4E made me miss 1E. Seriously[i/] miss it. While I dearly love 3E and the degree of character customization it allows, one thing that I have learned to truly despise is the idea of Game Balance.
Game Balance NOW says that every character must be of equal power at every level or the game is broken and bad. This is a concept that began with 3E. Back in 1E (and 2E) some classes were just inherently more powerful than other classes because, simply, []that's the way it is in the fantasy novels and myths and legends that D&D comes from.
Why in the world should Fighters be just as powerful as Wizards? Making it that way simply for the metagame reason of "balance" is, as I've come to see it in the past year or so, as ugly a cludge as I've ever seen. Does this not fly in the face of the genre itself, that a sword swinging warrior face down any menace that a mighty archmage can do?
What has become of the moment in the story where "Swords are no more use here;" the point when it becomes obvious that it's down to the sorcerer calling on his deepest magical reserves to do battle with the noisome eldritch obscenity which mere mortals can do naught but quake in fear of?
I MISS those days. I MISS that simulation and recreation of the fantasy novels and legends I love to read. I MISS keeping track of how many gold pieces of encumbrance I was carrying, and distinguishing between weather I was wearing High Hard Boots or Low Hard Boots.
Something that I ALSO miss from 1E is that you DID NOT play a class expecting to be HANDED a "fair share" of the limelight on a platter, but you played a class because you wanted to play that particular class and if you got a moment in the limelight is was because you earned it, not because every class was tailored to be just as powerful as every other class at every level. Magic-Users were more powerful than Fighters because that's how it is; this is the way magic and the supernatural has been portrayed in fantasy literature, myth, and legend for hundreds and thousands of years.
The game balance back then came in the form of a (logically) slower progression of the more powerful classes, because they used the novel concept that learning to do things which were more powerful were also harder to learn! Learning to bend the fabric of realty with words and gestures was harder to do than learning to skillfully wield a sword!
This uneven progression speed also meant that classes that were inherently weaker would also progress faster and actually be higher level, making the characters of those classes paradoxically weaker, and yet at the same time stronger, then characters of the more powerful classes.
And looking back on it now it was wonderful. Game balance then meant that the rules were correctly modeling the source material of the genre, NOT that all of the classes were equally powerful at every level to ensure that everyone got an equal share of cool things to do every single game session. Because we realized that the coolness of your character came NOT from the rules, but from it's personality. We accepted that the Wizard would be more powerful than the Warrior simply because magic is POWERFUL! And if you wanted to play a powerful character, you chose to play a powerful class, you didn't choose to play a Fighter and then complain that he was weaker than the Magic-User.
You played a Fighter because you wanted to play a Fighter, dammit[/] and to the Hells with how powerful he was going to be in relation to the Paladin or the Monk; you made the character cool by giving him an interesting personality or backstory, and if you wanted him to be cool and get the limelight than you had to actually BE CLEVER and DO something cool, rather than hitting your automatically refreshing "Cool Maneuver" button once per encounter.
After playing 4E for a while I am realizing that I really do not like it very much at all. I miss 3E, and would like to stick with that, but my DM has declared that 3E is now too cumbersome to ever run (or even play) again and he can no longer even fathom why he ever liked it at all. And this has made me rather upset, because I see myself in the not too distant future rapidly losing interest in playing D&D AT ALL if it has to be 4E. But my ONE saving light is that my DM has ALSO said that he has been missing 1E and really wanting to play t, and that we WILL be playing a 1E campaign some time in the near future. Hopefully one that will run into the high teens at the least, as our previous 1E campaign took our characters from 1st to between 25th and 28th levels, over the course of 5 years or so.
And I will be greatly looking forward to having a party composed of characters of classes of varying power and level, and having to rely on teamwork, ingenuity, interesting character personalities and good role playing rather than blatant and boring "Cool Moment" buttons to be pressed one a fight or once a day.
And I have an absolutely RAD Ranger with an 18/98 strength who's double specialized with the bastard sword and has a suit of field plate and is just waiting to learn his first Magic-User and Druid spells, just raring to go!! (Remember how field and full plate armor worked in Unearthed Arcana? Man that was just SO cool!)
But as for 4E, I'm afraid I'll merely be tolerating it between real games, where characters are defined by their cool personalities and not by their cool abilities, and a Fighter's attack with his sword is in No WAY equal to even a weak Wizard's spell.
And thus ends my little rant. I'm going to go design the coat of arms for my Keoish Ranger now.
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