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Message: <blockquote data-quote="soviet" data-source="post: 9225021" data-attributes="member: 6925338">Good post.I think the dividing line is 3e. Some people see/saw 3e as a fairly natural evolution of 2e combined with more modern design tecnhiques. So fundamentally they played 3e through a 2e lens and got a similar sort of experience. We know this is how some of the 3e playtesting went, and it's why clerics are so overpowered - because no-one really wanted to play them and when they did they ran them like they would have in 2e. I think other people saw 3e for how it was written. There's a very strong flavour of gamist optimisation in the feat selections and multiclassing and so on, particularly if you are building characters from scratch rather than converting existing ones from 2e or otherwise choosing things for fluff reasons. Combat is also very tactical and has defined rules for most things you could try to accomplish. It's designed as a game, which is no surprise given the company that made it. I think with 4e the designers looked at the second camp of 3e players and thought 'Oh, that's what you want is it? Well, here's an edition that fixes the main problems with 3e and is designed specifically to make that tactical, gamey, challenge-based play even more fun.' Obviously, they weren't quite right about how big the second camp was, or at least, they were too naked in their presentation of that experience to allow the people in the first camp to come along for the ride. If you were in the first camp and you sort of played 3e as though it was 2e (or you skipped 3e altogether) then I can totally see how 4e was a shocking divergence. If you were (like me) a bit more in the second camp and experienced 3e on its own terms, the shock about how different 4e was seems a bit misplaced.</blockquote>

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