No. For me,
4E is not oldschool. But oldskool represents something particular in my opinion. Hackmaster comes closest to resembling the freewheeling silliness of the way my mates and I used to play AD&D 1E, in a rules form. Come 2E that style had changed to something more po-faced.
4E, on the other hand, has a Rod of Might rammed so far up it's rear in an attempt to keep game balance that it couldn't come anywhere NEAR supporting the wild and wacky magic items and spells and their uses of that era. There's no in-jokes about Spears of Backstabbing and creative uses of Enlarge to be had here...move along...
It doesn't want to, and isn't designed to. It is D&D wearing an accountant's visor, with greedy little squinty marketing eyes peering out from under it, not D&D wearing a jester's cap, grinning madly, and with eyes which swirl with oceans of possibility. And that's if you give
WOTC's fantasy heartbreaker the title "D&D" in the first place, and I'm not so sure it deserves it.
It's a pity that 1E has game balance roughly equivalent to that of Monopoly, and
4E has so little soul that it would make a figurative version of the late James Brown run away screaming.
3E is probably the nearest thing we have to a compromise. 1E or C&C supplemented by Hackmaster, perhaps, if you want to throw game balance and Serious Campaign Design Is Serious to the winds, and fall off the other end of the scale.
__________________
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