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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9230662" data-attributes="member: 8461">Presuming I'm reading your post right, you're essentially asking "you already know that 4E doesn't work with your preferred style of play, so why are you critiquing it?"The short answer is because I want to better understand how it's different from not only my preferred style of play, but also from the other iterations of D&D which better dovetail with said play-style.The longer answer is that we can all perceive that 4E is different from its predecessor editions, and given that I find D&D and its history endlessly fascinating, I want to analyze those differences. Moreover, I want to do so in a public venue, where others can add their thoughts and insights. What goals were set for 4E, and how did it attempt to achieve them? To what extent were they achieved, and how artfully (or lacking in artfulness)? In what manner were these different from prior editions? All of these are worthwhile questions, and deserve to be brought up, even if the critiques don't paint a flattering picture of 4E.I noted in the OP that 4E had the shortest shelf-life of any modern edition (where "modern" means "debuted as of the year 2000 or later"), which is the most non-judgmental way I could come up with to say that a significant portion of the D&D community rejected it. Why? What about it caused that reaction?We can talk about a lot of factors external to the nature of the 4E rules and setting in that regard, to be sure. The GSL. The DDI. The marketing. The pulling of older-edition PDFs (though I need to double-check the timeline there). And quite a few others. But if we make what I think is the non-controversial assertion that a not-insignificant part of the reason why so many in the D&D community couldn't countenance 4E was because of the structure of the game engine (though the changes to the lore was also part of it), then that justifies taking a look at those aspects of the game itself, both in terms of what they do and how they compare to previous editions (and, by extension, the presumptions that previous editions inculcated in their fans as to what exactly D&D is "supposed" to be).Jon Peterson wrote an entire book about the history of attempts to define exactly what role-playing games are (that being The Elusive Shift), and the entire reason why he had enough material to make a book about it was because we've barely been able to scratch that surface, even after five decades of community engagement and development. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threefold_model" target="_blank">threefold model</a>. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNS_theory" target="_blank">GNS theory</a>. Trying to parse the difference(s) between a role-playing game and a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storytelling_game" target="_blank">storytelling game</a>. And quite a few more. In that regard, we can take a narrower focus, and try and figure out what D&D "is" and how its various editions play into that paradigm, both in terms of where they're the same and where they differ.4E is no exception in that regard, nor should it be.</blockquote>

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