NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6361358" data-attributes="member: 996">I'll try not to reply to everything... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> It is when the differentiation has no basis in anything definable, but, instead, always comes down along edition war lines. That's a real danger, so what am I missing? The system mastery in 4e is both minimal in impact and has a sort of 'floor' at which it's just dead easy.  The class descriptions come right out and tell you how to do a 'build,' rather than keeping it a secret or intentionally misleading you to 'reward system mastery' when you figure it out.  I'm not sure how I'm missing a way the tactical side is that different - one of the occasionally voiced complaints about 4e is that the powers and such work too easily.  You can power through DR, you can expect your power to work on most creatures in most circumstances. Things like that.  Those are ways in which tactical (and strategic) mis-steps are less severely 'punished.' That was rather easily explained in 4 sentences, so I'm not seeing the steep and long learning curve.  There's certainly some depth to it, but the payoff of mastery isn't so great that you /need/ it the way you might have in 3.x (I say might have, because it could really vary by campaign), and learning the basics doesn't take much.   Yeah, I can see that.  Can't empathize with the 'should' because that would have been such a frustratingly slow and incremental approach for a game already flirting with with irrelevance, but I can certainly see it.  To me, it just ends up feeling nostalgic. Which, at my age, is actually quite nice.     I'd be delighted if subjectivity could just be accepted as such.  The real rabbit holes open up when someone starts trying to justify their wholly-subjective opinion.... There's a reason they call the area between the trenches 'no man's land.'  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> It is a tempting thing to try to figure out, I acknowledge.  If it could be kept wholly accademic, it'd be worthwhile.  But, such theories get turned into excuses for the kinds of excesses we saw in the edition war.  It's one of the many sad things about that conflict.  Not really credible, no.  Thing is, I saw that happen with /every/ edition.  There were always hold-outs.  Then, we find out from that Dancey fellow what 4e was trying to accomplish, and the 'failure' makes sense.  Then it comes out that DDI was torpedoed by human tragedy.  The pieces fall into place.It's not like it doesn't happen all the time. Something will be brought to wrong market, or at the wrong time, or have the wrong backer or the wrong expectations or myriad other factors, and, while there are some good points to it, it'll be a failure on some business level.   Obviously it''s hard to say 'failure' without some value judgement being applied.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  There's a converse problem, because, no matter how hard I try to make it clear I'm only speaking of mechanical minutiae and technical properties, using the word 'better' in a sentence with 4e is going to apply some value judgement.  And, all the weasel-words get in the way of making a point.</blockquote>

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