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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5889096" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, that is always an interesting question. Of course it is sort of a kind of 'slippery slope' sort of thing. Eventually there's a point where anyone will start to feel that they're not playing D&D anymore. Of course that point is going to be different for everyone. I can only guess where that line is for me. For me 4e is still in the realm of D&D. It has basically the same classes, races, hit points that work pretty much like they always did, combat isn't that much different basically. The genre and feel are pretty close overall. I think a 5e that was largely a tweaked 4e would likely be even closer in feel to older editions without any radical mechanical changes. Personally I don't have a huge need for anything to change a whole lot, most of it worked well enough. I look at it as a 'complexity budget'. Players only have so much mental bandwidth to dedicate. What 4e did was streamline a LOT of the mechanics and thus reduce the workload on people at the table, shift it to activities and times where it was easier to deal with, and just generally make things easier on everyone. Then they had a good chunk of that budget freed up which they could spend on more complex character features, tactical combat options, etc. The upshot being unless there's something clearly to be gained by adding to the complexity of the skill system I'd rather see that budget dedicated to more story-centered activity. I think in fact that they have a big opportunity to back off a bit on the tactical stuff some and just make the game easier and quicker to play. With the nicely optimized core mechanics they have now that shouldn't be hard at all.</blockquote>Unfortunately its not always the same designers that carry through to create the newer editions. But even with all that knowledge and learning - you have to ask yourself that if it was as you say, why did 4E fall short in certain aspects when all that knowledge and learning from previous editions was at their fingertips already? (And just for all you trolls remember I play 4E).[/quote]I'm not sure 4e falls short for any reason that is closely related to the mechanics in a general sense. My feeling is that 4e's issues have more to do with a presentation that doesn't please a lot of players and some tuning issues. The whole combat thing for instance. I can think of very easy ways to make combat go 2x as fast, which easily puts it in the same league with even Basic on that score. This wouldn't even require abandoning tactical combat (though a simpler abstract combat system is a reasonable add-on). 4e is a pretty hefty redesign of the game. I think the main lesson to be learned is that it is tough to do that and exactly hit the narrow target of being 'just like edition X' in one shot. It takes an iteration to get everything exactly right. I don't think that invalidates the design decisions made with 4e in general. There doesn't seem to me to be any huge issue standing in the way of an iteration of 4e being a very good game and meeting a lot of the general play expectations of say AD&D players. Personally I don't advocate leaving any of the existing subsystems behind. I think 'forging ahead' at THIS point in time is ideally a fairly restrained iterative process. We have a system that generally works quite well. Where it has issues they seem to have very little to do with failings of mechanics. They're more in the realm of things like "the numbers for monsters don't feel quite right" and such.  Meh, I was never that impressed with WW's system. It is a matter of taste mostly perhaps, but OWoD at least certainly had deep systematic issues. I've no experience at all with NWoD, so I don't know how many things were dealt with. I feel pretty confident that decent game designers can hammer a 4e iteration into a very solid system that would be hard to top for the style of game that it represents.[/QUOTE]

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