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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7751297" data-attributes="member: 6873517">Those aren't the only reasons to work with the game, though. I tended to find "RAW rules only!" to be much more common with 4E than 3E but of course maybe that was the folks I played with, though a lot of them I'd played with before.  Lots of times I like tweaking to avail myself of a different feel as DM, often to shift something fairly substantially. I felt pretty much locked out of doing that in 4E.  Yes, 5E felt much more inviting towards me making decisions as DM. I'm not claiming 5E is perfect. There are several things I don't like about it, but I'm probably one of those people who pretty much never likes RAW. (I teach and one thing I always tell students is that "Fair warning: I seem to come to hate every textbook ever written".) Given the Lawful Neutral DM Proofing that went on in 4E I just felt that I really couldn't ever do anything besides make up a few monsters and magic items.IMO that's a distinction without a difference. They're fire and forget abilities. I totally get that the other part of Vancian casting, namely spell preparation, wasn't part of what they're doing and I understand the difference of role in the party. "In function" meant for me "dailies" which worked like 1E fire and forget spells, something nobody but spellcasters ever really had before. I could certainly think of worse in terms of sheer burden (e.g., Exalted 2nd Edition) but I won't claim I liked At Wills/Encounters/Dailies once the bloom left the rose. Note: Opinion. <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=";)" /> The post hoc rationalization was the notion of "choosing when you're awesome" which is exactly what you described. As I said, IMO, it's pretty bleh, though I guess I'll tolerate it to some degree in the form of Action Surge in 5E... so I won't claim to be 100% consistent in my preferences. I don't like things that feel like cards in a CCG, which is exactly what Dailies felt like to me and they were all over the place in 4E. So ultimately it was the ubiquity of Daily powers and general sameness of the action structure for all classes that really bugged me, at least when it came to characters---the magic item system and utter lack of an economy was another issue; 5E hasn't really fixed that. 4E was really solidly built on the gamist and more narrative sides of things, but IMO pretty much just ignored the simulate/world building/secondary reality type feel that I rather like. Right, this is exactly what I mean by "choosing when to be awesome" as a post hoc rationalization for the daily power. I agree they mirror genre, but only in a rude gamist sort of way. We'll have to agree to disagree---I don't think I'll ever get to the point of liking daily powers, especially for martial characters. I don't recall saying 4E was a badly designed game. Not liking the choices that were made isn't the same as not respecting that the choices were thought through for the most part. For example, I'm not one of those people who thinks that a musician or artist who works in a genre I don't like sucks. Quite often doing the things they do requires a lot of skill. There are a lot of things I did like about 4E, but many other choices they made I really didn't care for and felt very blocked as a DM to change them. Ultimately, what's a good deal is in the eye of the beholder. Long turns hurt everyone, not just the person taking the long turn. The burden of adding a bunch of damage dice was darn slow. I'd see people just grind doing that and rarely could seem to get them to do the things that would get them to speed up. Clearly it was a failure of basic arithmetic skills, but that made it no less real. This was something that 4E was actually pretty good about in many ways. Yep, and actually I rather like that as opposed to the way it works now. Losing your reaction, in particular, would be a nice tactical choice to have to make if you're concentrating.  Not that I was forced... the fact that other people would take them was a problem, IME often the people who really shouldn't take them. They just slowed things down A TON. This happened in 3E, too and can happen in 5E as well. Yep, that's a risk I'm willing to take but I find myself skilled enough as a DM to be able to keep encounters tough without TPKing. Quite honestly I can't recall the last time I had one. Of course, I could and did do things like you describe and indeed tend to do exactly that in most games I run. Fortunately for me, I can 99.44% Ivory Soap pure claim I will never play or run 4E again. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" />I don't mind genre feel of reversals, but rarely felt 4E combats actually achieved that---most of the time they were more like playing a CRPG on a laggy system, although the system ran better at lower levels. Given the propensity for lose a turn type abilities that were a big part of the whole genre reversals combined with long turns, there were times when I just felt I was waiting for an hour for my turn to come around again. Getting to roll a save to escape stun lock was like having someone give me one M&M... gee thanks.</blockquote>

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