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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5989155" data-attributes="member: 42582">3E doesn't really feel like D&D to me - it mixes "gritty" aspects of PC build (skill points) and action resolution (skill checks, disarm, trip, grapple) with the traditional gonzo elements of D&D (hp, spells, monsters etc). It's like someone looked at the unarmed combat rules in Gygax's DMG and thought they were a central part of the game rather than an optional periphary.What does that tell you about 3E? Not much. It might tell you something about me - I'm a long-time Rolemaster player and GM, and have minimum standards for a "realistic" skill and manoeuvre system.I guess my point is that while I don't doubt the authenticity of your experiences, I don't think they are especially or uniquely representative of the "D&D player" experience.Others have responded to your list in depth. I'll pick up on just fourthings:The change in fighter multiple attacks - making them just a part of a uniform attack progression - was a pretty big change from AD&D to 3E in my view.And D&D didn't always have nine alignments - these were an early innovation, not uncontroversial, and the subject of much criticism from early on. Whereas early D&D is framed in terms of a cosmological conflict between Law and Chaos, later D&D presents the nine alignments as a universal scheme for classifying moral personalities. This latter idea is absurd, whereas Law vs Chaos can be a great cosmological theme (and 4e does a lot with it).The Great Wheel cosmology is tied to 9 alignments. And even AD&D didn't use it uniformally. Oriental Adventures - my favourite AD&D book - used the Celestial Bureaucracy. Oriental Adventures also presented classes all of whom (except the barbarian, I think) got ki powers.As I replied to you a week or so ago on another thread on this forum, 4e delivers, for me, the game that D&D has promised since the Foreword to Moldvay Basic, and that OA hitherto had got closest to. A game of heroic fantasy steeped in a world rich in thematically evocative fantasy tropes.I guess some people think that same-y classes, with a uniform multiple attack progression, don't feel the same as a class-specific feature in AD&D!This post is an attempt, though I've followed Emerikol's lead in framing it somewhat autobiographically.</blockquote>

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