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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3999353" data-attributes="member: 42582">To summarise: AD&D was not a game you could buy off the shelf and play. Being descended from wargames, it was aimed (at least initially and primarily) at those who were used to committing the sort of time and effort in rules mastery and rules modification that old-fashioned wargames and board games required.3E was closer to a game you could just buy and play, except that it lacked a world in which to run one's PC once build. 4e will overcome this lack, plus support an introductory GMing style through the quite clever conceit of PoL. Everything else being equal, these increases in playability sound to me like improvements to the game.By moving flavour and campaign into the PHB, it looks to make the game more playable. And because the flavour and campaign is PoL, it will almost guarantee GM creativity, whilst facilitating the evolution of that creativity and discouraging canon-mongering.I don't play WoW, although I've got a general idea of how WoW, EQ etc play. I don't get the sense that 4e will necessarily play in the same way: there is nothing about a PoL setting, for example, or about the character build or action resolution rules (as leaked so far), that suggests that the main focus of the game will be on well-defined raids and scavenging loot-drops. Nor is there anything that suggests that character development, and interacting with the campaign world's thematic elements, won't be an important part of the game (as Skeptic has said in a post above, high-exploration gamism).For me, a more interesting comparison would be with T&T - one of the more successful of the old-school gamist RPGs. For example, the new rules for encounter design (add up XP values until you have the requisite total) in some ways resemble the T&T method of just bundling monsters together and adding up their monster ratings to determine total dice of damage. But whereas T&T was very light-hearted, 4e looks to be more serious in tone - PoL is rather sombre, for example.Will the designers meet the challenge of combining complex mechanical gamism - which naturally draws the focus away from the gameworld and onto the rules - with a high degree of exploration of a sombre world - which can distract from the sort of competitve focus that D&D gamist play has historically tended to generate?</blockquote>

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