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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6431546" data-attributes="member: 42582">In my case, I hadn't played very much 3E (and no 3.5) but had played a lot of Rolemaster and a fair bit of RuneQuest and related games, as well as 2nd ed AD&D Skills and Powers points buy, and so was familiar with a variety ways of using mechanics to achieve a variety of RPGing goals both in PC building and action resolution.Coming from that background, 4e seemed (and seems) to me to take the legacy systems of D&D - especially hit points and armour class (which most other classic fantasy RPGs, like RM and RQ, begin by dumping) - and make them consistent, and powerful, and generalised across the game. I also liked its handling of class - another D&D legacy. It makes class the centre of PC build but also connects it even more tightly to stats than the old "prime requisites", and links it to the skill system in a way that brought class archetypes into non-combat resolution.I agree with all this. But for me, when I started playing 4e (Jan 2009) D&D hadn't been primarily about dungeon crawls for nearly 25 years.Since Oriental Adventures (1986) my campaigns - be they mechanically D&D or Rolemaster - have focused on personalities, and politics/religion together with history/cosmology, rather than dungeoncrawls. There has been the odd bit of extended underground exploration over the year - including in my 4e game - but the inability of 4e to (easily) replicate White Plume Mountain or Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan hasn't been an issue for me.When I did run a dungeon crawl, at around 6th level, I was quite happy with how it worked out, but tracking rations and iron spikes wasn't part of it. I merged elements of Night's Dark Terror - burial mounds haunted by undead - with elements of the Sceptre Tower of Spellgard - underground canals, a flooding trap room with a vampire in it, etc - with bits of the online extensions for Thunderspire Labyrinth. And I did get out my graph paper and draw up a map. But the focus was on the action, not the exploration.The ENworld Front Page had the second Perkins quote too, but didn't make it clear that the two went together so tightly.Also, I should add that I wasn't meaning to bag Perkins. I don't know much about him other than his advice column on the old WotC website, which made him look like a pretty good GM, and some videos of him GMing (the famous "Darkfire can't target non-creatures" one), in which I don't think he came across quite as well.I'd be surprised if he dislikes 4e, given he seems to have spent a lot of time and effort GMing it, but you never know - he wouldn't be the first person to hate his job! But even if he did, as apparently Robert J Schwalb does despite having written tons of content for it, that would be his prerogative.I agree that too much malice gets imparted. I tend to seem them as a mixture of marketing - which, as a commercial enterprise, WotC is obliged to undertake - that draws upon the sort of in-group criticism you describe. For instance, when Mearls talks about "shouting hands back on", I think of that as a throw-away line. But I also think that it's a throw-away line that is intended to resonate with a certain part of his audience - namely, that part which don't like inspirational healing. That's the marketing aspect.What can frustrate me a little bit about that sort of remark is because there will always be posters out there who treat it as a reason rather than as a throw-away line. And if someone is going to say that inspirational healing shouldn't be part of the game because "you can't shout a hand back on" - that is, if someone puts it forward as an actual reason in favour of some rules element rather than another - then I find it hard to resist pointing out the obvious, namely that the passage of time can't grow a hand back on either (if you're a human being), and hence that recovery from severed limbs doesn't provide any sort of basis for preferring "passage of time" healing to inspirational healing.</blockquote>

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