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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 6072768">I hear the statement in bold often and I question: can we hold "table norms" against the game?  Is it a design flaw?  Or is it a player(incl. the DM here in "player") flaw?  Personally I've played and run 4e games where there are "wish lists", and I've run older editions with "wish lists" as well, some with that pesky "Ye Olde Magic Item Shoppe" that seems to have a wormhole linked to every possible magic item you could ever want, and some not.  With certain parties, I like "wish lists", because it can give me insight into what a player wants to do.  Perhaps the dwarf wants a special hammer, the ranger a special bow, the halfling a special cloak.  Now just like birthdays and christmas I have the choice of giving them what they want, or not and I think that's the bigger issue.  The 4e DMG encourages DMs to account for what players want, which every DM rightly should do, but it doesn't do a good job of drawing a line between that and giving them what they want.  It's important to account for things people want, but it's important to know how to account for them.  Perhaps a mega-dungeon leads players to a demonic forge whereby touching their hand upon the ancient, evil crystals, the force will create for them one demonically-empowered item....for a price.  There's always a price.  Be it defeating the dragon or willingly taking on demonic taint, perhaps 4e simply needed to encourage DMs to up the ante.  Because an item a player wants as opposed to an item a player gets is going to be a much more significant source of investment for them.  Anyway...I don't think it's impossible for 4e to do both, though probably not on the same night.  I agree that combat was generally a slog, but that's assuming you need actual full-blown combat for each and every one of these things.  No it doesn't.  It's always your choice to include anything in a game.  If Dragonborn showed up in your game that's because you let them show up.  I'm building a new game right now and I just buzzed through the CB list of "playable races" and put a big fat "X" on darn near half of them.  Exactly because I don't like them, I don't want them to "crop up where they don't fit" and I don't want to bother with writing them in thematically.  Heck, I was talking to one of my new players last night as he was making his character, about 5 minutes before I finished my list, and he picked Kenku.  I had to tell the guy "sorry, I don't allow kenku" and that he'd have to pick something else.  You are in control of your game, and if it's not your game, it's really not your place to say what is or isn't appropriate.  If you*not you you, hypothetical you) fail to exercise that control, well...that's not 4e's fault.I agree.  There's a lot of the specifics that I don't like about 4e, nit-picky things that just bug me.  The same applies to most editions though.  However, the math, the framework, the adjudication, the general system I love.Again, statements like these perplex me.  The "traditional core" was there.  4e's PHB1 had the following:HumansDwarvesElvesHalf-ElvesHalflingsTieflingsEladrinDragonborn.Aren't  the first 5 there the "traditional core"?  3.X and earlier included Half-Orcs and  Gnomes in place of Dragonborn, Tieflings, and Eladrin.  The 4e PHB1 also included:FightersClericsWizardsRoguesPaladinsSorcerersWarlocksWarlordsNow,  aren't at least the first 4 of those also "traditional core"?  The  second 2 were pretty common in early supplemental material if not core  themselves in some editions.  Warlocks at least made an appearance at  some point in most edition, and Warlords(at least the way 4e did them)  are really the only new appearance.So I must ask: what  "traditional core" did they leave out?  In the very first book the most  traditional of classes and races were included.  Now, if you're saying  that they're styled too differently to be "traditional", well,  that's an opinion issue.  But from where I look at it, the traditional  core is there.  I mean older editions had Monk, Bard, Ranger and Druid, though these were sometimes sub-classes.  There were some racial classes, but those don't seem to be holding their popularity.  What "traditional core" am I missing?</blockquote>

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