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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ydars" data-source="post: 4617915" data-attributes="member: 62992">A couple of points occur to me after reading this thread. The first is the question "Why the need for a new edition?" I do accept that 3.5 has a number of serious mechanical problems but I would like to point out that the CORE 3.5 is almost as stable as CORE 4E (see my comments below); it was the later supplements/splatbooks that, for example, greatly enhanced the powers of spellcasters versus martial classes. This and the number of extra feats and spells, whilst making for a very interesting game, made for some serious issues of game balance. So in a real sense, WoTC (and some 3PPs) created the monster that 3.5E became, so they can hardly now call this out as the reason for a new edition. From WoTCs point of view, there was obviously a financial incentive to create a new edition because, presumably, of falling sales. I don't accept that the imperative for 4E came from cruising messageboards and finding many complaints about 3.5Es mechanical problems. I think it came from falling sales of splat-books as the market became saturated. Having decided on a new edition, the stated design goals were to make 4E; 1) attractive to gamers who had not played D&D before 2) easy to learn to play and DM. 3) mechanically much more stable and mathematically more sound than 3.5 4) easier to write/create new material for. I think 4E succeeds on 1) because I do believe newcomers and those who left D&D for other games have been lured back, though I am not sure this has yet happened in the numbers WoTC wanted/expected. 4E succeeds less well on 2) for me, because now EVERY class has the same problems as the wizard used to have of complicated resource management etc. Is this anywhere near as bad as for high level 3.5 characters; not remotely! But it is FAR worse for a newbie player playing any 4E first level character than for a newbie player playing a 3.5E first level fighter. There is alot more to contend with with the powers and with complicated synergies resulting from movement and PC co-operation. The characters are now FAR easier to roll up and there is less chance of a completely sub-optimal choice so that is a strong point in 4E's favour. Having said this, if power creep becomes the same problem as it was in 3.5E (and we are already seeing evidence of this e.g. the Druid v Wizard) then the risk is, that 4E will end up as bad as 3,5E. As for DMing, part of the job (monster creation) has been made enormously easier, but actually running the game looks to have some new and annoying challenges e.g. bridging the gulf between the rules and the roleplaying aspect of the game because of the feeling that combat and skill challenges are sub-games within the main game. This results in a serious disconnect for me and I have't completely found a way around it yet. This was certainly a problem for me during as well 3.5E, but in 4E is it a whole order of magnitude worse. So what about 3); is 4E inherently better than 3,5E in terms of stability of the mechanics? Well NOT in the case of the skill challenges, where the maths was WAY off from the beginning. This, for me, left all claims by the design team, of the inherent mathematical sophisitication of 4E, in complete tatters; it was picked up by fans within a few days of the release (by Stalker0 and others). Combat appears to have been made more stable by the simple artifice of increasing the number of rolls that a typical combat relies upon, mainly by increasing monster and PC hitpoints. Mathematically, this greatly reduces the chance that random rolls will result in a variant result because the more times you roll a dice, the closer the result will be to a statistical average i.e. the bell-shaped probability curve. However, this, and the fact that PCs seem to hit only 50% of the time on average, has lead to the accusation of grind in combat. Level progression and class balance have also been sorted out, but with the result that all classes now feel much more similar than they did in 3,5E. This is why I find the claim that "4E is taking us back to class based system" absurd. What 4E does is to make class LESS important because the mechanical differences between classes are essentially irrelevant, all that changes is the fluff. The real triumph of 4E is in the design goal; it is SO much easier to create for than 3,5E ever was or could hope to be.</blockquote>

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