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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5359313" data-attributes="member: 2067">You think so? Maybe in your experience. But waves of third party products, stuff like True 20 and Spycraft and Mutants and Masterminds, and my own personal experience certainly point to not everyone having this problem.Tripping and breaking things were examples of things that there WERE rules for, even if you didn't have some special class feature or feat (the rules didn't make it very attractive, usually, but they were there). The amount of "underpinning," to me, was liberating, because I felt like I could extrapolate easy from the baseline, generating adventures and action around the fact that there were rules for things. I could make it a climactic encounter to knock some Evil Baron off the peaks of his high roofed manor into the waiting mob below, confident that players would find a way to knock him off and that I would have rules to help adjudicate the stunts they tried to do. I had falling damage, I had trip rules, I had bull rush, I had item damage and disarming. I knew how to quickly figure out what happened if, say, the Barbarian crushed the roof below the Evil Baron with his massive maul (item hp and saves), or the Ranger wanted to try and shoot the coinpurse from his hands (called shots and size-affecting AC). They weren't always great rules (which influenced how often they were used) but they did exist, which gave me information on how to make thrilling combats. 4e's unified stunt system is fine as far as it goes, it covers the bases, but so much of your stunt is bound up in a damage expression and a DC, often making it less attractive than the use of one of your powers, so it doesn't see any more use than the trip rules. It also doesn't give you interesting options. It tells you, "If someone does something outside the box, use this." It doesn't provide much advice in the way of things you can do that are outside the box, that might be unique to your character. This is mostly because 4e has a powers box for...everything. You're not supposed to trip, you're supposed to use a power that knocks someone prone. You're not supposed to knock someone off a roof, you're supposed to fight them util they are at 0 hp. It's a Paradox of Choice thing, too. Given a list, people can choose, but given a single sentence that says "YOU CAN DO ANYTHING," and people do nothing. It made life harder for me, because it assumed I was a certain type of DM, when I was not.People have not-fun with 4e. People have fun with pre-4e. 4e has no monopoly on entertainment, or on people becoming DMs. All this "everything sucked before 4e came along and everyone who doesn't like it is just wrong!" stuff is exhausting. Essentials is good step in a positive direction for a lot of people. If that makes you unhappy because those people shouldn't be welcomed into the game, you should perhaps open your mind to what the game can be, or at least who can play it.</blockquote>

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