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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 5506077" data-attributes="member: 11999">So what does all of this mean?I find the "minimal" write-ups for a simple character in each edition to be interesting just in terms of how much stuff needs to be written on a character sheet.However, I am more interested in the gameplay concepts and rules that a player actually needs to know before they can contribute meaningfully to the game.When I look over these examples, I see a gradual increase of complexity from Basic D&D through AD&D and even into 3.x.  For me, the biggest leap is from 3.5 to 4e.  Now, 3.5 is certainly a more complex ruleset than 4e when taken as a whole (even if we're just looking at the core rules).  However, it doesn't hit you in the face with all of it at once.  Skills and Attacks of Opportunity are the most significant concepts above and beyond what needed to be understood in earlier editions.One of 4e's stated design goals was to extend the "sweet spot" of 3.x through the whole spread of levels.  I don't recall the exact range, but I think the sweet spot was identified as about 4th to 9th level, when characters have a lot to do but aren't too complex.  And therein is the issue; 1st level characters in 4e feel a lot like 3rd or 4th level characters in 3.x, with a similar number of options and game concepts in play.  However, there was no gradual build-up to this point -- players have a number of abilities available right at the start.  And these abilities bring a wide variety of gameplay concepts into play from the start as well.I've tried to run 4e for two different groups now.  The first group included two members of my current group and three of my former co-workers (professional video game designers and programmers).  With both that first group and my current group, I was initially puzzled as to why half of the players were struggling with understanding the game.  The system was more streamlined than 3.5.  They only had 2 at-will, 1 or 2 encounter, and 1 daily power to manage, and everything was contained on the power cards.  It seemed so simple to me, but I spent more time and effort helping the players make in-game decisions than I did running monsters or NPCs.  Likewise, I spent more time and effort out-of-game revising PCs and trying to find a better way of presenting their abilities than I did working on adventures.What I didn't think about was the fact that having self-contained write-ups on each power card didn't mean a thing if the players didn't understand the concepts behind them.  When I started to think about what the game system requires of the players, everything became much more clear, and I understood why some of my players were struggling with the system.  I was always reading about how 4e was so much easier for new players to learn and was the simplest version of D&D since BECMI, but I wasn't seeing that in practice.4th Edition simply asks for far more player investment up-front than did any previous version of the game.  Whereas in earlier versions, I could explain about hit points and attack rolls and then sort of wing it from there, touching on concepts as they came into play, I found that I couldn't do that in 4e.  Explaining what at-will, encounter, and daily powers are and how they work also brings short and extended rests into the mix.  The distinction between hit points and healing surges is important, and there are a lot of at-will powers that grant temporary hit points, so those end up being part of the equation very quickly.  Many at-will powers cause forced movement or conditions such as slowed, so those concepts also need to be explained before players can make a decision in the first round of the first combat.  New players don't know enough to decide whether attacking for 2[W] is better or worse than attacking for 1[W] plus slowing the enemy until the end of your next turn.I wish that I had taken a more gradual approach, and played out a simple first battle with just at-will powers before tacking the next set of powers, and so on.  It might have made things a bit simpler.But even the simpler classes like the ranger have features that are essentially powers-in-disguise, like Hunter's Quarry, which has three paragraphs to say "you may select a single opponent as your quarry.  Once per round, you may inflict 1d6 extra damage on a successful hit."  Features like Prime Shot are overly fiddly for what they do.  If you are closer to your target than are your allies, gain a +1 bonus on ranged attack rolls?  It feels a lot like Point Blank Shot (+1 to hit on ranged attacks if target within 30') in its intent, but is way more of a hassle to use ("is my target within 6 squares?  Cool!" vs "how far away is my target?  5 squares?  How far is my target from each of the other 3 party members?  One, two, three...").When you are just learning the game and you have half a dozen or more options to consider on each of your turns, it is very difficult to make a decision when many of those options involve concepts that you aren't familiar with.  Adding abilities and effects that require mental effort to track just compound the problem, and the game starts to feel like too much work before you've even really given it a chance.There is a lot more to say on this subject, and many points were made in the replies that I would like to address, but I'm probably not going to be on here again today.  This post is hard on 4e and might make this thread come across as an elaborate and long-winded 4e rant, but that isn't my intent.  I'm focusing on 4e in the "what does this all mean" part because it represents the current state of the game and where this growing front-loaded complexity has brought us.</blockquote>

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