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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4696946" data-attributes="member: 80487">Every reason to prefer 4E is also (to someone else) a reason to prefer 3E or 1E. Many of those are also often reasons not to buy material designed with one of the other games in mind.Don't put too much weight on this analogy, but (especially as the games have become more complex and systematic) the situation is akin to the old days of competing computer lines with different hardware and different operating systems (often at least partly in ROM). A Super Adventure Game IV binary disk for the Amiga was not much use if one had a MacIntosh, Atari, Commodore or Apple II machine. Even a Basic program might take quite a bit of modification to work with a different interpreter.Nowadays, there are many open-source programs that can work fine when compiled on a wide variety of platforms.The differences among the LBBs, Holmes Basic, B/X, BECM, 1st ed. AD&D, and 2nd ed. AD&D may warrant strong preferences. However, they are not such mutually incompatible species as WotC's games. Indeed, hybridization of material from different editions is common. One can without great difficulty mix in Empire of the Petal Throne, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World, and/or The Arduin Grimoire (to name but a few). Even grafting on bits from, e.g., RuneQuest (which is a "different system" when taken as a whole) is quite feasible."Nothing has changed in how I play my games at all in terms of the stories that I can and do tell" need reflect no more than a decoupling of the story-telling from the game-play. If "nothing has changed" in 4E, then why make the change? Well, perhaps the game-play itself matters to some.Irrelevance is not the claim actually being made for 4E; it is bruited as superior.Pushing (pulling, sliding, etc.) pieces around a grid, and spending most of a session doing that, is at least quite different from the pre-3E game. A world in which any wound is mended after 6 hours is different.A great many notable differences have to do with how the game increasingly does not map to medieval combat, sword-and-sorcery literature, or anything else including traditions of D&D.What is a paladin? What distinguishes a cleric or wizard, and how do characters use magic? What does magic do? What is a sound strategy for interacting with a dungeon? How does one deal with a trap, a mystery, a negotiation? What are the capabilities of monster X? What are the economic aspects of magical scrolls and other enchanted items? What is the relationship of high-level characters to the rest of the world? All these things have changed, and more.Changing such things with "house rules" to suit one's campaign was one thing. Radically changing the common, "official," frame of reference is something else.Back-compatibility is now negligible. A different "edition" now means so thoroughly different a set of referents that language learned in one is at best misinterpreted, and increasingly just unintelligible, in another context. When Gygax advised that an "upgrade" to AD&D should mean starting a new campaign from scratch, that was IMO hyperbole. The same advice from the designers of 4E has turned out in my opinion to be spot-on unless I happened to be a masochist. It was a notably less work to retrofit new 3E material to a 1E chassis, but I could see how one might go the other way. The difficulties either way seemed to increase along with "level."The adjustments that 4E demands seem to me to make it no more (and perhaps less) useful than many another game that's not even called "D&D."</blockquote>

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