Crazy Jerome
First Post
I think that this whole "you have to earn the right to play the character you want to play" thing is somewhat unique to D&D. In classic D&D, where getting a truly viable PC (especially a magic-user) is itself a goal of play, it made some sense.
Retaining it despite the cultural transition from Gygaxian gamism to the high-concept simulationism of 2nd ed AD&D and early 3E (as you are describing it) just seems strange. And tending to promote not only dysfunctional rulesets, but (in my view) somewhat dysfunctional play, based heavily around GM force and dispensation (as per the Ron Edwards quote that you posted).
The 4e categories of Heroic, Paragon and Epic seem to me an attempt to reconcile player protagonism with D&D levelling, by making your "character identity trajectory" a given background to play, rather than a goal of play as such: you don't have to earn it (from the game or the GM) - it will come to you, over time, simply by turning up and playing. (Hence, I think, why some people criticise 4e as "player entitlement" or "munchkinism" or "overpowered" - criticisms for which I personally have little sympathy.)
That does, of course, give rise to the question "what is the goal of 4e play, then?" I don't think the rulebooks for 4e are completely clear on this.
I haven't yet got a sense, yet, of how D&Dnext is going to handle this sort of stuff: what is the goal of play, and how does character development and expression fit into that goal.
I think the "you have to earn the right to play the character you want to play" thing is mostly odd in 2E--and then only because the setting and module assumptions made it odd, not because of rules changes (of course). I don't see this as odd in even early 3E, because 3E very consciously goes to a lot of trouble to make the characters better able to participate and fit from the beginning.
Really, the problem here is that 3E is dealing with the aftershocks of merging the 2E implicit simulation goal while retaining the gamist underpinnings of the original ruleset. That's why 3E is so much more "playable" straight out of the box at the lower levels than the upper ones. It's almost as if they recognized that 1st level characters needed a few more choices and capabilities. Then someone thought, "but if we do that, what do characters grow into?" Their answer is the broken part, as they piled on more and more and more--prestige classes being just a tiny bit of that.
For example, as a thought experiment, I'm fairly comfortable predicting that if you took low-level 3E as a starting point, otherwise unchanged, ripped out prestige classes, and then replaced them with 4E paragon paths and epic destinies (adapted, of course), you'd end up with a better 3E. That's not because the 4E versions are perfect. They aren't. Already I think Next specialties are better. Nor does that indicate that it would solve all 3E issues. It would simply be marginally better than what was there originally, because paragon paths and epic destinies are a better mechanical solution for what prestige classes were intended for. (There's some other stuff that prestige classes ended up doing, that wouldn't be replaced so easily--but then prestige classes were a kludge for things like holes in the multi-classing anyway. The 4E widgets don't help any with that.)
Counter Forge views, I don't find mixing styles to be inherently dysfunctional in play. I think human beings are pretty sophisticated, in practice, at carrying around theoretically incompatible elements--even paradoxical ones. There are limits, and the more they are pushed, the more likely something is to be dysfunctional in practice. However, I think the limits are a lot wider than the Forge credits. Of course, if the purpose of a game is to push against particular limits very hard, then this becomes less true. The more specialized the tool, the less it tolerates alternate uses.