Economy of Actions

Economy of Actions, a post on the gleemax forums by one of the WOTC guys, Rodney.

In very brief form, he's talking about how many things each player at the game table gets to do. In older D&D, players often had access to multiple attacks/actions in a round, not to mention minions, followers, summoned creatures, pets etc, that gave a player more share of the game pie than it did others. If the four of us are all playing D&D, and I've got two wolf companions, each of whom get to do stuff during a turn, and none of you have anything like that, I'm getting a bigger share of the game pie than any one other player.

This struck a chord with me when it comes to BBEG's (Big Bad Evil Guy), the endboss, or whatever you want to call him/her. And this goes for most gameist/sim games, D&D, Werewolf, etc. I had a hard time pitting 4 characters against 1 bad guy. This came up more than once in our recent Werewolf game. And quite frankly, I had to cheat like a fiend just to keep these big fights interesting, and to make them last more than like 2 turns. See.. it gets into numbers... if I have a big bad guy that I want to stand up to the four players, he needs to be able to last more than a round, so he needs to soak, or otherwise deal with the combined damage of the four players. He also needs to be able to hurt them back, in a convincing manner. He can't do mountains of damage, otherwise he's quickly dropping the good guys, which no one wants. But if I use "the rules", and he's doing his one measly attack per round, he's still a cakewalk.

Anyway, I didn't mean for this to be a YAY D&D 4e! post, but it kinda is - since 4e is gonna fix this little problem for me. Mostly I was whining about how terribly I had to cheat previously :P