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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9098429" data-attributes="member: 6877472">To explain this, you have to go back to late 3.5, where there was a definite outcry (at least in online forums) about the balance of the game.  Excessive multiclassing, stacking Prestige Classes, and just imbalances between the classes themselves were definitely on WotC's radar.4e was designed in an attempt to reduce class disparity, and make multiclassing far less friendly- class levels no longer existed as building blocks for your character's final form; you couldn't be a Fighter 2/Wizard 5; instead you either had to commit to a hybrid class or spend feats to gain some abilities of a different class.  Balanced rules and character abilities were (at least initially), very important to it's design.  The downside of this was that the game was intended to work the way it was made (for the most part) and deviations would cause problems with that design.As we found out, however, for every person who appreciated this shift in focus, there was at least one person who didn't.  DM's who like the freedom to rule on the fly for how things worked were stymied because the game was written from a perspective of "look, there's nothing imbalanced about letting a player hit an enemy for 2 [W] damage, daze them, and slide them 3 squares each combat".  There's good and bad in this; obviously, if this results in the game mechanics harming the narrative, that's bad.  OTOH, there's a certain breed of game master out there who feels that every action a player makes should be negotiable and subject to alteration or even being denied outright.  The kind of person who tends to single out one kind of character over another; magic users should risk having their magic countered or warped.  Non-casters shouldn't be allowed to fly, teleport, or do anything that the DM decides is "magical".We see that to this day in discussions about what characters should be allowed to do based on class and subclass, in fact!If you have total faith in your game master, having negotiable actions isn't really a big deal.  But there's a lot of players who have had reasonable actions denied by a game master not for balance reasons, but due to their sense of verisimilitude (or worse, their whims).I'm not saying bad game masters are common, but if you've played at a table where the game master will take any opportunity to pin your ears back (as I have, many times), there's merit to this approach, believe me.  But like everything else, taken to an extreme, what could be a positive thing can become negative.The essential conundrum of D&D has always been "how much has this game been designed to suit what I want from it?".  So we've seen the pendulum swing quite a bit over the years, as it's become more or less crunchy.  With more or less options and restrictions for player characters.  Just from this thread, we can see just how the gelatinous cube has changed over the years, from the non-climbing ooze, to the one that could be knocked prone, to the one that couldn't be, and once again losing their climbing ability; just one example of this ever changing paradigm.4e wasn't designed to be modded.  Oh you could create your own monsters, to be sure, but how many people felt comfortable modifying the game itself?  And I think every DM has the soul of a tinkerer.  You want to be able to make fine adjustments to the product, and every table has house rules, of course.  It's been said that no two DM's played the same version of AD&D, for example, and moving from one table to the next could be a nightmare of unlearning and relearning rules.With 4e, you had two different public play systems, hopefully video games if the licensing could be sorted out, and of course, a VTT which would need to have every power and ability coded into it.  Add in a more restrictive OGL (if you can even call it an OGL), and it's easy to see what they were going for- one D&D for all!Even in 5e, which bends over backwards to be "everyone's D&D", we see differences of opinion and people unhappy with it's direction.  Trying to expect everyone to play the same way isn't going to ever be possible.  The needs and wants of different groups of players can vary wildly.And it's also quite possible that, like Snarf, what you desire can change; sometimes maybe you want more order.  Sometimes maybe you want less.  Getting all that from a single game without extensive changes to what the game was designed to do is a hard sell, to say the least.</blockquote>

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