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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4907869" data-attributes="member: 2067">OGL and the note about "different mechanical experiences" (let's call 'em "subsystems"?) are two things I'll gladly get behind.Another one would be "automation." I'm a kind of lazy, spontaneous, improv-heavy DM and 3e's interlocked ruleset allowed a decision I made to easily cascade into various other parts of the rules in an essentially intuitive fashion. As a for instance, if I said dwarves were now "small-sized" there was a package of things that went along with being "small-sized" that made the change very real, from a higher AC to a lower carrying capacity. Just by saying "dwarves are now Small" I could say a lot about how dwarves played without having to specify 200 different individual rules (one about carrying capacity, one about weapon wielding, one about AC, one about attack rolls, etc.). It was all rolled into one rule: The Small Size.Now, I totally get why 4e got rid of these cascading rules effects, and I'm pretty supportive of that goal. Tracking fiddly bits through the whole system can be very painful. But I do miss that "being able to say a lot with a little" aspect of 3e, where I could make one change, and have that change accurately reflected throughout the rules. 4e's "exception-based" design means that there are no neat little packages. Everything is off on it's own. Which makes customizing easier, but makes a lot more gaps that I need to fill in. If I say a character is a "dwarf," he might be a specific monster, but he might also be a specific kind of NPC, or companion character, or even PC, and in each situation, he'll have different rules for what he can do. Small size means something slightly different for a monster than it does for a party member. I miss having the game do that work for me, and giving me consistent answers. I think this is my major "disconnect" with the claim that 4e is a DM's haven. For me, doing more work to try and keep some sort of internal consistency between my game elements is a huge mental load is a much bigger task than I was asked to do in 3e, and it's busywork that I don't really want to do. So I miss that, even though there's a lot of aspects of 4e that I do like.</blockquote>

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