NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BryonD" data-source="post: 3833994" data-attributes="member: 957">Not to just ride on coat tails, but Orcus rather nicely stated the things that concern me.  When the 4E announcement came out, I was very strongly pro 4E.But I've become concerned that they are stripping all the life and dimension out of the game.  It is like making the game easy for a brand new DM to run by following a script is more important than keeping the world dynamic.  IME the uninitiated will have some bumps in the road, but then they become "truly initiated".  But if everything becomes cookie cutter then the ability to learn and grow will be undercut.  And the ability for good dms to really work the system will be diminished. Those "story things" are an important part of what makes the game.  I heard the same type comment in the last podcast when someone said something to the effect of "only a really good DM could make a fight with orcs different than a fight with gnolls."  I'm all for helping new DMs learn.  But if the plan, as it sounds, is to build into the system "the way" that gnolls fight, then you might move a new DM up to a 3 from a 1 on the gaming quality scale, but you just might lower the top threshold from 10 down to 7.  And, IMO, even if you turned 1s into 5s and the only cost was turning 10s into 9s, that would be too grave a price.  If someone has the potential and desire to be a good DM, they will get there.  And usually it doesn't take all that much experience.  I would jump at a chance to play in a D&D game DMed by Piratecat.   If the game was Descent, then it wouldn't really matter much to me who was running the game.  Descent is fun, but no game of Descent, no matter how well played, is ever going to be as fun as a really well run game of D&D.   I'm not claiming that 4E will be like Descent.  That is just an extreme example.  But any motion in that direction sounds quite bad.Here is hoping I'm worried about nothing.  But the statements so far have created this concern.</blockquote>

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