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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5357987" data-attributes="member: 82106">What I'm trying to say is there is an opposite perspective here. Playing AD&D was like being in a straightjacket to us. You're an M.U. and you want to swing a sword, sorry, rule 27 says you CANNOT do that. You're a fighter and you want to climb? Sorry, there simply is no rule for that, you aren't a thief, you don't HAVE that class feature. Anything that wasn't considered as doable by the people that designed the classes was just not possible. Sometimes you could cover it with ability checks or secondary skills/NWPs. A LOT of the time you simply couldn't. MANY character concepts were just impossible to realize in any sensible fashion in AD&D as well. You can be an elf that uses a sword and casts spells, but that's it, you can't be human, you can't just learn one sword fighting technique, you have to stop advancing at level 9 or 12, etc. It was a KLUNKY system. Classes were narrow and no real thought was given to being able to stretch them much beyond what they were set up to do. A ranger was NOTHING but a guy that runs around in the forest, etc. Lots of concepts simply fell between the cracks and weren't feasible.Customizing your character? Forget it. There was really no such thing. Later in 2e that changed, but all that really showed was how brittle the system really was. The kits and options and whatnot simply imploded the system as soon as they were added.The options and choices available in 4e is very liberating to me. NOW I can free things up. The players, and the DM, can create characters and stories that really just didn't work well at all in the old days. It isn't total freedom, but it is a LOT of flexibility that didn't exist way back when. As for the whole "nobody bothers to do anything but use powers anymore" thing. I'm not really sure that is the fault of the presentation of POWERS. I think it has more to do with the presentation of encounters and how 4e lays out developing and adventure. It isn't really all that fluid a technique. What is presented to the players can easily become routine and buttoned down if you just follow the formula. I think the more productive approach than trying to go back and chop away at player options is to really look at the organization of the game structure that surrounds what the player characters DO. Encounter design guidelines are not a bad thing, but the game just sort of stops there. It gives you a palette to use, but only to paint one kind of picture with. You CAN do a lot more with it, but the rules have made it seem like whatever you do has to fit into an encounter framework.I've seen some discussions of this on a couple boards, but it seems like it has taken a while for the 4e community to start to really understand the tools and their strengths and weaknesses. Basically it seems to me like Essentials is a great answer to the wrong question.</blockquote>

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