I’ve already read your play preferences so I’m not going to argue about the warlock except to say that Warlocks should hit like hell and kill monsters with Daily… they were designed for that. In fact, they seem to be demonstrably weaker than newer ranged strikers like the Sorcerer.

If you haven’t seen them already, Barbarians are exceedingly scary too. I killed Controllers and Artillery in one round using At-wills. That’s what Strikers do, when played intelligently. The other classes’ role is to give the striker the best opportunities to dish out maximum damage.

I find a lot of the beasties in the books if against characters of similar level and layout either don’t last too long or dominate very hard. I think when it boils down on the actual use of monsters, using tactics and considering the group you can make either outcome INTERESTING (they may hate GETTING hit and decimated, but when you throw the right words out, and make it personal, they want to come back for more lol). As a DM, we want to consider when our enemies want to cut and run(leaving them alive), or get nitty gritty.

The class I can’t touch as a DM is a Warlock. They give me nothing but headaches in 4e with an addiction to curses and a lot of Striker tactics, one Dark Lock can take out half of the enemies with a Daily.

When our companion didn’t rise to the surface to tell us what was down there, we began to worry (only slightly, since he was a rather troublesome gnome, but we worried nonetheless)…after some quick piton pounding, the resident halfling rappelled down the shaft, torch in hand, only to realize a horrible mistake had been made…on account of darkvision providing a black and white image (one w/o color due to lack of light), what was mistaken for a pool of water was really a pool of acid…

After a hearty laugh, we continued on with our lives…

Also, at one point in time, I had a level 20 knight on my hands…they have this ridiculous ability called Loyal Beyond Death that allows them to stay concious and alive no matter how badly hurt they are…for each round they do this, they must expend one use of their Knight’s Challenge per day (14 for me)…when we took on the BBEG, I used my Test of Mettle ability to hold him off, while my compatriots dealt with his minions, occasionally peppering my opponent with damage…by the end of the fight I was kicking around at -163 hp with 9 rounds of life left in me…but thanks to some swift healing by the party’s two clerics, I came out not dead…

What a day that was…

I mean the 7 volume monster books was ludicrous…

Wait a minute… how many did WotC create for 3.5? 5 + fiend folio + both codexes+…

I’ll shut up now.

Be it that the ruleset is too heavy and made fights to long (Gurps, Rolemaster, High Level D&D) or just too deadly (CP2020, O D&D), I’ve often read that Roleplaying took over you couldn’t play the game otherwise.

Definitively a subject for a future post.

BTW. I love those stories. Keep them coming, I’m writing a huge text for Johnn Four’s newsletter and I probably won’t post anything here until tomorow night.

(That character showed up in at least three other campaigns over the years.)

Going away from 4e for a second — the most difficult but fun transition we ever made in gaming was from 3e to CP2020. I ran about 10 game sessions before we had one that was not a TPK. My group took their time figuring out they weren’t gods of the battlefield in that game, so they ended up just meat. But far from turning them from the game, we grew to love it’s grittiness and the setting in general. I was deadset on enforcing CP’s unforgivingness in firefights, so my PCs knew they were going to have to get their kicks some other way. I got some of the best roleplaying, characters, and stories out of our CP2020 sessions after this.

gamefiends last blog post..Beautiful Power Cards

In my case I love rogue and they died pretty often too, but I’m always doing crazy stunts!

That just made me remember one of the more flashy death I’ve had with a cleric… We had an encounter with a Balor or something alike and Chatty use it’s meteor storm spell using the spread that has the equivalent of 4 fireball in one spot… Well I was in that spot… He was rolling damage looking at me after each “fireball” expecting something but I was looking back at him saying bring it on… He goes on and on and after all of it he goes:

-You’re still alive!?!?
-Well I think that at -80 hp only my boots are left with little smoky bit on top…
good time…

Of course, I have run more than a few front line wizards over the years. And a wild mage who’se only memorized spell a lot of the time was reckless deowmer…

It’s hard to tell the difference, isn’t it? My group just entered the “storming phase” (in my ninth session playing D&D) and I’ve been asking myself, “If D&D is supposed to allow you to do ‘anything,’ why would you choose ‘find out what it’s like to hang out with a bunch of violent assholes?’”