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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Imaro" data-source="post: 5359534" data-attributes="member: 48965">Yeah, I didn't find 4e's original system for improvisation and stunting (pg. 42 in the DMG) all that great. Why, well because it really only deals with DC's and damage... not condition. Also it does an, IMO, piss poor job of explaining exactly how levels/difficulty/gameworld interact... thus you had some peopel believeing everything should scale with the adventurer's. Finally it gave no way to mesure the power of effects... and since everything is designed as an exception... if there was a way to infer the power level of conditions in relationship to each other and character level... it wasn't at all transparent. In 3.x I felt like I had enough examples in the exsisting mechanics and that they were attached to the gameworld in a way that made it easy to extrapolate most improvised things from a DM and PC side. I didn't feel this way with 4e. I knew what a level 3 hard DC was... but what tthe heck did that mean in a gameworld sense? Also, how do you decide the power of conditions in 4e when players try to stunt to inflict them.   It sounds like you're trying to tell us and WotC to "rethink", and honestly there does seem to be a little "essentials sucks" in there as well. Personally to me the point of a "Game"is to create a fun time for those who participate in it. Whether it's rules are polished and superb and flawless matters very little unless the game is fun. I think Chess is a better designed game than checkers... yet the number of people who play checkers for fun far outstrips those who play chess for fun. I feel like Essentials is bringing some fun back to what I felt was a very well-balanced, nicely-designed but also uninspiring, sterile and text-book like game (at least until hybridizing and psionics were introduced to the game). I don't want you to agree with me... but the fact of the matter is you've already got a ton of toys to play with... so, why does essentials bother you?   Yep, and along with some old school sensibilities... essentials is bringing this stuff back... to a point. We've got stuff like the rare magic items now, and random treasure parcels... things to make the game (outside of combat powers) mysterious and strange to the PC's again.  I would say their content was good... mechanically, as far as it inspiring me, getting me excited to run 4e or leaving me with ideas to implement within it... I would say alot (though definitely not all) of the 4e stuff kind of fell flat... and IMO, for an rpg, that's a no-no. As far as the devs and what they may have not thought of... I disagree with that as well. You see the problem was that alot of this was called out as unfun, or stuff that needed to be fixed during the 4e marketing campaign... so really there was alot of push against stuff like this being "better for your game". even Dragon and Dungeon which had traditionally been theplace to get your fix for the weird, wacky and broken stuff was assimilated into 4e's philosophy.</blockquote>

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