Someone
Adventurer
Why do you play 4e rather than another edition? Alternatively, what do you like about it even if you mostly play another edition?
(Yeah, this topic has undoubtedly been covered before; just humor me. It's for a charitable cause.)
*As a DM who likes to use his own settings, the number of D&Disms woven into the rules is much reduced compared with previous editions, who depended on setting structures like alignment, planar cosmology or power source to properly use class abilities or basic mechanics like healing. I can play a lot of different settings with 4e that I can't with 3e or 2e without extensive house ruling.
*I can plan a large variety of plot scenarios that are not immediately invalidated by spells. (In my experience, and what I've learned after readin many story hours written by very good and talented DMs, is that starting at mid levels they go like this: Cleric casts Read DM's Notes, and learns everything they have to learn. Then they try to Scry the bad guy, but he's protected against divination. The group uses a clever loophole in the wording of the spells to overcome the protection. Then they cast find the path/wind walk/teleport and arrive at the bad guy's stronghold, and beat his defenses using more spells. The fighter/barbarian/gonzo prestige class charges into combat, deals a significant amount of damage, and is downed/dominated/taken out in one round. The rogue tries to sneak in, but everything has blindsight, then flanks and attack, but everything is immune to criticals and deals 1d6+4 damage. The cleric casts some spell and the fighter is up again, then the cleric buffs himself and deals more damage in melee of with spells that the fighter did. Then the mage casts something apocaliptic and ends the battle. I've seen and read this exact pattern many, many times, again from very good DMs.
*I appreciate that the rules are transparent, utilitarian and and cohesive, without taking unnecesary detours to provide a false sense of variety or simulationism. This makes making house rules and on the fly rulings easier.
*The defects in the system (like math imbalance at higer levels or the magic item dependence) are much easier to fix (with a free expertise feat and inherent bonuses) than the mechanical screw ups of 3e (like the saving throw math)
*I don't know if it was the design intent (specially seeing how early adventure modules were designed) but I find it leads to less frequent, more important combats with more out of combat stuff style, rather than frequent skirmishes with trash monsters whose only purpose is to be so meaningless that it's unproductive to use a spell slot on them, so you send the fighter.
*Emphasis on active abilities make the character feel powerful when you use them, rather than being powerful because of math.
*The PC design make reskinning very easy and in general terms, a much higer variety of playable PCs than previous edition possible. A haunted set of armor? Easy in 4e. In 3e, not without massive EL penalties.
*Combat is fun, even if too slow at a times, and rewards good players -not merely good minmaxers- and much easier to remember and play. Some of the previous edition combat rules are unnecesary complicated for little gain; the grapple rules are a well known example, but the penalties on ranged attacks and shooting into melee are facepalm worthy too.
*Edit: I don't know how I fogot this, but it's quite important. When my campaings of 3e reached 10 level or beyond, it wasn't uncomon to me to spend an entire afternoon designing an NPC or two before online tools were developed for that. That's unnaceptable. I can do that for 4e in 20 seconds.
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