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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 5146183" data-attributes="member: 11999">I would say that yes, those players would recognize 4e as the same game.  Obviously we are talking about players who last played D&D 1e, 2e, or B/X when it was current.  As much as the active D&D fanbase obsesses over every change made to the rules in every successive edition, the more "casual" or "lapsed" gamer probably won't notice that big a difference -- and more importantly, they likely won't care, as hard as that may be for some of us to believe.  You still play an elf, dwarf, fighter, cleric, or wizard, you still roll a 20-sided die to see if you hit the "armor class" of an opponent and roll a different die to see how much damage you subtract from its "hit points."  You still go on a grand adventure into a dungeon, fight monsters, and accumulate gold and magic items.  When I talk about "lapsed" D&D players, I think of people who played casually or semi-regularly (or perhaps even regularly) in their youth, but drifted away from the game after high school or college/university as real-life concerns demanded their attention.  Or perhaps simply because gaming groups drifted apart over the years; at any rate, I'm not thinking of players who used to play (A)D&D but stopped because they found the rules too "unrealistic" or too restrictive.  "Lapsed" does imply a certain passiveness, versus an active decision to stop playing.To the majority of people who are not currently active role-players and who haven't done much serious gaming in the past 15-20 years, it's basically the same game.  All of these changes in flavor and world assumptions that 4e has brought on are most likely to not even register as having changed and if they are noticed as having changed, they would quite possibly be seen as more appealing.  Personally, I find that 4e captures much of the flavor and spirit of BECMI D&D, even though it does drop a lot of the traditional AD&D flavor.I find that many of the most devoted fans of a role-playing game, video game, movie, band, TV show, action figures, etc sometimes can't see the forest for the trees, fixating on specific details that they find bothersome while virtually nobody else outside that small, devoted community can even tell the difference.  To someone who hasn't played D&D in 20 years and who hasn't followed the development of the game during that time, 4e will likely not seem like as great a departure as it does for us.</blockquote>

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