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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7751357" data-attributes="member: 6873517">I got much less BS hacking 3.5; nobody would tolerate it in 4 and I felt it was largely impossible.  True, but they weren't really core things that identified the character. And monks to me always felt more supernatural. But I don't think there's anywhere else to go with this. Suffice it to say that in general, I'm not a fan of daily powers if there's another way that's not super painful to make being cool limited so that people don't just button mash it. For instance, make the cool fighter thing situational. Rationalizations are almost always post-hoc. That is, the thing has been decided, in this case to fit the general turn structure and play logic, and the reason is made up afterwards. The reason's not even in the rulebook, those were things I heard people say and probably said myself, too. The adoption of Vancian magic was done in no small part because EGG was a Jack Vance nut!To me a highly gamist structure is one that doesn't have an in-world rationale. To some degree those are inevitable, of course, but a highly gamist game like 4E is one where "getting the rules to work and ensuring game balance above all else" is the primary driving concern. It was well-designed but not IMO good for what I wanted. That is to say, many of the choices they made were well-thought out choices I felt boxed me in. They zigged hard where I would have liked to have the option to zag. Without going through a lot of pain and just as often fight with players, I didn't think I could actually do any of those changes. I've DMed for 30 years and can categorically say I disliked DMing 4E the most by far given how in the way I felt it was for me. I recognize that other folks felt that it was very liberating due to the inherent balance of it (for the most part). This wouldn't really matter if there was a way to play other games, but at the time it was all nearly anyone I knew wanted to play. That's not how I tended to see it happen. The constant decision loop---I recognize you dislike this comparison but I really felt every round was like looking through a card hand trying to figure out which card to play, and please don't try to tell me that's not what it felt like to me---meant every player had to decide what to do. Some were really, really slow at it or obsessed with setting up the optimal combo (which just as often failed or got busted by someone else). I didn't see all the abuses of 3E that others are talking about but of course we all see a small, narrow window of the folks we play with and in general I played with people who were good enough DMs to avoid that. I didn't need WotC to help me out by making combat DM proofed into a particular genre cliche.  I agree that they did let you out of stun jail which was different than, say, prior editions where it was very hard to get out at all. Usually I replaced any "save or die" with damage to allow some chance of survival. Stuns weren't bad if they weren't combined with long turns. IME 4E had both long turns and stuns. Daze was also nasty, though better. There were characters that were essentially devastated by that, whereas others were much less bothered. Of course, that's a weakness of that particular class type, but it fed on long turns because the long turn classes (e.g., barbarians and avengers) were precisely the ones that could substantially ignore dazing. Near the end of 4E, were I to run it again, I said to myself I'd outright ban barbarians and avengers just due to their turn length, and in retrospect would probably ban any pre-Essentials character just for good measure. Of course, I have no intention of ever playing or running it again so that's not an issue. All that said, they did have some good ideas!</blockquote>

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