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="Tequila Sunrise" data-source="post: 6582194" data-attributes="member: 40398">The tactical combat is part of it; I do love action, and 4e certainly delivers on it. But I also prefer 4e because it's so...tidy and transparent. Which really helps me as a DM without a ton of experience, and a fairly...literal way of reading. Most of my DMing experience prior to 4e came from DMing 3.x, and there were quite a few times where I made encounters either cakewalks or TPKs. Not because I was running a sandbox campaign and I was expecting players to know when to stand and when to run, but because I was trying to make fun heroic combats with roughly-assigned CRs and ballpark-it encounter guidelines. So there were quite a few disappointing cakewalks and a couple of big behind-the-screen fudgings. I'm sure I would have gotten a handle on it all with enough practice, but 4e monster levels and encounter guidelines made it so much easier to strike the right balance for fun heroic combats.As a player, I like the lack of die-rolling during chargen. (Rolling for abilities is of course presented in the PHB, but it requires DM approval, and I've never seen it happen in 4e.) 4e chargen is in general very very intuitive, and strikes a great (but not perfect) balance between customization and simplicity. I've introduced a handful of gamers to D&D via 4e; I offered to help each of them make their first characters, but most of them turned me down and were nevertheless able to go through the entire process without intervention. Oh, and there're fewer legacy quirks; paladins aren't restricted to LG, turn undead finally operates under the unified d20 mechanic, etc.. There are still some quirks that make me roll my eyes though, like the earlier mentioned swordmage class.And then there are a lot of little things that make 4e appealing. Like how 4e has the yin-yang of both attack-and-AC-by-level and damage-and-HP-by-level. I know that most gamers don't think anything of thac0/BAB, saves, and hit points rising with level while AC and damage don't, and some gamers are even offended by the idea of 'double-dipping' offense and defense as 4e does, but to me it just makes 4e so much more pleasing. Both from a simple aesthetic PoV and a simulationist PoV. It may sound strange to others, but this is actually not such a little thing for me. In fact it's a pretty big thing.Anyhow, when 4e was young I wrote a lengthy <a href="https://4thmaster.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/why-4e-fans-love-4e/" target="_blank">blog post</a> on this topic; it's a compilation of all the reasons that 4e fans love 4e.</blockquote>

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