Cynicism of an AD&D refugee

[pawsplay]

I would never call 4e's design lazy. What I would call it is unambitious. I'm still disgusted by polymorph being thrown under the bus at the tail end of 3.5, and that 4e has completely moved away from anything that open-ended is a complete turn off to me.

 

[RFisher]

I think I’d call 3e and 4e design pessimistic. 3e tried to codify as much as possible to avoid arguments. 4e actually shows some optimism leaving some things uncodified than 3e codified. But among the things they did codify, they tended to drop anything that anyone might have ever found to be a “problem”.

Yet for most of us, I suspect, these things they’ve tried to fix aren’t really problems.

(Which is not to say that there aren’t good things in the design of both, though.)

 

[pawsplay]

I don't see 3e as "avoiding arguments" so much as just having a convenient rule to fall back on for most common situations and a few uncommon ones. It was with Living Greyhawk and the increasingly ambitious "errata" where things started getting weird.