D&D 4E Do there need to be a "lot" of changes to be 4E?

[Patlin]

4e seems to hold the promise that they're going to take a lot of the cool ideas they've had sine 3.x came out and put them together as a coherent whole so that the game as a whole can benefit from them, rather than just the johnny-come-lately prestige classes.

For example, take immediate actions. They're fun, and I like them. Strange the monsters I fight (from MM1) hardly ever take advantage of them, though. Now it appears Dragons will have immediate actions to use against you, which is kind of cool.

As we get closer to publication, more and more examples of this should appear.

I also hope it'll be easier to DM than those huge 3.x stat blocks.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Would I be flamed too badly if I piped up and said that I actually prefer AD&D 2nd to D&D 3rd and D&D 3.5?

Heck, I still miss Basic D&D.

 

[Ranger REG]

Heck, I still miss Basic D&D.

Basic D&D and all the other boxed sets? Yeah, I missed that.

2e? Not so much. In fact, it's not even on my radar, except the nonmechanical fluff material to flesh out my RPG sessions.

 

[Clavis]

Would I be flamed too badly if I piped up and said that I actually prefer AD&D 2nd to D&D 3rd and D&D 3.5?

Not from me.
And I hated 2nd edition.
But at least you could run more than 1 or 2 combats in a session in 2nd edition, and do it without miniatures.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

I think that yeah, they could have done an update and accomplished some of their goals, and I think the late development cycle of 3.5 reflects this in a lot of ways, but...

I think that their desires to redo the product structure and basic class schemes really required a new edition.

I mean it's perfectly possible to produce the Tome of Magic that complements the Tome of Battle's ability pacing and then you can have classes that work the same way play-wise without having to update the basic structure.

But if you do that you can't then write adventures to reflect that.

Basicly, I think they like the way they were going with the classes and they decided to update the edition so that they could reflect the new pace in the adventures as well as in the characters.

 

[LightPhoenix]

I think that the changes that are necessary are having a sort of ripple effect on the rest of the rules. In this way, there aren't a lot of fundamental changes, but those are causing broad changes in the rules overall.

Take monster design, for example. I fully agree with the idea that monster design needed to be revamped, and mostly agree with the comments made by the developers. However, in changing monster design you're going to change a lot of things, some more subtly than others.

 

[KingCrab]

No... They could simply replace the "3.5" on the cover of the current edition's books with a "4" and it would be 4e. They're the guys who print it, they can call it whatever they want.

Exactly. Had they just made a few more balance changes it would have been a fine 4ed (and something I defninitely wanted to buy.)