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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7749066" data-attributes="member: 996">Yep, prettymuch the opposite experience, here.  3.x the attitude was dissect every rule to find & then argue for the interpretation that was most favorable as being "The RAW," 4e, the rules were just clearer and the benefit from pushing an interpretation where there was ambiguity often less profound (and likely to be 'updated' away at any moment, anyway), so less rule-lawyering, but at least as much of a tendency to stick with the rules rather than tweak them, yourself.But I was talking more about the broader on-line community, which was very RAW-insistent in the 3.x era, and just more sort of RAW-acceptant in 4e.  There was more sound & fury in RAW debates in 3.x, more edition warring in 4e RAW debates.  Neither were conducive to tinkering.The thing about 4e, though, was that it was surprisingly (for D&D) balanced, so you not only might not tinker with it to fix balance problems, but you might be hesitant to do so for fear of wrecking said balance... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  With Skill Challenges as an alternative to combat, 4e struck me as being pretty open to doing quite different things... at least compared to classic D&D which just blithely assumed dungeon-crawling...  Ironically, that was no different than D&D had always been, just spelled out formally (in the olden days, you /needed/ the cleric for healing/undead-turning, the thief for traps/locks, the fighters to take hits & grind damage, and the wizard for magic - or you were likely going to TPK or at least fail the adventure's presumed goals, hard - it just wasn't as up-front about it, and the classes didn't come through too consistently at their assigned roles*).  Players certainly needed to be engaged, yes (and a more balanced game is actually more conducive to that, since you're not left wondering why you even try), but 'system-knowledgeable,' not so much.  4e was very easy to play 'cold' (just walk in, pick up a character you know nothing about, and start playing - prettymuch the assumption of the Encounters program) compared to other editions, but rather disconcerting to step into from a place of extensive experience with earlier editions.   A pure rogues-only game (I ran one in AD&D, briefly) was prettymuch off the table in any edition, rogues being barely-viable even supported by a party (same with an all-fighter or all-low-level-wizard game, for instance).  What was more-nearly viable was a party of PCs who were MC'd Thief/something-else, to bring in the necessary healing, combat power, and, of course, magic-use; doing that in 1e meant a mostly non-/demi-human party, and doing it in 3e just meant plenty of levels in not-rogue, quite possibly adding up to a 'normal'-ish party.  Using that work-around for an 'all rogue' game in 4e would've been problematic - early 4e lacked the hyprid rules, and Rogues (and 5e sorta kept this, but for Expertise) didn't have the lock on theifly skills they did in prior eds.  But even just playing several different rogues would've been viable enough, especially if your campaign was mostly heists & the like, where combat was to be avoid when possible, and ended swiftly when not - you'd have an all-striker party, afterall, and those were viable in a brittle way, that'd work for 'days' of fewer combats and more skill challenges.  Alternately, depending on what defines a 'rogue' in your mind, you could have several different classes that happened to be participating in the stereotypical rogue lifestyle - the criminal underworld, or the sneaking about, opportunistic approach to adventuring - because class wasn't quite the straightjacket it's generally been (if your concept didn't include magic, any martial class might work for it, for instance). 5e does quite a good job of meeting classic-D&D expectations, and at least doesn't seem alien if your formative experience with D&D was 3.x/PF, as well.   The latter was a mechanical simplification that would have worked very nicely with the rest of 5e's design philosophy, but for (critically) how it would have felt to long-time/returning players, which was the deal-breaker.  The former was solid design from a resource-balancing/management perspective, which, ironically, considering what you had to say above, made the game /less/ sensitive to party make-up, but, again, was too much of a deviation from the Band-Aid-cleric, spell-resource-management-centric traditions of the game.  5e gets by with just giving a /lot/ of classes some access to healing, so you're likely to get enough to get by in spite of the relatively low amount and lack of in-combat - as long as your players don't all decide to be single-class rogues. ;P</blockquote>

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