hong said:
to be substantive information. Because, after all, there is more to D&D and the campaign than combat and killing monsters.
I don't.
The passages you quoted do not require tiers; they could easily be rephrased as "General guidelines for campaign structure". Change "at paragon tier" to "around eleventh level" and you're done. The only bits of substance described the Cool New Combat Powers you'd get.
I really wonder, sometimes, at the 4e supporters, who seem shocked, amazed, and overwhelmed by the fact 4e lets them keep doing exactly what gamers have been doing since, oh, 1973. Here's some revolutionary features of 4e:
You can MAKE STUFF UP! Wow. I guess I was dreaming yesterday when, burned out after a long week, I went to DM my regular 3x game and just improvised my ass off, using PCGen to make up one major bad guy (a gnoll bandit king) in the car (asked my wife to drive, used my laptop), then making his followers up in the minutes before the fight by looking at gnolls and deciding they'd have roughly 2 more warrior levels, so +2 BAB, and lessee weapon focus for a +1 and kick the base saves up by 1, that ought to be good enough for a slaughter. (During some player-on-player interaction, I did have a minute to get them statted in PCGen, too, so the final figures were accurate).
The game CHANGES WHEN YOU LEVEL! Wow, that's different, too, because it's not like brown box D&D had rules for establishing kingdoms and collecting taxes or anything...
You can just USE MONSTERS OUT OF THE BOOK! Yeah, because my two+ feet of monster manuals don't have any functional stat blocks in them as it stands...
Sorry to delve into bitter here, but if the best 4e supporters can come up with is the moral equivalent of "And the new 2008 Ford model family cars will have FOUR wheels and BRAKES!", I find it hard to share in the enthusiasm.
Back on the main topic, I *do* like the idea of ritual magic. I hope it's cool, because it certainly CAN be if done right. I don't like that it seems to be used as a cheap way to balance combat/noncombat strength and to limit possibly creative uses of "utility" spells in combat. I know 4e had a three year development cycle, but so much of it seems, from an outsiders perspective, to be rushed, as if a lot of dev time was spent on Really Neat Ideas that ultimately failed in playtest and substitutes needed to be found, quickly.
