Quote Originally Posted by helium3 View Post
I've found that the real advantage of DM'ing 4E so far is that when you couple the XP budget method of encounter generation with the way they want you to quantize everything into "quests" you sort of innately get a feel for "pacing." It's a lot easier to realize "this dungeon is way too large" right off the bat.
Well, I've only built and run two adventures with 4e. I'm still wrestling the 3e rules out of my head. Like deciding ahead of time what a magic item is, since there's no random chart to consult mid-game. (I've since added an excell sheet to take care of that for now)

I find that the pacing does work itself out quite nicely in 4e. And I have enjoyed the new thinking in encounter design. Not having to assemble a statblock for a monster also helps greatly. So far as a DM 4e is nice and in practice runs a lot closer to my usual style. So the adjustments are simply breaking old habits. Of course, YMMV

Quote Originally Posted by helium3 View Post
High level encounters (only done one at 10th so far) are SSSSLLLLOOOWWWW if your players haven't figured out how to "optimize" their characters. What's odd is that I don't mean optimize in terms of character builds, I mean in terms of the actions they choose to take in combat.

It seemed like it was harder to do that in 3.5 for some reason.
Well I am waiting until everyone has the difference between "Burst" and "Blast" down before I try running a higher level game.

I have run a couple of encounters myself just to see how a level 19 Great Weapon Fighter goes against a Level 19 Umber Hulk I adjusted up. That was slow and cumbersome since I was trying to read every rules that came up to make sure I had it all figured out. I certianly hope things go faster when I get a chance to run that in the future.

All things considered, the only part I'm not enjoying about 4e is my inner grognard hates the simplification. I have a little masochistic voice in my head that feels that I should grab a pile of d8's when a random monster comes into play and roll his hit dice right there at the table with the players crossing thier fingers for bad rolls. But the rest of me enjoys simply grabbing a monster stat block from the MM and plunking a monster onto the table and proclaiming, "Roll initiative, he's here and he's attacking."