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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zustiur" data-source="post: 4486645" data-attributes="member: 1544">No, it's not doing it for me.It seems to me from reading this whole thread that a lot of the people posting in favour of 4E are the DMs, while a lot of those posting in favour of 3E are the players. This is no small co-incidence. 4E has a major focus on making things fun for the DM, sometimes at the expense of player fun.I'm only playing in 4E, but I looked at DMing, and decided 4E wasn't for me there either. I heavily favour the internal consistency that 3E has with monsters being treated as races, and classes being pasted on top of that. As a player I find the 4E classes extremely restrictive. Instead of feeling I have all these wonderful powers, I feel that the powers are all I have. In 3E I haven't ever felt that I'm restricted to my powers or spells alone. I played 3E yesterday after having played several 4E sessions in a row. Coming back to 3E felt like a kind of bliss. Not only did my character have a wide range of choices, those choices actually had an impact. Too many of the 4E powers feel like a waste of time (especially at-wills, I'd rather just attack normally and forget that the at-wills exist for most classes). Based on the analysis earlier about an extra +1 in your stats being one extra hit per game session, I suspect my at will special features make a difference about once every 2 game sessions. Hardly worth having!A significant portion of complaints I've seen regarding 3E can be cleared up by not using splat books. I've discovered that that every time I add splat books to my games the game gets worse, so I've stopped buying them altogether. Were I to continue with 4E, I think I'd feel compelled to get PHB2 in order to complete the available classes, but this doesn't gel with my anti-splat-book stance.I find no problem with the 'Christmas tree effect' in 3E because as a DM, I control what items are available. Okay, call it a house rule if you will, but this is one of those true 'it plays how you make it play' situations. I'm completely at odds with the magic items being in the player's handbook, precisely because I feel that the majority of magical items should be so straight forward that writing 'longsword +1' on your character sheet should contain all the information you need to use that item. In earlier editions items that did something other than just +X were unusual to say the least. I continued that trend in 3E, but it appears other DMs didn't. 4E seems to be pushing the opposite angle, if it's not '+X and special ability' it doesn't get handed out. Take a look at the 1 level parcels and the likelihood of handing out a sword or armour +1 without abilities attached and you'll see what I mean. In 2E and earlier, items like Flametongue, frostbrand and the girdle of giant strength were seriously rare. Yes, they may have turned up in every campaign, but you only saw one or two throughout that campaingn, you did not get flaming this that and the other every couple of adventures. I believe that if you stick to that mentality the game avoids getting anywhere near as complex.With regards to monsters, I agree that 3E stat blocks are rediculous. This to me is one of the places were 4E had the right idea, but chose the wrong solution. 3.5E took a couple of steps in the right direction, but didn't go far enough. Monsters do need to be less complex, but removing recognizable class structure wasn't the way I'd have gone. I'd prefer to see simplified NPC classes where the creature only gets a few feats to choose, and the rest result in 'toughness' or 'extra ac' and other simple mechanics. Each core class would be represented, but in a simpler form.We know our NPC wizards aren't going to last long, so you don't bother choosing 400 spells they know. You choose enough to give them primary abilities and interest, then you fudge the rest. The monster manual should have done the same to the monsters themselves. From 3.0 to 3.5 this was part of the design philosophy, but clearly they didn't take it far enough to relieve overworked DMs.</blockquote>

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