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Message: <blockquote data-quote="humble minion" data-source="post: 5643153" data-attributes="member: 5948">Oddly enough, I find myself heartily agreeing with the second half of your post while disagreeing with the first!I genuinely think that 4e's rule changes were designer-driven rather than management-driven.  Perhaps some of the tone and what I percieve as the targeting at a younger audience (twoword compoundnames for everything, and the utterly cringeworthy melodramatic prose that heads up maneuver/class/whatever descriptions, for instance), but in general, I think the 4e rules were largely a designer-driven reaction to the weaknesses of d20/3e.  Addressing 3e's very real issues with the layering of buffs overcomplicating combat, the divergent maths at high level, save or die, gamebreaking spells at low level, the ridiculous complexity of high-level 3e stat blocks and the drag that applied to DMs, the attempt (even if clumsy) to separate out tactical vs ritual magic, etc, etc, etc.  All these issues were very well known to the design team and are certainly what I would have looked to address if it were me designing 4e.  But I think there's a temptation when redesigning something like D&D, to go too far and lose what's familiar.  As a designer, you probably spend years living the ruleset during the new edition design, talking it about it every day with your fellow designers, coming up with new ideas, testing, refining, making more and more fundamental changes as times goes on.  It's probably a small, incremental process of change for a designer, who gets to try all the intermediate stages and who can fight for their favourite bits over the development period, but it's very sudden and stark for a customer, and I think designers who've been immersed in a fluid ruleset for years often forget that.  And 4e actually magnified the problem by making a bunch of flavour changes (planar structure, dragonborn etc) that really just seem to be largely unnecessary (certainly un-asked for) from a game experience point of view and could have almost been custom-made to get on the goat of long-time players.  NWoD seems to have had the same problem, and I know that previous WH40k ruleset edition changes were recieved so badly that the last couple have actually been so minimal that 90% of the previous edition's material is still usable - and this is in an environment when players play AGAINST each other, so balance is much more important than in D&D.  Anyway, I do very much agree that 4e was necessary and even desirable, and I even agree with the designers about what issues it should address.  But like you, I just think the 4e we got wasn't one I liked very much.</blockquote>

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