Neonchameleon
Legend
Cards that contain information on specific abilities?
No. Setting the whole thing up so you don't have to look a thing up in the rulebook because it's all printed in front of you including what everything does.
Using the idea that splitting your character's levels into artificial steps does not make you Campbell. Even so, such artificial cliffs did exist in earlier editions through the edition of various follower groups, the Druid's special type of advancement, etc.
If the rules need to make the story for you that could be an issue, as that is now making a system of resolution affect the narrative directly.
I see what your problem is now... The difficulty in separating mechanics from flavor. Now your choices of games to highlight also make sense. Also you're kind of an obsessive optimizer per your other discussions in threads.
You mean that 3e bakes an entirely narrow flavour into the rules. 4e doesn't do this. It also has a much wider array of non-casting charaters and because the D&D casting flavour is so overwhelming it has a much wider variety of casting options.
Finally 3e had the narrowest monster design of any edition of D&D because of the stupid idea that you had to make NPCs by the same rules as PCs.
As for being an obsessive optimiser, not quite. I'm obsessive at understanding what I am doing. There's a difference - but understanding what you are doing is a prerequisite to most of the benign forms of optimisation.
That's definitely an interesting place to approach gaming from. While there will always be a certain amount of gamism, narrative and simulation can be achieved through the system. The problem is that you suffer from a need to optimize so much in 3e that you find the enforced limits of 4e to be comfortable.
I don't suffer from a need to optimise. I suffer from a need to understand what I am doing - take your ad hominem away please. I also suffer from a need to roleplay within the world set up by the rules.
The less I understood 3.X the more I enjoyed it. I find that unforgivable in design terms. The more I understand 4e the more I enjoy it - and I was sold on it the first time I flung a monster into its own pit trap without thinking about it.
Which was kind of the point behind the Ikea vs. Carpentry argument.
Except that it's not Ikea vs carpentry. It's a massive bucket of lego for 4e with everything working with everything else vs a junk box.
In 4e you can make what you want as long as it's fantasy heroic fiction. In 3e you need to make yourself stupid, ignorant, or a conspiracy theorist in character to not take certain spells over others.
An implied level of system mastery above those who play 3e and enjoy it is just worrisome.
Most of the people whose system mastery I respect turned their backs on 3e because they understand how it works - see, for instance Logic Ninja. (The others, like Trollman, are 3.X obsessives). [MENTION=22424]delericho[/MENTION] is a 3e fan and he, himself compares the 3e mechanical structure to having a broken arm and people pointing it out to people poking at the broken arm.
We understand the breaks in the system, we deal with them. Like a homeowner we patch the walls, lay on some paint, maybe replace the ductwork here and there...
A homeowner in a ramshackle house.
But we also can make a nice little comfortable sweet spot cottage, or an extravagant mansion with lakes filled with dire psuedonatural koi swimming in their Lovecraftian beauty.
Guess what? So can we with 4e. Except that the whole thing isn't held together by string and duct tape.
And the argument against the game not playing like fiction... Well, we're creating something of our own. That's the fun of our group.
The biggest problem I have with 3e is that the magic system is overwhelming enough that you need to make up excuses for it not to become a stock 3e world. Which means it actively impedes creating something of our own. 4e on the other hand fits a vast range of settings because the builds have a lot of character and the mechanics are purposely fairly generic.
If we want a shaved orangutan who grapples using holy tattoos as a fiendhunter? We can put it together.
I thought you said you were making your own fiction not using prefabricated stuff like fiend hunter? And the 4e grapplers (brawler fighters) who get to drag people around are much more interesting than the 3e grapplers. You've just illustrated a concept 4e does better than 3e.
Wanna play a fat merchant who uses wind magic through his ornate fan? We can do it.
Simple reskin. Your point?
There's all sorts of ways to tweak the levels of power, base this on that, go from there.
The levels of power shouldn't need tweaking. That's what the character level should represent.