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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Delta" data-source="post: 4127994" data-attributes="member: 40269">You're seeing a symptom of why I wouldn't touch 4E with a 10-foot pole.The spells in 3E took up, what, half the PHB? And those spells have been refined and playtested over literally 30+ years. You can pick out lots of specific language that was copy-and-pasted from 1E all the way through to 3E, with desired refinements.Now here's 4E that's burned the entire system right to the ground (half the PHB by my count) and starting over from scratch. They're trying to rewrite ever single spell in a totally different power system. It's simply mandatory that it's going to have loads of balance and writing issues, without the benefit of 30 years of playtesting behind them. And it's a heck of a lot more content to fill in at once than, say, OD&D started out with.It's a common issue in software, too -- in theory a clean code rewrite sounds spectacular, but commonly you wind up losing a lot of refinements. Example: Blog from last week on refactoring that points out, "The problem is that warty old code isn’t always just warty - it’s battle-scarred": <a href="http://basildoncoder.com/blog/2008/03/21/the-pg-wodehouse-method-of-refactoring/" target="_blank">http://basildoncoder.com/blog/2008/03/21/the-pg-wodehouse-method-of-refactoring/</a>Or this essay on "Why You Should Almost Never Rewrite Your Software": <a href="http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/2596/Why-You-Should-Almost-Never-Rewrite-Your-Software.aspx" target="_blank">http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/2596/Why-You-Should-Almost-Never-Rewrite-Your-Software.aspx</a></blockquote>

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