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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Voss" data-source="post: 4005943" data-attributes="member: 57593">i don't know about this one.  I've seen a fair amount of conflicting statements that people think its more like BXCMI, or 1e or 2e or this or that or some other thing.  For myself, some of it reads like the bad days of Gygaxian nonsense of inexplicable multilevel dungeons parked next to the Town of Shopping District, and its just combat over and over again, until you have to stop to heal and sell your loot.  Maybe with a few inexplicable traps thrown in. I'm also not sure what 'contemporary' roleplaying means.  Kids today don't seem to do much in the way of actual roleplaying.  Either their prepainted crappy minis are hurling d20s at each other, or they are bleeding to death from papercuts inflicted by Naruto cards used as fake shuriken.  See, thats the thing. I've heard nothing about things like that, its thats exactly the kind of thing I want to hear about.  All I really care about is the mechanics, because if I run a game, I'm going to flush their shoddy fluff (and several of the core races) down the toilet.  Meanwhile, some of the mechanics I have seen strike me as fairly gamist, and seem to  remind the players that they're moving miniatures around, and playing more of a boardgame than a roleplaying game.  The paladin smites are a good example.  There isn't a reason why someone gets a AC bonus, just a feeling that someone hit F8 and triggered the red attack and blue shield macro.  This is an instance where there should be flavor (not necessarily fluff), and maybe there is in the actual book, but it was presented to us in a very ugly way.  Like Leiber's skinless ghoul-people.  Yes, Ffahrd can get his game on, but its really, really creepy.Then there is Saga, which is supposedly a major preview of 4e, and to my eyes, truly and deeply broken on a mechanical level.  Talents and feats largely range from 'I win' to 'I suck', with very little middle ground, and character creation is, as far as I can tell, purely an exercise in exploiting the system's mechanical flaws, with role-playing and flavor bleeding out in the hail of auto-fire and frag grenades.  So I'm not sure its headed in a particular direction, but I see a lot of worrisome signposts.</blockquote>

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