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The roots of 4e exposed?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7460595" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>1982 here. 600+ pages of house rules, just of the ones that are written down. </p><p></p><p>That said, I understand if rules smithing isn't everyone's thing. </p><p></p><p>For me the real difference is how much of the rules are assumed to be player driven compared to how much the rules are DM driven, which is to say how much of the rules are flavor driven compared to mechanics driven. Goblins, hobgoblins, sidhe, changlings, pixies, orine and idreth are PC races because they are in my setting, and not because there was a player demand to get a race with a particular combination of bonuses to enable a build they wanted. Ironically, I'm a bit of an 'old school' outlier here, as my impression is that most of the 3e diehards like 3e precisely because its chargen is so player driven.</p><p></p><p>When I considered running a game in 4e, I notice that a lot of the work was front loaded. That is to say, the designers of the game had done a lot to make it easy to use their stuff, but in doing so they'd also increased the amount of work required to extend the system. Creating a new class for 4e was no light piece of work, and even creating a new interesting monster could be a daunting challenge owing to the complexity of the stat block and the need to make that monster mechanically interesting in 4e's tactical framework. By comparison, creating new content in 1e was owing to the lack of framework a simple exercise in natural language, where creating new content in 3e could be tedious but only for reasons of rote accounting. Now, if you weren't a rules smith, this probably was a welcome change. But if you came at the game as something you were going to customize to your taste and setting, imposing both new mechanics and new rules on your existing setting (and tying the two together strongly) was not something you wanted.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7460595, member: 4937"] 1982 here. 600+ pages of house rules, just of the ones that are written down. That said, I understand if rules smithing isn't everyone's thing. For me the real difference is how much of the rules are assumed to be player driven compared to how much the rules are DM driven, which is to say how much of the rules are flavor driven compared to mechanics driven. Goblins, hobgoblins, sidhe, changlings, pixies, orine and idreth are PC races because they are in my setting, and not because there was a player demand to get a race with a particular combination of bonuses to enable a build they wanted. Ironically, I'm a bit of an 'old school' outlier here, as my impression is that most of the 3e diehards like 3e precisely because its chargen is so player driven. When I considered running a game in 4e, I notice that a lot of the work was front loaded. That is to say, the designers of the game had done a lot to make it easy to use their stuff, but in doing so they'd also increased the amount of work required to extend the system. Creating a new class for 4e was no light piece of work, and even creating a new interesting monster could be a daunting challenge owing to the complexity of the stat block and the need to make that monster mechanically interesting in 4e's tactical framework. By comparison, creating new content in 1e was owing to the lack of framework a simple exercise in natural language, where creating new content in 3e could be tedious but only for reasons of rote accounting. Now, if you weren't a rules smith, this probably was a welcome change. But if you came at the game as something you were going to customize to your taste and setting, imposing both new mechanics and new rules on your existing setting (and tying the two together strongly) was not something you wanted. [/QUOTE]
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