AD&D is not "rules light"

[Ariosto]

LostSoul, that's cool so long as sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!

I would submit, though, that this is "one rule" only from the perspective of a player -- and at that a player less interested in the contents of the Player's Handbook than seems to me usual.



Dyson Logos, 4E is pretty carefully designed around a particular and sometimes subtle balance of numbers (in all the game factors) with character level. The DMG offers a lot of tools to help the DM match those -- for instance, in designing monsters and putting them together into encounters -- to deliver a certain consistency. (Also, WotC has issued errata revising factors in the books.) One could certainly do without that information, but the result might be very foreign to normative expectations of 4E play.

 

[Dyson Logos]

Ariosto: So was 3e, but we are quite successfully playing it without any of the EL and CR quidelines, magic item expectations (magic item lists, standard magic items at all!), and so on. This is foreign to the normative expectations of 3E play, obviously, but the game runs fine without them. I was just wondering if 4e allows play along these lines, or if it is like 1e in that you HAD to own the DMG also just to have the basic rules of the game (ie: the combat system is in the 1e DMG, not the PHB, whereas everything you need to play is available in the 3.x PHB).

 

[Ariosto]

Well, in 4E you've got half of the equation (attack bonuses and defenses for characters) in the PHB. You know that a hit is scored by rolling d20, adding attacker's bonus, and comparing with the target's appropriate defense.

The other half -- factors for monsters by role and level, given in the DMG -- is needed to get the 4E equivalent of the AD&D combat matrices. Armor Class, for instance, is no longer even tenuously a class of armor but is a number tied to role and level. Damage is likewise not a factor of size and weaponry but another statistic that scales by level.

So, while one could just make those up, it would be like making up one's own tables of chances to hit for old D&D. In 4E, the raw numerical differences among character classes are built in; but the differences in proportion (which are really more significant) could get messed up. There's no problem player versus player, but even non-player characters are supposed to be treated differently in 4E.