Neonchameleon
Legend
But give the man a break and some respect. Stop assuming the worst every time something is posted. Just because it's possible to twist and misunderstand something he writes about 4e doesn't mean it should be.
Why? Respect should be earned. And the man who deliberately put system mastery traps into 3.X needs to go a long way to digging himself out of the hole to earn mine. And since then he has in his L&L column done things like talked about passive perception as if it was a new thing. And said that 4e doesn't have saving throws.
Respect is also a two way street. I'm seeing none at all coming from his direction - when the communications I see from him are a mix of push-polls and signs that he doesn't respect the game I'm quite happy playing, I have limited respect for him.
And as for "twisting his words", he is meant to be a game designer. I need to change the raw meaning of his words in order to get to the results that he may have intended to communicate. One of the necessary skills of a game designer is the ability to write clearly and unambiguously. Apparently he fails at this.
(And re: the Schwalb article. It was talking about fighters as they were intended to be in 3.X rather than as they were. If that article had been written by Monte Cook, it would be a self-congratulatory pat on the back saying that he'd got things right when in fact he'd failed badly. Schwalb isn't one of the names on the 3e PHB. Context matters.)
I like the idea of the traditional saving throw because it makes affecting someone with magic mechanically different from attacking someone with a weapon. I think that makes each of those activities, and consequently the classes involved with those activities, feel more distinctive from one another in play. This is important to me because I believe part of the choice of which class to play is a choice of what kind of gameplay experience the player wants, and the more distinct those options are the more distinct and meaningful the player's choice will be.
And to me the above gets filed under "a distinction without a difference". I believe that the ability to re-write reality is enough to make things feel different as long as you have any immersion at all, and having multiple separate subsystems just confuses matters. This is important to me as changing characters should not throw me out of the game as I am forced to work out which separate set of mechanics I need to interact with unless there is an actual direct benefit to having separate mechanics.
An example of magic using separate systems to good effect would be the WHFRP 2e magic system. The casting roll means that you can get blowback whether or not the spell is cast, and allows you to control the amount of magic you dare to use (the less, the less blowback you risk). That is a distinct and meaningful difference in the way simply swapping over who rolls the dice isn't.