Monday, September 29, 2008

Shouldn't combat be fun?

Crwth’s last post got me to thinking. Namely his allusion to the onset of tedium in the official WotC module we’re going through.

I’m not privy to the details of the module, and as much as I’d love to, I can’t go and read through to see if we’re just in a combat heavy section, or if it opens up into more roleplay heavy section soon. I dunno.

I would like to give the benefit of the doubt to the module though. The storyline so far has been intriguing (although I’ve had to suspend reality a lot when it comes to the design of the keep. Just the physical layout as we’ve seen it strikes me as really stoopid for a defensive fort.) The recent plot twist of another group in the nearby mountains definitely grabbed my attention. The encounters have also been very interesting with terrain and monster powers being put to great use.

That aside, I’ve been feeling the slogging tedium of late. It's so bad that I almost dread combat now and find myself pushing for the group to ignore obvious XP and loot farming for avenues that I hope will lead to furthering the story.

I love XP and loot!

So what the hell is going on here!?

My current theory lays the blame on the powers. Especially the “At Will” ones. For me, they have just about sucked every ounce of fun from the game. There’s no more resource management or planning involved. It’s just a matter of looking at the grid, picking out a cluster of bad guys, and dropping a Scorching Burst. Next round? Same thing. Or maybe I’ll toss out an Encounter Power just for shits’n’giggles.

As much as I love the glut of feats our characters get, and the ritual system, I’m really missing the old 3.5 feats and spellcasting system. It was just, more fun. Fourth edition, for all it’s simplicity, and for all the huge improvements, isn’t as much fun for me.

I want to hold out and give 4e longer than the three months it’s had. I want to see the next round of books (and my glimpse at the Player’s Guide to FR was encouraging) but I don’t know if I’m gonna make it. Right now I’m almost to the point where I’m ready to push for a d20 Modern campaign. Or a return to 3.5.

Or, I guess I could blame the DM. ;-)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes but you know what isn't fun? Moron's in this world who bitch about people who put the PHB online. Fuck if anyone can look at it once and know what the whole book is. It's gotta take at least two to three people to make heads or tails. And what the fuck are they doing about the torrents? Nothing. The pain of finding a site that won't tear up my comp just makes me want to go to the nearest book store to photo copy every page with high res and post it on every blog, twitter, youtube, myspace, yahoo, google, photobucket, or any similar web site I can find. I will destroy them.