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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tomtill" data-source="post: 4148355" data-attributes="member: 37444">worldbuilding vs. gamebuildingI agree with Lizard, in a limited sense. For worldbuilding, I loved 3e. It gave me a (more or less) logical and consistent way to explain the world. It always frustrated me that AD&D characters were very limited relative to the rest of the world. They could do only a particular set of abilities, while the rest of the world had completely different sets of abilities. In other words, a lot o AD&D settings made no sense in the context of available abilities. 3e fixed all that. You could pretty much design a world with the 3e ruleset, in a consistent and mostly logical way.Worldbuilding, however, is only really appreciated by the DM. The players appreciate the game you build. It is satisfying to the DM to be able to come up with rules justification for how that wizard created his tower the way he did, and what prestige class he had to take to get a particular spell. Players only care that it is as believable, as say, a typical Hollywood action movie (A very low standard).The trouble is, the application of the consistent 3e ruleset routinely failed to meet the primary goal of any gaming ruleset, that is, it failed to achieve proper balance within the game. The challenge level/encounter level system of matching opponents was horribly horribly broken. Even after hours of preparation designing an encounter, in the end, the DM has to wing it.D&D is a game of overcoming challenges. We had hoped that applying the 3e ruleset to encounter design from the character level up would create consistently predictable challenges. It failed. According to the developers, 4e should give you the tools to build an encounter from the top down. Starting from the XP, fill it with these XP units. If your concept is not pre-made, designing a new opponent of a particular level is supposed to come from a table of abilities appropriate to a particular level. This is promised to create consistently predictable challenges. In other words, 4e should allow better game building (as opposed to world building). You can give your time to the story/fluff that makes your series of challenges particularly interesting for your world. That's a better use of your time, I think.</blockquote>

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