AbdulAlhazred
Legend
That is great. I am glad you had such a positive reaction to 4E and it fit your style. But not everyone agreed. I felt it was good design for what it was intended, but it also was not a good design for my preferences or style of play. I can sort of see the arguments about it being more modern and updated than 2E (because 2E did have a lot of clunk and confusion). But I dont think it is objectively better design than 3E by any stretch. It just addresses different concerns and problems than 3E (and if those are not concerns or problems one happens to have, or if you dont have them to the degree that the 4E designer assume, it doesnt stand out as good design). Now I am not trying to trash 4E at all. I do think it is a well designed game, but it does get a but tiring hearing form 4E fans how their taste equals good/modern design and ours equals "crap" or "poorly thought out" design. I think we really just want some very different things from the game.
I just had particular issues with 3e and class balance. I wasn't greatly enamored of 2e from the standpoint of it didn't do anything mechanically for me, 1e was the same game. I thought 2e was well-written, but yeah it was just mechanically a bit dated. 3e's writing is as good as 4e's, but I don't see it as better. Rules-wise though, not close. Presentation and human-factors wise? 4e is a clear improvement, mostly incremental but in a few areas substantially more. The degree to which character complexity is front-loaded onto chargen for instance is huge, and the way NPCs are handled, the difference is night and day. Organization and presentation in 4e are often really significantly improved. I think those issues were just barely on the radar with 2e (1e is just a sort of hodge-podge) but not even really clearly well-developed in 3.x (3.x is overall organized well at a high level). 4e takes cleanness of presentation, organization, and graphic/human factors elements into consideration in ways that no previous edition does. Its specific incarnation into the game 4e is somewhat of a different thing. The techniques employed to create the game are just clearly more refined. There's nothing surprising about that. For all that WotC seems to have a hard time internalizing ideas about what to put in their games and how to present the material in a cultural sense, they have clearly mastered all the most modern production techniques and concepts. That isn't surprising, they have a huge toy company to draw on which clearly has vast experience at product design.