Tony Vargas
Legend
I am:What's wrong with taking him at his word?
On another forum I’ve been running in circles with fans of other editions about different D&D play styles and how different editions support them, but I think I’ve finally nailed a key difference that sheds an enormous amount of light about so many disagreements ....
While either form of D&D can be played with any edition, it works better with some editions than others. TSR-D&D mostly sucks at Combat as Sport.... Also a lot of elements of TSR-D&D design that drive Combat as Sport people crazy, really tie into the Combat as War mindset. ..
With 3ed the game shifted a bit towards Combat as Sport and then shifted a good bit more with 4ed. In 4ed it’s easy to tell what’s a good fair fight for a given party and combat rarely goes in a direction that the DM completely didn’t expect and there’s tons of fun combat variety. However, the 4ed focus on balancing combat at the encounter level rather than the adventure level runs directly counter to Combat as War gameplay. ...But probably most importantly, 4ed combat just takes too damn long for Combat as War players. If you’re going to spend your time doing sneaky rat bastard Black Company stuff before combat starts, then having combat take a long time is just taking time away from the fun bits of play.
The main point of this post was trying to understand why a lot of the posts of 4ed fans sound like crazy moon logic to me while mine seem insane to them, I think this is a better rubric than most I've seen for providing an explanation for that.
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