NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 9224483" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I had an interesting revelation (and to make it clear, this is a personal one) when I was thinking of why I ended up not really liking 4e even though in some ways it was aimed at me (I like a lot of engagement with mechanical teeth that isn't just dependent on the GM providing it).  The interesting thing is its the opposite of some people's complaints, which is why I looked at them back in the day and kind of rolled my eyes.It felt all too much D&D.I've mentioned before that I was away from D&D all through the AD&D period pretty much, and a big part of the reasons is it felt overly abstract and disconnected from what was going on, and where all kinds of things were special cased to death.  My go-tos were things like RuneQuest that, though they were missing some things I wanted (BRP has never been particularly good at handling character defining elements that weren't attributes and skills) things pretty well mapped to what the character could do in a discernible way, and that for the most part did general systems with specific applications to minimize special casing.  I wondered off later into things like the Hero System that weren't always quite as special-case avoidant, but still minimized it and provided extra tools to define a character in the form of Talents and the like.I'd come back for a bit in the 3e days, because it had moved more toward that character definition (in the forms of multiclassing, prestige classes and feats) and though it still was too special case intensive (every spell was still a one off, and feats weren't built to a common metric), the system had tried to provide an underlying structure everything ran to.  Unfortunately, it also turned out to become virtually impossible to run at higher levels because the still present special-casing expanded to an unmanageable degree.So 4e comes along, and not only does the special casing expand like crazy (every class power is a special case, and they're everywhere), the parts that aren't using that have retreated from being particularly representational of anything concrete.To my perspective, it was the most D&D thing ever, in about half the way things had put me off from D&D, and the part that served my other issue (the difficulty in representing anything not pretty simple in OD&D) had largely done so in ways that made that worse.  It had even solved the GMing problem in 3e by making the opposition far more abstract than they had been in 3e (which, to make it clear, was a virtual necessity with all the special-case moving parts but was not, in and of itself, a virtue to me).Just a side note, since the position I was coming from was not going to be relevant to most people approaching 4e; they weren't going to object because it was too much D&D.</blockquote>

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