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: 5357945" data-attributes="member: 82106">You're melting my brain dude! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The fact that Gold Dragons are now listed as "unaligned" in MM3 and whatever the other thing KM mentioned was, I forget is actually causing people issues? Are we now reduced to such a pitiful level of total utter slavish dependence on printed material that DMs can no longer improvise AT ALL???!!! That they NEED to have paladins that can only have one alignment?What happened to creativity?Honestly, if your game is 'grid-centric' maybe it is time to look at the people at the table and ask if there's something going on here. I mean I ADMIT that SOME parts of my games ARE played on the battle grid, absolutely. Those parts are still pretty free-form and creative. I certainly understand how that part of the game can get lazy and people stop extemporizing much, but if that is the whole focus of your game, then maybe there's a level of creative imagination that has drained out of the game.Honestly I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, and I think Mike certainly is right that 'tone' is a significant part of a game. I'd just like people to understand where some of the people playing 4e are coming from, like myself.I pretty much dropped D&D from the lineup of games I ran back in the 2e days, around the mid 90's. The reason being it was just WAY too buttoned down. There were fun things about it, but besides the system being clunky it was just TOO LIMITED. You made the characters that the game allowed you to make. If your concept didn't fit into the pigeon hole of one of the existing classes you were pretty much SoL. The rules actively prevented you from doing anything outside of what they provided.4e TO ME is a marvelous toolbox. The classes follow similar rules and are really very modular. They were designed carefully (for the most part) to allow for a LOT of jiggering within the system. A Ranger could be a twin rapier wielding swashbuckler. A fighter could be a sword-n-board con based knight, or a dex based rapier wielding fencer, or a highly intuitive glaive wielder. I think the mechanics of the E-classes are fairly clever and I have nothing against them, but when I look at the Sentinel and the Cavalier I see classes that are VERY set-piece. They are boxed right into a single concept like the old AD&D classes were. It really isn't quite that severe but THERE IS a good bit that is lost. Imagine if Essentials WAS 4e. You could play a 2-handed wielding Slayer or a sword and board Knight. You can't really do much else, except either homebrew or wait around for a class that matches what you want, or just not play what you want to play.It may be a small nit in the overall scheme of things, and 4e Essentials is still a lot more flexible than AD&D was, but not as flexible as classic 4e. Something IS lost when you delete rituals and button down all the classes.</blockquote>

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