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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7751379" data-attributes="member: 6873517">I suspect they didn't have it Su tagged so it wasn't dispel-bait or subject to Spell Resistance but I don't really know. Monks to me always felt pretty Su. Certainly there were daily powers before but they weren't a core part of most classes. In 2E I long ago dumped the "Vancian" preparation rules and let people prepare and cast freely, with clerics being able to cast whatever they wanted off their domain lists, rather like 5E but even freer. It didn't break the game because characters only had one spell a round and they could be interrupted without being careful. Fair enough.  Heh. I guess the thing is for me I felt that for a caster that was part of the game. If I didn't want daily powers, I played other things. In the early version of 4E I didn't have a choice because every class had AW/E/D. (More about this below.) They didn't. Basically nobody else used that. Vance didn't really have a system, per se, that was really Gygax running with it. Gygax-Vance (probably a better name for it) memorization was always a bone of contention among people. Over and over people were bugged by it and constantly tried to come up with different systems and/or rationalizations.  My issue with gamism isn't that I disagree with the fact that systems need to be elegant and playable. My issue is when gamist concerns become the first concern.  The person who used liberating felt that prior editions left too much up to him to decide so he meant it in the sense of "easy" as in "liberated from the burdens". He liked the fact that 4E built in the rulings right into the monster card for the most part and took care of most of the rulings for him. By contrast, I felt 4E was horribly confining as a DM; I seriously disliked running it. Yes, 100%. It was basically the only game in town. When 4E was coming out, White Wolf, the next biggest competitor, was dying out. Of course, Pathfinder came out. You're 100% right that some players are just annoying or slow. Oh sure, I don't mean to imply it's not decisions. I have no problem with decisions, though I do think there is a role for having one or two class archetypes that are intentionally simple, like the Champion Fighter, for the kind of player who doesn't like making a bunch of power choices but mostly just wants to roll to hit and damage. I think the issue is that the decisions felt very much the same to me across classes in a way they really hadn't before: "Which of my consumable resources do I use now or should I wait and just use an AW?" Without that same structure for classes without dailies or encounter powers, say one that has some interesting At Wills that are situationally useful. For example, in my heavily house-ruled 2E game, we'd devised combat maneuvers to make fighters more interesting that were rather feat-like. None of them are limited use; all are situational. For example, one allowed someone to Tumble (hence improve AC and disengage from a fight easily) but make an attack. Sometimes you needed to turtle so you'd Tumble to avoid being attacked but to be able to attack once was helpful. Another one allowed for a retaliation strike when an enemy rolled a natural 1. I'd let people make up their own maneuvers to support their character concept. One character is a swashbuckler type who likes his flintlocks. In general they kind of suck in D&D, of course, but we devised a maneuver, Pistolero, which let his character draw pistols from his bandolier as long as he has a hand free and use them as part of his extra attacks, with no off hand penalty. It's not really a boost in power but it supports the character's theme. I think 4E would have been quite hard to manage given all the dependencies and interconnected strings. It wasn't impossible, of course, but it would have been much more difficult IMO. Later on, Essentials had some pretty cool examples where they broke with the general pattern of everyone having the same number of AW/E/D, say with the Protector Druid having their dailies all be summons and most of their other abilities AW (I think---it's been a while). IMO Essentials was just much better than the original 4E classes, which is one reason I would have banned all pre-Essentials classes in any game I did had 5E not come out. In many ways I see 5E kept a lot (though not all) of what was good about 4E's later incarnation. I did like the Protector Druid a lot, and think that would have been a good druid build in 5E. It was not a shapeshifter but really a caster. I might have lost my train of thought there. DM proofing removes a big part of the DM's job, at least a lot of the parts I like, such as world-building and tailoring rules support my concepts. By making things easy it got rid of the parts I actually like! They spent a lot of time rolling damage and extra attacks with more damage. Leader types, by contrast, seemed to have very quick turns: Minor action healing, attack, move, done.</blockquote>

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