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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7665446" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't understand what you are trying to achieve here.You are telling me about how important feel is - but then, when I give rather detailed explanations of why, to me, 4e felt like a realisation of the best essence of D&D, you respond by saying that unlike you (and othesr? I'm still not sure who you are intending to speak for) I don't focus on "feel" and "vibe" but on minutiae of rules and parts rather than wholes. You accept that the numbers that rank degrees of difference are relative to the individual, but you then you seem to imply that my rankings are less valid because the differences I care about are not the same as the differences you care about. (Art, for instance, while something I enjoy in RPG books, has almost no influence on how I approach the game, except that it might suggest a certain element of encounter or scenario design - the three instances of that I can recall off the top of my head are a huge cavern with a statue of a god and multiple entrances at varying heights above the floor, inspired by a picture in an old White Dwarf; a stairway going down the side of a huge underdark cavern, inspired by a picture in the 4e book Into the Unknown; and an attack by beholders in an underground cavern with a chasm in the middle of it, inspired by a 3E picture that might have been the cover for Dungeonscape.)My view of D&D is ultimately fiction-first. D&D is a type of story, structure+content. At it's heart is party play - a group of adventurers who, while perhaps having different ultimate goals or desires, are somehow bound together by some trajectory of fate. Those adventurers live in a world that throws challenges at them, and those challenges aren't merely petty or human challenges (of the sort that some Runequest or Traveller play involves, for instance) - they are world-historical or cosmological challenges, or at least proxies for them (that's why we have alignments, outer planes, books about gods, etc, or for less cosmological settings like Greyhawk we have epic histories that determine the current shape of the world).As the adventurers take on these challenges, and (typically, or at least from time-to-time) best them, they grow. They grow in capability - the fighters become more puissant, the wizards more eldritch. They grow, simultaneously, in social, historical and/or cosmological stature - they become lords, archmages, high priests. They commune directly with higher powers, doing their bidding or opposing them directly. In a cosmological game, they become agents or enemies of the gods. In a world-historical game, they transform the world, bringing history to a new end or perhaps to its ultimate crisis point.These adventures are ultimately about externalised expressions of personality. The adventurers may have inner lives, and these may come out in play from time-to-time, but D&D (at least before the Inspriation mechanic) does not emphasise this.I wouldn't expect everyone, perhaps anyone else, to see D&D this way. For me, it is what D&D derives from Tolkien and REH, which - as I play the game - are the two biggest influences on my approach that also appear in Appendix N. (The other influences are the X-Men and martial arts cinema - these also emphasis world-historical or cosmological conflict, with externalised rather than internalised moments of confrontation.) It is also what Moldvay Basic promised me in its Foreword, in which the hero slays the dragon tyrant and frees the land, using a sword bestowed upon him by a mysterious cleric.Consistent with this view, I have always used D&D as a source of story material more than mechanical material: in  my past 25 years of GMing I have run mostly two systems (Rolemaster and 3E) but have used D&D material ranging from 1st and 2nd ed AD&D Greyhawk books, to Oriental Adventures material that straddles both editions, to 3E and d20 modules, some B/X stuff, and a handful of 4e modules. The mechanics in which a module presents itself is secondary to me: I am pretty good at systems and can handle whatever conversion needs to be done without much trouble. When I say that I am "using a module" or "using a setting book" I am talking about story elements: maps, histories, characters, cosmologies, conflicts etc.In 4e, it happened that the company that publishes all this story material also happened to publish a rules system that was not only suitable for using that story material in an effective way, but was perhaps better suited than nearly any other system out there, given what I was wanting to do with it. It realised what, for me, had in the past been an unfulfilled promise. And it showed me, at least, how this could be done not by scrapping D&D's mechanics and starting over, but by distilling out the essence of what had always been there, plus some stuff that had been added over the years, and then generalising it and making it into a well-tuned, reliable system. Hence I bought what they were selling.It's obvious that not everyone experienced 4e the same way that I did. I was posting on these boards in the months before 4e came out. It was obvious at that point - just to give one example - that 4e was going to realise and extend the potential inherent in Gygax's metagame systems (hit points, saving throws), and that some existing 3E players weren't going to like those sorts of systems. Hence, they didn't buy what WotC was, for a relatively brief period, selling.When you ask "if I can see" that some people felt that 4e broke with the D&D tradition, what are you asking? I assume you don't think that I'm ignorant of their existence, given that some of them are posting in this very thread and I've had exchanges with several of them. And given that I've already reposted twice in this thread a post of mine from 4 years ago, from a thread that you started, stating that 4e seems to have turned out to be less popular than WotC had (presumably) hoped.So I can only assume that you are asking whether or not I can see that they are (from their point of view) right?As I said upthread, particularly following the moderator caution, that's not a path I'm very keen to go down. I've spent the past 6 years being repeatedly annoyed by people telling me that I hate D&D, that I don't know what a roleplaying game is, that my games must, a priori, be shallow skirmish games because they're being run in 4e, etc. A sensitive critic can do a brilliant job of interpreting a person's experience back to him or her, even if that interpretation ends up revealing something less than flattering about what the person was doing or feeling. But most of the people who have told me those things have not been sensitive critics, and the job they've done has mostly been less than brilliant.On this sort of forum, I think it's up to those with different views of the tradition to articulate those views and their experiences, and how they fit into a bigger picture of what D&D is about. They don't need me to do it for them.</blockquote>

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