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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thunderfoot" data-source="post: 4275151" data-attributes="member: 34175">Time for a dissenting voice that brings some experience to the party (and hopefully a lot less rancor...)4e is a lot of things, being like 1e AD&D is not one of them.  There is a substantial streamlining of the rules and I for one am grateful for it, but too many things that were 'optional' are now 'mandatory'.  I have noticed a great deal of things where the designers threw the baby out with the bath water; for instance, Epic Destinies and Paragon Paths - first there is no fluff and once we get here its like "pretentious much?" Angelic face and astral wings, glowing weapons, what the heck is this the Matrix?  What if you don't think this is a good idea or if it doesn't fit into your campaign style?  No optional rules, just deal with it this is the way it is.  By putting it into the PHB they have already made my job difficult because every player will say, but its in the book... at least when it was in the DMG I could say, you shouldn't be reading that anyway.I'm looking at some of the rules and thinking, "great job" and others thinking "what illegal substances were you imbibing when you created this?"  Mind you the system isn't a total loss, but there are far too many things that should have been changed before it went to press.  PoL is an obvious design error and campaign creation is going to be a ton of work that may just have me shelving a 'system with a few kinks'.The more I've played 3.x and previewed 4e (which I've done over several months btw) the more I want to start an AD&D campaign - you know, before two-weapon fighting, before spell limitations, before UA and the dread barbarian or cavalier...  It's not that the system was better, just more realistic (and of course that is a far stretch from meaning total realism.)  But there were no video games to influence the design back then, in fact AD&D influenced the video games...I hate WoW and Evercrack and pretty much every other MMORPG on the market, so when I see their influence on the game that I love, yeah it irks me.  I understand the reason for it, and as a poster stated on another thread it seems like we are moving farther away from the DM being part of the equation at all.  Just players and rules, no administrator.  I would hope this isn't the case, but I have to admit, from what I've seen here, especially SUGGESTING that DMs play a character is breaking a rule that goes far beyond tradition for me, nigh unto blasphemy.I realize a lot of folks started with either 3.x or even 2e, which were vastly different from the original AD&D (or even OD&D for that matter).  Part of the charm was the 'rules light and ready to fight' attitude it had, and while I admire the designers for trying to recapture that feeling, there were just too many other things that they tried to force upon me as a DM through the rules to make it worth my while in running this out of the box.  So a year or so from now when I finally have all my house rules done, I'll let you know how it turns out. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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