Y'know, Derren, your point would likely be a whole lot more accessible if you stopped trying to speak for other people. As in, instead of talking about "many others", why not just talk about your own experiences.
Additionally, since I have seen elsewhere that you admit that you stopped looking at 4e pretty much after the core 3 were released, wouldn't that be a lot like judging 3e based entirely on the first printing 3e core 3? I mean, if you're going to talk about how 3e broadened its focus beyond things, you really should take some time to examine the stuff that's come out in the last two or three years for 4e before passing broad sweeping judgements.
Just a thought.
It would be so nice if you would stop living in your dream world where 4E is universally liked and played by everyone except me. 4E drove away a lot of players from D&D and my complains have been repeated by many of them. So I am pretty confident about my claim about "many others" having the same problem no matter how much you want to deny that.
And yes, even when only looking at the core books my point still stands. The feat system which allowed greater customization of characters, the expanded skill system and multiclassing were all available in 3E core as was the equalization of PCs and NPCs which allowed in my eyes a better interaction between them. Compared to the previous edition all this made 3E more open in my eyes as it allowed for more customized characters and supported more styles of games.
4E core contained the restrictive roles and linking of usable weapons to class, the simplification of skills with removing skill points and having everyone advance in all skills at the same rate excluding training coupled with the environment scaling to player skill so that everything was always equally difficult regardless of level. It also had the "Point of Light" setting which includes the "Not allowed to play evil" and "You only need what you kill" design (Yes, those things were later changed in 4.1 or 4.2). And skill challenges which were advertised as improvement were broken and not fixed until much later.
All this makes 4E more "focused" or in my words more limited as the rules and the marketing makes it perfectly clear that this edition wants to drag the game back into the dunegeon where D&D had its origin. Everything else was just stuffing which was supposed to be handled as quickly as possible to get the game back to the important parts. So I really fail to see how 4E is more open than 3E.
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