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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 4424880" data-attributes="member: 5100">Funny (I say that w/o sarcasm).My preference to 4e isn't that it gave me "permission", but that it makes it easier to deal with only the important bits.  Sure, you can shave some off the stat blocks in 3e, but 4e has less white noise to doing it.Kind of agree.  When I dropped 2e, I said I'd never do another class/level based RPG.  Looking at 4e, I'm not entirely sold (though I do see enough interesting to make me want to give it a good try).  But, it actually got me to consider breaking out my 1e books again.I'd been disaffected with 3e for quite some time before 4e was even announced, and just trying to wrap up a campaign that was designed to close out my 20+ year old home brew setting.  It's not like the spirit of 4e made the scales fall away from my eyes.My main issue with "Balance" isn't that everyone has something guaranteed to put them in the limelight.  It's that the only balance is in combat.  I've always enjoyed playing non-combat characters (I've even played a pacifist ranger in 2e -- no spells, can't use combat).  In 1e/2e, combat was quick enough that you could stand to be minimally effective in combat without feeling like you wasted your evening.  It was a great feeling to let the meat shields and artillery do their interchangeable functions, but be the only guy who could get out of the traps, over the gaping pit, or whatever.  That's my kind of limelight.  I don't need an equal share of blood on my hands.This is a concern, IMO, with 4e.Oddly enough, one of the things I miss about 1e is that I hate that tipping point.  But, 1e was set up in such a way that, if it suited your group's style, you could keep the martial/stealth characters in the foreground and leave the wizards as advisers, lackeys, or background characters.  Or, things could be as you said.  It all depended on group style.  I never could get that formula to work in 3e.This is an area where it looks like 4e is an improvement.  Even with the emphasis on balance, I'm getting the feeling that group style of "mages rock" vs. "fighters rock" will be more able to be incorporated.That doesn't mean I don't agree with you about balance, though.  At least with the general spirit of the argument.I think it intentionally informed the design of the rules.  Yes, a strong DM and/or appropriately inclined group of players can ignore it.  When I have multiple game systems from which to choose, though, I see no reason to piss into the wind.Every game has some warts.  Every game supports certain play styles better than others.  For the style of play I want, I find 3e frustrating.  It was a hard realization to come to, because I appreciate many of the elements in principle.What kills me is that one of the big things that brought me back to D&D was the 3e idea that monsters were built using (basically) the same rules as PCs.  One of my biggest gripes with 1e/2e was that there were times an NPC could do something just because he was an NPC.  In practice, I've learned that statistically equivalent NPCs and PCs are not practically equivalent.  The 4e abstract rules for building NPCs appeal to me a lot more, right now.  Sure, you can impose an abstraction on 3e, but why build a meta-system when there's a system that's got it built in?</blockquote>

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