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I disagree. I think it's rude no matter what was said or how he said it. It was unsolicited advice, designed to make the jerk look like Mr. Knowledgeable Helper. The newbie had no context for understanding the relative merits of the editions. If he'd asked the jerk about 3e vs. 4e, that'd be...

Certainly. The point I was trying to make, following Hussar's point, is that edition warring is all well and good (well, not all well and good) when we're talking amongst ourselves. But edition warring in front of unsuspecting CNN readers and Game Day walkups is completely counterproductive...

The key thing here is, the person he was talking to had never played D&D. He was the proverbial fresh-faced newbie, out to see what this game was all about. And pretty much the first thing he hears is some jerk telling him that nah, he doesn't want to play the game that he's standing in line...

True enough, but being a baseball fan is pretty common (and I happen to be one). If you are so obsessed with the Red Sox that you couldn't countenance dating a Yankee fan, well, there are plenty of other Red Sox fans out there to pick from. We gamers are a rarer breed. We ought to stick...

It's not the mainstream media, but I encountered a pretty infuriating example of this sort of thing at one of the first 4e Game Days at my FLGS. I was waiting in line a few minutes before the shop opened, and the guy behind me mentioned that he'd never played D&D before, but he saw a flyer for...

Trailblazer may be what you're looking for. It includes a number of 4eish mechanics on top of a 3.5 base, including things like recharges after short rests, elites and solos, and action points (in a somewhat different form). Bad Axe Games

Understood and agreed. But prior to 4e, most classes didn't have any kind of damaging area attack at all, or had very few. Now, everyone has them to one degree or another. The differences between classes are subtler than they were; you have to experience them in play to really understand how...

I don't think it's wholly illusion, though. I would argue that 4e powers are objectively more similar, at least to some degree, than previous editions' attacks/spells. There are no insta-kills, there's no ability damage, there's no subdual/nonlethal damage per se, there's no disarming or...

You're of course right, but I think there are a few things at work here which make the 4e powers appear more homogeneous than previous editions: 1) The fact that every class has powers, and the well-supported ones have 100 or more powers available to them. Naturally, many of them are similar...

Fireball used to do more than damage; the old versions would melt soft metals and do a host of other things that were flavorful but sometimes annoying to actually work out at the table. 1e had rather detailed (some would say crazy) rules for determining a fireball's area of effect, with the...

The great thing about 4e combat is that a 15th level fight takes pretty much the same amount of time as a 2nd level fight. The problem with 4e combat is that a 2nd level fight takes pretty much the same amount of time as a 15th level fight.

The topic has been covered pretty well over the last few years, but for what it's worth, I'm nearing the end of my 4e interest as well. It has nothing to do with WotC's releases or lack thereof, nor their management of the brand. It's just that after an 18-month campaign, I'm finding the game...

I should note that I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if they'd sold me the core books as a set of PDFs or some other format that I could own in perpetuity and which they then "patched" from time to time as issues arose. In that universe, I would be quite pro-updates, and eager even...

It was a bit more than that, though. Originally, the number of allowable failures scaled with the challenge, so at complexity 5, you needed 12 successes vs. up to 6 failures. IIRC, Stalker0 did the math and realized that this made more complex challenges easier to defeat than less complex...

I disagree. The "Expertise" problem is that the PCs' attacks didn't keep pace with the monsters' defenses. The MM1 problem was that the monsters' damage didn't keep pace with the PCs' hp. These problems are, I think, independent of one another, and they both lead in the same direction: grind.

I can't speak for others, and YMMV and all that, but I found the MM1 monsters truly unusable after mid-heroic. Before the damage errata, I had to throw much higher level monsters at my PCs to even have a chance of hurting them, with the well-known result of having two groups of combatants that...

Fair enough, yes -- there were a great many 3rd party 3.x supplements that were far worse. And I'm sure there were many TSR-produced supplemental 2e books that were poorly designed and edited as well (I have heard of, but never seen, the "dawizard" book, for example). We'll agree to disagree...

True, but I feel like the core 3 from 2008 set a new standard for imperfect out of the gate. The math didn't actually work, necessitating the Expertise feats; the skill challenge numbers were completely out of whack and almost immediately errata'ed (making the challenges trivial, requiring yet...

Can I ask what parts of the 08 DMG you are using? I still use large chunks of PH1, but I don't think there's much in the DMG that hasn't been superseded by errata and updates. Except for the fluffy bits and Fallcrest, I think practically everything has been replaced: poison and disease DCs...

I strongly support 1-4, but I'm not sure how far to take #5. The monsters I think are mostly OK once you fix the math. I wish there had been a true 4.5 to clean up all the cruft.