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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Plane Sailing" data-source="post: 4850365" data-attributes="member: 114">Do take a deep breath, everybody.Feel free to discuss things with evilbob, but even if you feel it, don't make an effort to 'correct' him.FWIW, I agree with many of the points which he is making here relating to 4e as a system. I've come to the conclusion that in the game which I run I just use PHB1 and nothing else at the moment. A chap who runs a game I play in uses everything.In the past, to me, D&D was the go-to game for a basic 'fit any genre' kind of game. Now I find that it does a '4e genre' game pretty well, but trying to use it as the basis for any of the genres that I used to use D&D for turns out badly, so I've given up on that and turned to other systems (which is working out OK for me too).I think that an underlying issue which evilbob touches on but which isn't actually being discussed is the difference betweena) the clear mathematics which they are using for relating attacks and defences to levelb) the relatively arbitrary way in which powers are assigned their damage, effects and level etc. This affects powers and magic item power/properties It is the latter issue which seems to be at the bottom of a number of the issues evilbob has identified for himself. Nothing has been published about the way in which powers are graded, and the regular appearance of "say what?" powers suggests that WotC may not actually have their own secret sauce guidelines either, and that things are decided by rule of thumb. Who knows? I don't, but it seems that way.This is actually in quite a lot of contrast with 3e and earlier editions where it was normally pretty obvious what level most spells would be, and although some might end up underpowered for their level, not many were overpowered for their level.It would be interesting and instructive to break down all the powers and consider the combination of things which are seen in powers - in terms of # of [W] dice, number of fixed dice, size of fixed dice, number of attacks, number of targets, burst/blast radius, number and type of keywords, type of condition, duration of condition and such. It may be that there is no discernible pattern (which would indicate a problem to me, especially as so much effort went into "sorting out the math"), it might be that there are some clear patterns and a few outliers, which would be interesting.One of the things that seemed obvious to me during 3e's evolution is that some things were set up with implied checks and balances in the core books and later books developed aspects but ignored the implied checks and balances (e.g. Conjuration spells ignore spell resistance, but do lower damage in the 3e core books. Then supplements appeared with spells labelled as conjuration so that they ignore spell resistance but were doing xd6 damage just like the evocation spells they effectively superceded... ignoring the original inherent balancing factor and in the process devaluing the evocation school).I think that there is a thoughtful conversation which can be had by engaging with some of the underlying issues here.Regards</blockquote>

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