again and you do realize that the monsters don't actually exist, right? It's all made up by the DM, the monsters never have to congregate in a room because they're in our heads.
Fuchs wrote:Look, not everyone skips all the story parts and just throws bags of hp and powers mixed up "appropriately" at the party to grind on. Some of us like to play in games where monsters and NPCs act as if they existed, and not as if they were WoW mobs with a bad AI.
If a pack of goblins, a dark elf and one harpy attack my party I better have a reason ready for why those work together, or all I am doing is providing my friends with a cheap shadow of MMOG "Gameplay" where one clicks through the quest dialogue since it doesn't matter, is shitty and stupid, or both.
This isn't incompatible with what Novembermike said. You don't suddenly stop world-building because your encounter isn't Goblin Warrior x5.
(And if you can't or don't want to make up an environment where drows, harpies and goblins work together, use the magic of reskinning to make them all drows.)
Koumei wrote:I can only assume that you're pointing out how "In 4E, the monsters don't actually exist out of combat, they spring into existence for the fight, with no connection to the world, then exist to get killed" and are using sarcasm and satire here. Because that does come across as a pretty good highlight of part of the stupidity of the assumed setting and the monster design, yes.
If you're seriously saying "Monsters only exist when the MC says they do, so they really should exist in a way that suits the party perfectly! Just because the sign says 'Warning: a continent-sized dragon lives over there' doesn't mean there should be one until the PCs are high enough level - if they go there at level 5 then there's only a bright red lizard about a foot long" then you are dangerously retarded and should go have a lie down. Because that describes an awful game design and world design that makes no fucking sense and would be terrible to play in.
Obviously you don't. You create the party's environment and plot hooks to ensure that they won't have any reason to randomly attack the giant dragon, but if they still do, they die. Players don't get to survive impaling themselves on their swords either. In both cases, there is something very very wrong with the group, and you don't solve that just by saying their swords turn to rubber before wounding them.
Fuchs wrote:Novembermike wrote:If the players can actually deal with the harpies dropping rocks on the player, why would you put the encounter in? It's not particularly interesting (the wizard has some options, but everyone else just pulls out their secondary weapon and starts doing basic attacks), it doesn't seem like it would do a particularly good job of moving the story along (running forces them somewhere, fighting just keeps them where they were with some bodies around them and a little less health).
By that logic we can skip just about every encounter, since those are meant to be able to handled by the party.
Does that mean you skip every encounter while playing 4E, given that it's so boringly easy?
Oh come on, are you willfully misinterpreting his logic? The harpy attack forces 80% of that hypothetical party to sit on their thumbs.
That is why it's unsuitable for that party. I have no idea how you get to the conclusion that
no encounter is suitable.