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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thasmodious" data-source="post: 4673722" data-attributes="member: 63272">Seems a lot of people understand the 4e rules as written, get the intent, follow the examples and meanings, understand what is meant by exception based design and what is meant by challenges scaling with level (as Mr. Thompson explained).  It seems a lot of people don't.This is just speculation, but I wonder if a lot of the people that don't "get" 4e possess considerable game mastery of 3e (or another edition)?  You hear a lot of talk about how 4e "removed" craft skills or "took away" half orcs and other things that show the person writing the message is reading 4e as an extension of 3e, comparing everything to how it was done in 3e.  Doing this leads to a lot of misconceptions, such as the idea that the intent of scaling DCs is that things actually become harder to do with level.  Or that sliding down a bannister and kicking an opponent does a massive amount more damage at epic tier than it does at heroic tier.  This is not meant to be insulting in any way.  I don't mean that some people who have problems with 4e didn't read it right or just aren't smart enough to understand it.  On the surface, 4e looks like an extension of 3e, but is really a considerably different philosophy, so if you apply the "3e mindest" to it, a lot of things don't make sense or are easily misintepreted.  Similarly, 4e plays a lot like 1e but doesn't look anything like it.  If a 1e player who never moved on read 4e they would hardly recognize the game, despite the fact that many people who have played both editions find the experience of the latter is evocative of the first.I have a pair of friends who are big time CharOps guys, both post regularly on the CharOps board and both are experts with 3e and know it inside and out.  Both read 4e and just really didn't "get it" for exactly the reason I mentioned above, making some of these same common misconceptions.  They were viewing the game as a sequel to 3e and expected it to follow 3e's general philosophy when that is definitely something 4e does not do.  A huge difference in philosophies is static DCs versus PC based interaction.On the other hand, I never quite got 3e, and I didn't realize it until after 4e had come out.  I played and DMed it for years, tweaked and houseruled the crap out of it to cover what I wanted it to do, grumbled about its multiclassing limitations, etc.  Whenever I needed to create a character I went to the two guys mentioned above.  They were experts.  I said "here's my concept, how do I pull this off".  They replied "take the following 4 classes at these levels, take these 7 feats from these 5 different books..." and they did this without needing much time to consult, they just knew things cold, knew how the system worked and how to get the most out of it.  But there was an underlying philosophy to 3e that I just didn't really "get" and it caused me to misconstrue many things and, of course, dislike many things because that just isn't my approach.  I get 4e, I get the philosophy behind the game, it makes sense to me and works with the way I want to run games.  I like that it plays fast and loose like the old school and that effort was put in to streamline rules into broadly applicable sets of easily understood and manipulated mechanics like the power framework, skill challenges, pg 42.  I like and get the weight of the mechanics and intent behind them.  I understood on reading that the intention of level scaling DCs was that the PCs are expected to be facing challenges their level and the same lock has the same DC if encountered twice.  Again, I really want to stress that I'm not denigrating anyone, as I realize it could sound like that, especially given my tendency to get sucked into editionwarz.  Instead, I am just trying to stress that its important to realize 4e is a new edition, not a sequel, and that reading it as such can lead to some of these misinterpretations.  That doesn't mean Wizards wrote a bad book or that some people aren't smart enough to get it, its just inevitable.  If you show the same paragraph to a 1000 people and ask them to tell you what it means you are going to get a lot of different interpretations.That banister example someone mentioned a page or two back is a good example.  Someone thinking about a stunt like that might interpret pg 42 to mean that an epic PC must somehow pack such a wallop by sliding super fast or something that it does a massive amount more damage at lvl 26 than it did when he kicked an orc at 2nd level off the same banister.  It doesn't.  Hit points are abstract.  The stunt does enough damage for the opponent to notice it.  Sliding off the banister and doing a set 4 points of damage is a waste of an action at epic level.  With the rules as they are, it has the same relative effect at lvl 2 and lvl 26, it does enough for the level appropriate challenge monster to notice.  Hit points and damage are abstract and whether the opponent is a lowly kobold or an efreet noble its going to be demoralizing to get a whole bootfull of your awesome right up in its grill in front of everyone.</blockquote>

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