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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4287608" data-attributes="member: 2067">An RPG does, by the magic of DM authority (tinkering). The DM can say "gnomes are really nearly immortal beings; they use the elf table for determining age," and by that say something about his world and his gnomes that is unique to his game. Or to give an example 4e can't do so well, a DM could say "You can worship any god you want, but you can select amongst the domains of only the Evil gods." This, right in the rules, introduces a mystery into the campaign setting: only the powers of evil, though we can still worship good? Is good a lie? Are the evil deities really behind every good church? It says something about this setting and about this DMs game that is unique, and that he can't as easily do in 4e because 4e doesn't have the channel divinity feats for evil gods.It goes a little something like this. There are three basic ways that a tinkering DM can shape his campaign: Adding rules, adjusting rules, and banning rules (in this, rules and options are largely synonymous). #1: Making new rules is hard (for, I'd assume, most people).#2: Adjusting rules is fun (for those who like to tinker, at least)#3: Banning a rule is easy (for, I assume, most people). 4e, in providing less options and less "rules points" that you can adjust or ban, thus puts the tinkering weight on #1, which is the hardest to do. 4e makes certain elements of #1 easier to do than 3e did (monster design, for instance), but that doesn't fix the basic underlying fact that making new rules is harder than adjusting or nixing existing rules.3e, in providing more rules points, and more options, allowed the tinkering weight to go to #3 most often ("I'm not using the weather rules or the random encounter rules or..."). 4e, in an effort to streamline and simplify, got rid of a lot of the rules that people most frequently banned. This means that tinkering with the campaign goes down, because ignoring a rule is easier than adding a rule, so most people won't go through the effort of adding a rule that they might need -- they'll just adjust their campaign to reflect the existing rules. If someone has need of the weather rules, they probably won't add them themselves, they'll just adjust their own games so that they don't need them.  In other words, banning dragonborn from a game that has them is always going to be more popular than adding dragonborn to a game that does not. It's easy to tinker with dragonborn if they exist in the first place. Not that simply adding more rules is going to make it easier to tinker, because if the rules are interlocked and interconnected, or if they are wildly disparate subsystems where +1 means something very different in each, they will be harder to tinker with. But fewer rules doesn't make it easier to tinker, either, because creating rules is harder than messing with what's already there.It's not about the trope, really. 3e told you how to play a Good Tiefling Warlock, too (or a good tielfing wizard who summoned demons, if we're sticking with core-only). A major issue for many is that 4e stopped telling you how to play a CN half-orc druid, because, apparently, those weren't as popular, even though it could have told you how to do that while still telling you how to play a good tiefling warlock.It's not like they had to choose between them. They just elected to provide rules for the most popular (or projected-to-be-most-popular) things, while 3e elected to provide rules as a foundation for even blatantly unpopular things (like randomly generating weather), just in case someone needed it or wanted to use it or mess with it.At this point, I'm not interested in its success, just its attempt. That's enough to say that 3e more wanted you to tinker, while 4e more wants you to play.That's not, of course, necessarily a bad thing. But it does alienate some of the tinkerers, just as a need to tinker is going to alienate some of the...well...players. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> 4e recognizes that there's probably more players than tinkerers, but that doesn't mean that 3e fans who loved the tinkering are wrong to feel abandoned and affronted, and they have every right to rant about how 4e took away their toolkit. I mean, a lot of people screamed about how 3e had monks in the core, and they were ultimately vindicated, too. <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=";)" /> 4e doesn't do it as well. It doesn't really try to. It nods in that direction, but 3e WANTED that direction......and now for something completely different....I'm mocking an opinion that has no place in this conversation. "3e was bad, 4e is good" has no place in this conversation. In fact, it actively degenerates the conversation into pointless edition wars. I'm mocking it because you should stop saying that in this conversation, hopefully demonstrating the absurdity and uselessness of it. I do this because I care. <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=";)" />The fact that you think this is a personal attack or attributing motives is...well...at best, a misunderstanding of what those things really are.I absolutely do, and I think I've made that more than clear. I am not about to assume that a word that basically means "It's easy to pick up and doesn't require an obsessive interest" is somehow derogatory. Rather, I think you need to abandon the notion that "casual" is somehow inherently demeaning. It isn't.That sort of elitist snobbery is absolutely foreign to me and my gaming experience. "Hardcore" is not some sort of sacred land that every player should aspire to.Have you read my posts addressing this? Because they're right there.</blockquote>

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