Sunderstone said:
It isnt impossible at all. Juts doesnt make much sense to some when half of the rules at the very least are dependant on tactical position (like AoO's the Mobility feat, etc). In that sense I do notice a stronger and stronger pull towards minis with every new edition. 1st and 2nd edition were much easier to run without all this. We used minis very rarely back then, mostly for the important or epic encounters.
I guess its to be somewhat expected as WotC wants to sell their miniatures (the least of which they could do is NOT make them random, but thats a debate for another day).
Bottom Line, it is possible to play 3 or 4E without minis, just doesnt make much sense to as the game has become more of a tactical boardgame than the RPG original. ymmv.
I'm really tired of the "WotC is trying to force us to buy miniatures" line. They've made a game that grants a much wider range of
tactical positioning options, the more options you have, the more beneficial it will be to keep track of those options. This is a fact. WotC saw that their game was moving towards tactical combat, and saw a business opportunity. Plastic minis that I don't have to paint, are theme appropriate, and essentially unbreakable are
awesome and at $1-$2 each they're significantly more affordable than the $5 pewter minis you can buy otherwise (the only reason I don't buy them is because I refuse to purchase "collectibles", but that's a different discussion). But you hardly
need WotC's minis. Considering I've been running D&D for six years with army men, dice, coins, and a box of Hero Quest minis I got from a garage sale and I'd say I'm reaping the benefits of that expansion of tactical options
without giving WotC a dime for minis. On the other hand, Warhammer
requires that you play with Warhammer minis (you can't play in a Warhammer tournament without GW minis, unless you're Orcs) because Games Workshop makes a ton of money off of their minis. So please, stop saying that WotC is trying to force mini purchases.
The D&D rules cover combat almost exclusively. The 3E Player's Handbook has a few pages about social interaction (and one of those pages is the rules text for Gather Information, Bluff, Sense Motive, and Diplomacy, skills that bypass roleplaying with a few die rolls.) Previous editions had even less. Expansion of the rules are, by necessity, going to expand combat abilities and options because those are the rules that exist. Eventually there were going to be enough abilities and options relating to position that it's difficult to apply them all without keeping careful track of positions, that's just a natural evolution of the system.
1E was easier to run because it was
boring, you had no options for what you could do. The actual mechanical system of being a fighter was "Whack things with a stick until they're dead". If the only mechanical reward you get for whacking things with a stick is that you get
better at whacking things with a stick, well that's not that much fun. If you want to do anything beyond whacking things with a stick in 1E, you have to resort to DM fiat and houserules.
I've seen a few longtime 2E DM's (I'm not old enough to have been around when 1E DM's were common) with absolutely
staggering piles of paper full of house rules they have implemented in their games when the basic rules just weren't "enough". The question then comes: if they're house rules created by DM fiat, why write them down? Because if you make arbitrary rulings players will usually deal with it, but if you make
inconsistent rulings the players will try to burn you alive. For me 3E felt like nothing so much as that Williams, Tweet, and Cook piled all their houserules for 2E together and sorted, cleaned up, and organized them for consistency's sake. And it has that same Baroque complexity of rules piled on rules and separate subsystems that those piles of houserules have (trip, disarm, grapple, and sunder all work differently, nauseated, stunned, sickened, shaken, scared are all different effects with weird little niggles like you drop your weapon when sickened, but can't cast spells while nauseated)
The thing made obvious by all these piles of house rules is this:
people like expanded rulesets, either the writers provide the expansion, or the players do it themselves. If you
don't like expanded rulesets, that's cool. But don't go around claiming that 4E has to be as simple as OD&D or else it's somehow
bad, that's just not true. If you like a simple rule system, good for you, if you like a complex rule system, good for you as well. Personally, I don't like 1E, not because it's simple (I love Feng Shui and Savage Worlds, both of which are much simpler than 1E) I don't like 1E because I think it's
bad for a simple game system. I like 3E, and acknowledge it's flaws, and the more I see 4E the more I like it, because even though it's going to be a fairly complex system (fighters can do more than whack things with a stick! The horror!) it's looking to be a
good complex system.
3E made a great leap towards unification just by using a d20 for most things, no more d10 for initiative, d6 to detect secret doors, percentile for hiding in shadows, d20 (roll high) for attacks, d20 (roll low!) for saves and so on. 4E is taking that unification and applying it to the rest of the rules. It's not that 4E is "simpler" than 3E, it's that 4E is making rules that are more balanced and make more sense and so are easier to apply. If the increased complexity of 4E bothers you, then
don't play it. But 4E isn't
trying to be simple, it's trying to be
easier to play, and so criticizing it for being more complex than 1E is missing the point, it's like criticizing a VW Bug for not having enough cargo space, that's not one of the design priorities.
. But try to understand that the OP's arguments are not based on reality in this case, but on poor DM'ing, lack of understanding of things that we know for a fact and personal preferences (which still can't be argued about). He might be right that 4e is not for him, but it might just as well be, because some of the things he complain about, just aren't true.
