D&D 4E I want 4E NOW!

[Kzach]

am however pleasantly surprised by the complete lack of flaming in this blatantly flamebait thread by those "Negative Nancys" with there "criticism".

Sorry, that wasn't the intention. Just generally put off by all the arguing and bickering that goes on and thought a bit of positivity wouldn't go astray

He felt like he could no longer just make encounters on the fly without following a bunch of complex rules and formulas. He said that 4e seems like it will go back to his 1e days when he could just make stuff up. Only now there will be an underlying system behind the numbers you come up with for your monsters and NPCs. I haven't seen him this excited about D&D in years.!

This sums me up exactly. I'm one of those people who always ends up DM'ing and generally I thought I wasn't too bad at it. The more I planned, however, the worse a DM I got. For some reason, games only ever went well if I ran them almost totally on the fly.

With 3.x I found that I just couldn't get away with that. Players, although good people and good players, would call me up on this, that or the other little thing about 3.x and it made it so I had to prepare a lot ahead of time.