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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8985166" data-attributes="member: 42582">4e has issues with feats. It has issues with AC - eg Barbarians get an ad hoc AC buff to reflect the fact they don't have INT or DEX as a core stat but are a light armour class; but then Primal Power has a DEX-based sub-class that makes the ad hoc AC buff unnecessary. There is power bloat, weapon bloat, etc.But all of this is fixable, in the reality of play, either by ignoring and/or editing-on-the-run, or by obvious just-in-time fixes. (Eg just houserule to solve the barbarian AC problem).There are, in my view, two deep structural problems with 4e D&amp;D.One is that the skills math and the combat maths are not the same. This gets worse as levels grow, and the gaps get bigger. It shows up in stat blocks for monsters and NPCs with weak skill bonuses; in the fact that using skills against defences is not mathematically smooth; etc.The second is related: there is no smooth interface between the concrete elements of combat resolution (turn-by-turn resolution in a tight ingame time frame; plus tight tracking of physical location using squares-per-turn movement rates) and the abstraction of skill challenge resolution.Fixing the former requires changing the maths, which in turn breaks compatibility. I don't have a good sense of what fixing the latter would look like.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8985166, member: 42582"] 4e has issues with feats. It has issues with AC - eg Barbarians get an ad hoc AC buff to reflect the fact they don't have INT or DEX as a core stat but are a light armour class; but then Primal Power has a DEX-based sub-class that makes the ad hoc AC buff unnecessary. There is power bloat, weapon bloat, etc. But all of this is fixable, in the reality of play, either by ignoring and/or editing-on-the-run, or by obvious just-in-time fixes. (Eg just houserule to solve the barbarian AC problem). There are, in my view, two deep structural problems with 4e D&D. One is that the skills math and the combat maths are not the same. This gets worse as levels grow, and the gaps get bigger. It shows up in stat blocks for monsters and NPCs with weak skill bonuses; in the fact that using skills against defences is not mathematically smooth; etc. The second is related: there is no smooth interface between the concrete elements of combat resolution (turn-by-turn resolution in a tight ingame time frame; plus tight tracking of physical location using squares-per-turn movement rates) and the abstraction of skill challenge resolution. Fixing the former requires changing the maths, which in turn breaks compatibility. I don't have a good sense of what fixing the latter would look like. [/QUOTE]

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