I want the same experience I had as a 2e player looking at 3e for the first time. The sense of "why weren't things always this way?". The quantum leap forward of mechanics.
So, anyone looking at 3e and not liking it can say that 3e wasn't innovative?
For what it's worth, I didn't find 3E particularly innovative:
* Race/class as the basis of PC build - goes back to AD&D (and I imagine even further back to the Greyhawk supplement, but I'm not 100% sure of that);
* Uniform XP table for classes - goes back at least to Rolemaster;
* Skill built using points with a level cap and class-dependent point costs - goes back at least to Rolemaster;
* Spells memorised via a class-and-level dependent table from a long list - goes back to original D&D;
* Simulationist rather than fortune-in-the-middle saving throws - goes back at least to Runequest;
Monsters presented in the same stat format as PCs - goes back at least to Runequest.
There are only three real mechanical innovations I can think of in 3E, but I'm happy to be pointed to the game where they originated! One is the use of spontaneous casting to reconcile "Vancian" casting with the flexibiity of mana-point casting; another is feat as a way of giving a class-and-level based game some of the same flexibility in PC build as a points-based game; and a third (but the merits of which are highly contstable!) is using the PC build rules to build all NPCs and monsters.
I can see how 3E might have looked innovative to someone who knew little of trends in RPG design from the late 70s through the 80s, but otherwise it was about bringing D&D up to a level of design that had been pioneered around 15 to 20 years earlier.
I've got most of Monte Cook's Rolemaster books - I'm not sure how innovative they are (mechanically not that much), but he certainly has creative ideas - there's a lot of fun stuff in Creatures & Treasures II (including items that turned up in his D&D work, like the Cape of the Montebank - though the "teleporting in a puff of smoke" spell that the item is based on was not introduced into RM by Monte, but is found in the original Rolemaster Companion which predates his involvement in the game), and his organitech stuff from Banewarrens (?) and Ptolus was anticipated in the Rolemaster campaign supplement Dark Space.
For innovation by Jonathan Tweet, Ars Magica is obviously a clearer example than 3E, but it's hard to think of a more innovative RPG than Over the Edge - which, having come out in 1992, predates 3E by nearly a decade yet still reads like a contemporary indie game. (And it's interesting to see the raving over feature of 13th Age, like backgrounds as skills and One Unique Thing, which Tweet thought up over 20 years ago for that earlier game.)
See, when I looked at 4e, that's exactly the reaction I had for most of the mechanics. "What am I not doing things this way already".
Huh? Your mind is boggled by the fact that someone might find 4e a game worth playing? Then I think you need to get out more!
I think 4e is more innovative than 3E - it is a version of D&D that, in terms of its mechanics, is basically contemporary with other games being published in 2008, rather than playing catch-up to 1985 like 3E was. I think it's biggest mechanical innovation is showing that crunchy tactical combat mechanics - which traditionally were a staple of heavily process-sim games like RQ, RM, etc - can be used to a quite different, non-simulationist end. (Arguably Burning Wheel had already done this over 5 years earlier, but BW maintains the process sim resolution and then layers non-sim concerns over the top of it, whereas 4e abandons process sim for all elements except positioning.) Skill challenges are also a distinctive approach to complex scene resolution, which have weaknesses compared to some others (in particular, the absence of active opposition can create framing challenges for the GM) but strengths also (once the GM overcomes the framing challenges, skill challenges are less vulnerable to a dropping out of fictional positioning than simple opposed-check systems like HeroWars/Quest extended contests or the BW Duel of Wits).
But I think the biggest innovation in 4e is actually not mechanical at all - it's at the level of story. 4e shows how decades of D&D lore can be consolidated and repurposed to support a non-simulationist game, in the form of a conflict-riven setting in which the PCs (and thereby the players) are inherenlty engaged. It is the
Gloranthafication of D&D.
