NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6075078" data-attributes="member: 42582">I find the angst over Expertise a bid weird. I do think they're fairly bad design as feats and work better as an on/off toggle for the whole campaign. But I run my game with no expertise feats, and at 19th level am not experiencing any "to hit" gap crisis. Rather, the players in my game do what I am guessing the designers initially anticipated would be done: use powers, combat advantage, paragon path features and general synergies to make up their chance to hit.I think this makes a certain degree of sense. If the rules are meant to be sim, and you can see a better sim by tweaking them, then you tweak. But if the rules are meant to deliver a certain play experience that will satisfy some non-sim urge, and you tweak them, maybe your tweak will block the production of that experience - a bit hard to know until you try! So you don't try.That said, slowing down the recovery rate for extended rests is an utterly trivial tweak whose impact on the play experience looks completely transparent to me. So I share  [MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]'s frustration that it gets attacked over and over and over. (Contrast healing surges and short rests, which are intimate parts of the game and I think quite hard to tweak without changing the experience in all sorts of somewhat unpredictable ways.)The Alexandrian <a href="http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2" target="_blank">blogged</a> his defence of low-ish level 3E on simulationist grounds in 2007. The <a href="http://grognardia.blogspot.com.au/2008/09/gygaxian-naturalism.html" target="_blank">"Gygaxian Naturalism"</a> blog is from 2008. That suggests that at least some people must have been thinking of D&D in simultioninst terms in the years leading up to those blogs (which are clearly considered opinions developed over some time).That's not to defend D&D as simulationist - I don't find it to be so, and in 2005 was GMing Rolemaster in part because I enjoyed (to a reasonable degree, at least) its genuinely simulationist mechanics. But the idea does seem to be deeply entrenched at least by the mid-to-late part of last decade.I agree that 4e has a strong "supers" feel. I think that the whole open-ended team play dynamic of post-Gygaxian D&D is supers-like in nature. (The Gygaxian stable of characters is a bit different, unless your supers team is The Avengers.)I had a post about this towards the end of last year:</blockquote>

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