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Message: <blockquote data-quote="knasser" data-source="post: 4685999" data-attributes="member: 65151">I voted negative initially and grew to like it, but that's not quite accurate.What happened was that I got interested in D&D as all the previews were coming out because the idea of running a heroic fantasy game appealed to me (I'm probably unique in this thread in not having come from a previous edition). However, as more details emerged I grew frustrated because there were many things about 4e that looked good, but the ever more-obvious fixation on combat got worse and worse. So my initial feelings were wanting it to be good, but feeling negative. The feeling only really started to change for the better when books like Draconomicon and Manual of the Planes began to appear. These are very good books and they did much to offset my opinion that 4e was all about combat. The fluff is rich.However, I still have reservations. I've yet to make up my mind on skill challenges, but the way 4e limits character concepts is a real frustration to me. About half an hour ago, I created a pre-gen character - a sixteen year old tiefling warlock girl. I wanted her to have an Infernal Pact because it fit her backstory perfectly. But the trouble is, her role-playing stats are a slim, slightly fragile girl with great charm and charisma. And Infernal Pacts are fixated on Constitution. The rules keep insisting that she should be a Feylock. There are a lot of niggles like that. It's not as if I'm trying to create a physically weak fighter or some conceptually unsound. It's just an arbitrary decision for the much adored "balance" that Infernal works on health and Fey works on Charisma. You can't separate out abilities either. For example, it's impossible to have a frail but magically powerful mage because of the way level bonuses work. Any wizard who can wield great magics can, de facto, also swim raging rivers and scale cliffs like a mountain goat. 4e can handle Gandalf, but Raistlin is right out.So my opinion has gone from greatly frustrated to kind of frustrated. I've come to consider 4e to be a great tactical game, but rather poor in terms of role-playing.I also made the mistake of hanging out on the WotC boards during the initial release where any comment about 4e's shortcomings would instantly bring a great vengeance from hordes of people chanting: "You don't need rules to roleplay." <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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