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<blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4586440" data-attributes="member: 1054">I should be more accurate.&quot;Change to fix problems no one had.&quot;I've played D&amp;D actively from 1978-1986 and 2000-&gt;Present. During all that time, I've heard people bitch about armor class, hit points, 1-shot magic users, boring fighters, etc. I've never heard &quot;Halflings are too short!&quot; or &quot;The elemental planes are useless!&quot; or &quot;How do you map an infinite plane?&quot; Yet, it's fixing these non-problems that the current dev team seems most proud of, and it's been a consistent irritation to me since 4e was announced.To each their own, I suppose. I find the extreme balance obsession in 4e to be very.... scary, I guess is the right word. I'm afraid to touch anything for fear the perfectly balanced mechanism might go spinning madly out of control. 3e I was very comfortable sticking a finger in the wind and saying &quot;Good enough for government work&quot;; with 4e, I feel if I want to come up with a new exploit/spell/prayer I'd better build a spreadsheet and make sure my new ability is not the slightest bit better, or the slightest bit worse, than any existing ability. I feel constrained. I find the one-size-fits-all cosmology to be another example of constraint, even if it's only for &quot;official&quot; worlds, it's part of an attitude that has shifted D&amp;D from being a generic toolkit for fantasy gaming to being a set of rules usable only in one fantasy world. It's becoming closer to a setting-based game than a genre-based toolkit, and while I am perfectly capable of (and intend to) using it to do what I want with it, I feel I have to fight the design intent to do so, that the dev team is no longer on &quot;my side&quot;, if you follow me.I'm sure there will be lots of cool stuff in the MOTP, I just feel I'm going to need to do more work to extract what I like from what I don't than I had to in previous editions.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lizard, post: 4586440, member: 1054"] I should be more accurate. "Change to fix problems no one had." I've played D&D actively from 1978-1986 and 2000->Present. During all that time, I've heard people bitch about armor class, hit points, 1-shot magic users, boring fighters, etc. I've never heard "Halflings are too short!" or "The elemental planes are useless!" or "How do you map an infinite plane?" Yet, it's fixing these non-problems that the current dev team seems most proud of, and it's been a consistent irritation to me since 4e was announced. To each their own, I suppose. I find the extreme balance obsession in 4e to be very.... scary, I guess is the right word. I'm afraid to touch anything for fear the perfectly balanced mechanism might go spinning madly out of control. 3e I was very comfortable sticking a finger in the wind and saying "Good enough for government work"; with 4e, I feel if I want to come up with a new exploit/spell/prayer I'd better build a spreadsheet and make sure my new ability is not the slightest bit better, or the slightest bit worse, than any existing ability. I feel constrained. I find the one-size-fits-all cosmology to be another example of constraint, even if it's only for "official" worlds, it's part of an attitude that has shifted D&D from being a generic toolkit for fantasy gaming to being a set of rules usable only in one fantasy world. It's becoming closer to a setting-based game than a genre-based toolkit, and while I am perfectly capable of (and intend to) using it to do what I want with it, I feel I have to fight the design intent to do so, that the dev team is no longer on "my side", if you follow me. I'm sure there will be lots of cool stuff in the MOTP, I just feel I'm going to need to do more work to extract what I like from what I don't than I had to in previous editions. [/QUOTE]

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