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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 4583783" data-attributes="member: 22779">Honestly, I think the primary difference is philisophical.  4e attempts to focus on the adventure.  The rules are a spotlight with the PC's smack dab in the center.  Everthing outside that circle of light illuminating the PC's possible actions is pretty much left entirely up to DM's fiat.  3e, as has been mentioned, took a different approach and tried to provide comprehensive rules that would cover not only what the PC's did but, governed what everything in the world did.  ((Thus the whole "Rules as Physics" concept)).Probably the best illustration of this is in the minion rules.  Minions are simply 1 hit point monsters that die when hit.  They have all or most of the power of an equivalent level monster - attack bonus, damage, etc - but, they die when someone sneezes very hard at them.  Critics of this approach often question how such a member of a species could survive, after all, if it falls off a horse, it automatically dies, which, I think we'd all agree, would be silly.This is a very 3e approach to the rules though.  A creature in 3e that has 1 hit point has 1 hit point at all times and you get strange results like housecats being able to murder commoners.  4e ejects this line of thinking entirely.  It's not that a minion has variable hit points depending on the PC's, it's that when the PC's aren't around, the minion has no hit points at all.  It has no mechanics at all.  It dies if the DM decides it dies and lives if the DM decides that it lives.  It has no independent existence at all.I think this, more than anything else, fuels the disagreements between 4e detractors and proponents.  If you look at the changes made to the cosmologies, settings, and pretty much everything else in 4e, you can boil it down to changes made to make the game easier to play and run.  Everything is done in service to the adventure and the PC's, not geared toward world building.That's my 2cp anyway.</blockquote>

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