And then you get 4th edition, which is hated and played less than the previous edition because people want to influence the combat right now and not have super slow combats.
There's also no valid way of fixing that. If you make HP non binary then you just make rockets even more prevalent, as whatever side goes first has far more ways of preventing the other from fighting back.
Remove anything that influences the fight right now and you have a slow grind fest... or no one has the ability to deal with encounters, so everyone dies.
Actually, that's not the major complaint I've seen with 4e. Myself and my group enjoy it, for the most part, the biggest problem (especially with longer fights) is that the combat gets boring not because of 'impact', but because the player runs out of interesting things to do, because they have too few abilities. The general sequence runs down to "At-will, encounter, at-will, another encounter, at-will,
daily, at-will, at-will, at-will, at-will..." The at-wills get boring and repetitive, especially when the player has already run out of their other powers.
By that, I mean, you can have long fights, there just needs to be more going on and capable of happening than running down a power list and repeating options. That might mean throwing more powers(/abilities/maneuvers/spells/etc) on everyone's plate. That might mean having more balance-shifting wrenches thrown into the works mid-combat. More stuff needs to happen, but it doesn't necessarily need to happen every round.
D&D isn't ponyland. Things die. Even the heroes.
I have no problem with players dying, but I think it should require more than
one die-roll to kill off a player or major enemy. That's my main problem with SoDs as they stand.
It may look nice at first glance, but it's actualy a trap. Because now the game is screaming for players to focus-fire the enemy with no-save debilitating effects that stack into death. Single enemies are now more screwed than ever because even if they win iniative, they have nobody else to combo with and now have no hope of at least making their saves against the stacking player debuffs.
Nah, actually, that's where HP is the best place for a common ground for focus-fire tactics. Don't make spell-based debuff effects stack, especially not for the strike-driven SoD alternatives. (penalties to movement/saves/attacks, sure, because they are contributing to the decline of the target in all measures..) No-save debilitating effects? Like what? Everything should have some chance of failure.
Then again, I also think there should be more 'bloodied'-style gamechangers, maybe other effects, positive and negative, that kick in along the decline of HP. Those type of effects, when properly interacted with, have gotten a lot of good responses in my group.
Not to mention that the game as a whole gets drasticaly more complex and combat slows down even more.
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps combat needs to be de-complicated. I've noticed this, and this is a big thing I've noticed myself doing, we all want there to be five or so different things a character is doing per-turn. Maybe if more of that was broken down, spread out so the player isn't having to juggle five different action types and multiple things to juggle, combat rounds would get less complex, and combat might process a little faster. Just a thought.
Plus, as the game goes on, ressurection and fixing ailments gets easier and easier. If your cleric isn't packing some fast revival magic by middle levels, it's your own fault.
And I think the cleric's (or whatever's) primary role in the party should be mid-combat healing or strike-negating during combat, not waiting until after the combat is over to rez whoever's left and clean up the corpses. The game needs to be altered to make mid-combat defense&recovery a viable playstyle again.
This is why you make capable, competent characters, that way you don't have to worry about them dying all the time and can focus on playing and enjoying the game instead of desperately struggling to not get constantly slaughtered.
Please define each of the qualifiers you just used, (like 'capable', 'competent', 'desperately struggling to not get constantly slaughtered'), and keep in mind, the game as you know it may be changed beyond what you're used to, heck, I'm asking this as a general question because I'm also designing a non-D&D-but-psuedo-d20-system game on the side, and I'm trying to apply what I learn about D&D to the design process from the ground up, so I don't hit a lot of the major traps and pitfalls.
