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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6066794" data-attributes="member: 42582">I bought the 4e core books when they were released in mid-2008, and started my campaign in Jan 2009 (after my previous, Rolemaster campaign reached its conclusion).I'm happy to accept that I had a deep understanding of the rules (based on reading the books closely, and following  [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION]'s threads on these boards), but I didn't have any play experience with the game when I started GMing it. And I didn't have any trouble getting the sort of game I wanted. (I used Night's Dark Terror, an old B/X modue, as the source for my material.)I think I found 4e easier to understand because to me it signalled a whole host of departures from some traditional ways of playing D&D (like the adventure path or the dungeon/sandbox), and seemed very obviously influenced by indie ideas around thematically laden characters confronted by situations the GM has deliberately designed to speak to those thematic concerns.This was a GMing approach I had stumbled towards on my own over the course of 20-ish years (starting with the mid-80s Oriental Adventures). You have to ignore a lot of traditional GMing advice to get there (for example, a lot of traditional advice lambasts metagaming and emphasises world-building over encounter design). I was helped in understanding what I was trying to do, and subsequently in recognising how 4e could help me do it, by my discovery of The Forge in 2004.I think WotC were too coy in the 4e books, not sufficiently willing to explain how best results from the game required keeping some aspects of the past - like an adventure path, good encounter design matters; like a classic sandbox, player freedom of action is crucial - but abandoning others. For instance, part of the payoff of the ease of monster building and encounter design in 4e is that you don't have to plan out a railroad in adventure path style: you can respond to the players' choices, and the resolution of past scenes, in framing the new ones. And part of the payoff of points-of-light is that it creates a backdrop in which thematically responsive encounters can be framed on the fly without disrupting the verisimilitude of the setting.EDIT: [MENTION=463]S'mon[/MENTION], we cross-posted. Thanks for the kind words. I agree that Chris Perkins' DM Experience column has good stuff in it, but it's a pity that it is confined to that format, which I don't think has the same sort of uptake or impact as a rulebook would.I've never seen DMing for Dummies so didn't know about the cut-and-paste you mention. I can add, though, that the Robin Laws stuff from DMG2 is cut-and-pasted from his HeroQuest revised, and it shows badly: the two games are different enough in their mechanics that adaptation was required to make HQ techniques work in 4e.</blockquote>

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