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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5360466" data-attributes="member: 82106">@KM, sorry, I think you're reading more into some things people have said than what they intended. I don't have any super beef with Essentials for instance. I just see certain things that Essentials seems to be aimed at doing and I think IMHO it is mis-aimed. I think people's points of dissatisfaction, including yours, with 4e aren't the actual problems.You seem to be saying that 4e is too light on rules for improvising. I think that is an impression you've gotten from playing a lot of 3.x personally. 3.x was the 'nanny state' of D&D versions, it tried to tell you exactly what to do at every turn. It also had a lot of complicated fiddly rules for doing specific things. Sure that meant it had a LOT of rules, but quantity =/= quality. 4e says in one page what 3.x took a book to say sometimes. Looking at this whole "there are no guidelines for the power of conditions and such". I don't really agree with that. There are 10's of thousands of powers in 4e. They form an extraordinarily complete compendium of all the possible reasonable effects that you would likely want to be using at different levels. An improvised attack that does a stun (save ends)? Probably not something you'll do in Heroic Tier, there are certainly few powers that do that in Heroic, almost none in fact. It is certainly pretty appropriate in Epic Tier though, and could be appropriate in Paragon Tier as well. Honestly, I simply can't grasp how improvised actions could possibly be simpler or better. I've never seen ANY system that did this as well as 4e does. I guess some people simply MUST have a rule called "Tripping" and it MUST have exact directions for every possible tripping scenario or else they can't run the game? Wow. I don't get how people with that level of inflexibility of rules application can DM at all I guess. It really honestly just blows my mind away.Mostly I just don't see where from my perspective Essentials is actually solving problems. It seems to me like a lot of the advice and support that existed for DMs in the DMG is just not even there now. Improvising is at best even less well explained than before. Other things that DMs had in their toolbox before mostly still exist but are at best heavily deemphasized. My guess would be that players will have LESS incentive to stunt or otherwise improvise than before, it is less clearly spelled out how to do it and the rules for what DCs to use are harder to interpret than ever. The RC seems to sort of hint that maybe most DCs should scale with the PCs level (a mechanically questionable concept at best, you can easily create some hilariously stupid situations this way), and then goes right on to show a whole bunch of fixed DCs for various things. Huh? If that is a better explanation than existed before I'm a fork! As a supplemental set of rules and options Essentials is perfectly fine. As a core game system I just don't see it as an improvement. The classes may have some 'retro appeal' and they are decent classes, but I'd never want to play "Essentials only" and I think Essentials DMs would be well served to have a DMG or both DMGs.</blockquote>

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