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Message: <blockquote data-quote="S'mon" data-source="post: 6075787" data-attributes="member: 463">I definitely think 4e D&D is a "Does One Thing Really Well" game - as I think it was Bill Slavicsek said about 1st edition (1984) Paranoia in his design notes. Slavicsek contrasted Paranoia with AD&D as the example of a broader game that could be adapted to do lots of different things, only not so well (in his opinion). I'm with Slavicsek, so I think I disagree with Neonchameleon when he called pre-3e D&D narrow. I find pre-3e D&D's kludgy-but robust 'AK47 rifle' design really easy to mess with and get what I want. 3e D&D is more like an M16 or SA80/L85 rifle - precisely designed, tends to fall apart if messed with (certainly our SA80s did when I was in the Territorial Army!) <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /> - but you can turn it into something else (a CAR15, another d20 game) if you know what you're doing. 4e is more like a Barratt .50 sniper rifle - it does one thing really really well; it does not take much user skill to do it, but it is not designed to do anything else.I think the 4e designers either did not realise they were creating a specialised game, or did not understand the implications. And so it was easy to take from the 4e marketing and design a bad message: "Your old play style sucks! Play this way!"4e is not a broad-based game. It is closer to those games like Call of Cthulu or Feng Shui or Leverage or 1e Paranoia which are well designed towards a specific play experience. I enjoy that experience, but I see it as one game in my repertoire, alongside others I can use for different experiences. For more traditional D&D play I go to other games - recently I've GM'd 1e AD&D, GM'd Pathfinder Beginner Box, played and GM'd Labyrinth Lord. Those all do things that 4e does not do well. Incidentally, it very much seems that 5e intends to be back in that same tradition of kludgy, broad-based, 'do what you want with our D&D' games that 4e departed from. Which is fine, but I already have lots of games like that which I use and enjoy, so I'm not sure why I'd want yet another.</blockquote>

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