So I have closed the final chapter on my Shackled City campaign. It was fun at times, but I often became very frustrated with the game system. The biggest thing is the swinginess of combat. One thing I noticed in 4th was that there were no make or break spells. There weren't any pre combat buffs to stack. And there wasn't a ton of resource management like a huge number of spells.
Well all that makes a lot more sense after running a 3.5 game to 20th level (technically 18th level).
It is very hard to balance an encounter when there are so many game-changing spells. For example, in my campaign the final battle involved a demon prince. His first action was to use a spell, Blasphemy, that instantly killed all the players except one. The players had been given plenty of time to buff so they actually had a spell on that basically soaked up one death (Fortunate Fate froma splatbook). So they lived. His second casting of the spell was neutralized by silence on a friendly melee fighter and a caster readied to silence whenever he went outside the silence. Then melee went to town on him with Haste and Brilliant Aura and copious amounts of two-handed power attack.
It points out several things. Individual spells can swing combat a lot. Wihout the specific preparation they had Blasphemy would have caused a total party wipe. As it stood they survived it without any issues. Save or die spells in many cases can massively swing the game. One of the jokes of the campaign was that Glitterdust was the ultimate spell. It ignores spell resistence and you always fail one a 1. Many a 1 was rolled against Glitterdust and it turned dangerous foes into essentially helpless targets.
Another major swing factor is the remaining resources of the characters. Characters tend to not know how dangerous their next battle will be so they can decide to push on or not. A high level party with full resources is MUCH more powerful than one at 25% or 50% resources. Also, if you give a party several rounds to prepare, stacked buffs make a huge difference.
All these factors tend to collide at high levels. It makes it very difficult to make balanced encounters. I found encounters were often too diffcult or too easy. And this is using published materials. Mostly they were too easy.
So I feel like I have a lot more insight in to why they made the decisions they made with 4th edition, and although it looks like a stripped down game I realize that the things they stripped out made it un-balanced and difficult to play.
