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="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6075862" data-attributes="member: 82106">I disagree, 1e stops working as soon as you don't have a wizard and a cleric in your party, flat out. The system presupposes a very narrow range of structure of game with a highly stereotyped environment and party. Moreover the PCs are quite fragile. The whole thrust of the game is to keep them one tiny footstep or missed die roll from death. IMHO this is a pretty narrow game design. Nor does classic D&D allow for things like characters developing certain talents, evolving or changing their capabilities, developing new interests, etc. Class-based design in the AD&D sense is a very strict straight-jacket, ever fighter is virtually identical, will remain very similar to every other, and will follow a very strict sequence of development. I don't see how that sort of design facilitates any level of flexibility in a game. Again, this is why we never saw TSR leveraging D&D as a basis for other genre of game (maybe there were other reasons, but it seems to me one of them was that by the time you stripped out all the D&D-isms there wasn't much point in retaining what was left).At best you could strip away all the classes, magic system, much of the combat system, etc and be left with some generic core, but at that point what's to really distinguish 1e from 4e? 4e's simpler system of defenses and more open character design tools (feats, PPs, EDs, etc) conceptually provides more ways to build a system for a given genre than 1e's basic mechanics do with their in-built fantasy assumptions. Any considerations of play style and such are practically eliminated at that level of strip-down anyway since you could as easily rebuild either game's chassis in a variety of ways at that point. You'll just have to throw away LESS to do it with 4e, and judging by examples such as a Star Wars reskins and such it is possible to do some pretty thin rebuilds and support rather different genres at least. Honestly, I've never been a huge fan of 'core systems' that try to do everything anyway, so I'm not sure I really CARE a whole lot one way or the other, but still, Classic D&D isn't winning any prizes for flexibility in my book.</blockquote>

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