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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lord Zardoz" data-source="post: 4013414" data-attributes="member: 704">More like Idiot ProofingI think you are slightly off the mark here.Lets assume that one of the priorities for 4th edition is to make the game more accessible for people who have never played before, and who do not have a friend on hand to teach them how to play it.  This may not be the way that the game usually gets new players.  As far as I now, outside of the 1st generation of players, most people get into the game via a friend who already knows how to play.  This is how I got into the game with 2nd edition.Now, the hardest thing to do when learning how to play 'cold' is to be an effective DM.  It is too easy to screw up combat.  You can eyeball how difficult something may be to kill.  For Ogres / Giants, this is easy.  For creatures that inflict effects like Stun or Daze, this is harder.  Running an adventure can also get difficult.  Another problem you can run into is figuring out when to give out magic items.  If you start handing out +2 swords and the like around level 3, you are very quickly going to find out that your players are killing things way too easily.The way to avoid most of these problems is to provide clear guidelines on what kind of treasure a player ought to have at any given level, and also to let the newbie DM know which monsters are generally the right power to throw against your PC's at any given level.Now, I suppose that the arbitrary level limit on ring usage is a fair target for criticism.  It is a purely mechanical contrivance, and they could just as easily tried to have a variety of rings that scaled with level.  I think the reason they used the approach that they did had more to do with Rings being the only magical item that you could conceivably use 2 of at a time, (ignoring dual-weilded weapons).  Having a ring of Resist Energy might be balanced at level X, as might having a Ring of Fast Healing.  But is a character having both balanced?  Not for me to say.But Roles, the idea of Quest Cards for adventure management, and level / tier based adventure design all seem to be aimed at helping new DM's get started.  In any event, I do not see how any of the things you have described actually reduce the influence of the DM over the game in any meaningful way.  The only thing that does come close is the magic item restrictions.  Even then, that would only have an impact on the ability of players to use plot critical magic items.  I am not really sure there are many situations where this would come into play, however.END COMMUNICATION</blockquote>

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