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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4153089" data-attributes="member: 2067">Not to pick on you, Mourn, but I think that this debate gets to the core of why "1st level is nothing special" guys feel on the outs. Some people use D&D to be Conan. Some people use D&D to be Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk.One of them is a barbarian king splattered in the blood of empires. The other is a poor kid who stumbles accross some magic beans and gets lucky. D&D has always been more about the former than the latter, but people who enjoy the latter still made it "work" in D&D because they could suspend their disbelief just enough to say "Okay, Jack's a rogue, and that doesn't make him much more exceptional than a barkeep, that's just how we'll say he's clever." But when it came down to it, D&D has pretty much always wanted you to eventually go toe-to-toe with the giant, rather than running away and cutting down the vine.If 4e characters are brazenly more powerful, those who enjoy the more faerie-tale-esque takes on fantasy, who enjoy their heroes more like Bilbo and Sam than like Conan and Aragorn, are kind of on the outs. They're being told they're not SUPPOSED to play the game like that. That's a tough pill to swallow, after having made it work (and, presumably, enjoying it) for so long.I mean, I'm all for fantasy stories coming from the Achilleses and Gilgameshes and Beowulfs of the world, but in more strongly asserting the "PC's are really exceptional" thing, they're pushing out some people who have so far enjoyed going against the grain.That's kind of a side-effect, I believe, of this whole "Be clear!" kick 4e is on. Not that it's bad to be clear, just that by eradicating the vagueness of what D&D is trying to do, you kind of inherently limit what people can interpret it to do. It's more easy to see it as something you can either accept or reject, rather than something you can interpret as you see fit.Hopefully the much-touted modularity of the game lives up to the hype, because that's what's going to let these guys who feel that they want to be "mundane heroic" embrace 4e as they have previous editions.</blockquote>

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