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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6249767" data-attributes="member: 2067">Who mentioned THAT little gem? Most of the time when I hear "denigrating 3e," the thing that is trotted out is the troll-poo cartoon. [sblock=digression!]But while I think a lot of cries about 4e poo-pooing (heh) 3e are kind of hyper-sensitive, 4e did quite reasonably sell itself as an improvement. And in order to be an improvement, it had to be fixing problems. And some of those "problems" weren't problems for everyone -- though the material often spoke as if it was.Wyatt's OTHER quote about D&D not being about traipsing through the faerie rings feels a little more on-point: he was casting non-hostile fey encounters as a PROBLEM, a problem that 4e's concept of the fey would fix. That quite obviously isn't a problem for everyone.To pull something else random out of the aether (and to spread the responsibility around -- Wyatt wasn't the only hand in 4e, though some of his quotes are especially narm-worthy), <a href="http://www.wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/drdd/20070924" target="_blank">this article about demons and devils by Chris Sims</a> spoke as if the similarity between demons and devils was something obvious and was obviously a problem, a problem that 4e meant to solve. Tell that to someone who'd been using a lot of planar material before 4e, and I don't think you would've found a big problem (let alone one that embraced re-assigning succubi as a solution). I'm not saying early 4e material trash-talked 3e, really. But when you fix problems that aren't actually problems, it comes off as judgmental -- "Oh, I threw out that old ratty T-shirt for you (that you actually kept because it reminded you of your sick father)." Oh, I fixed Fey for you (that you actually enjoyed RPing with). Oh, I fixed demons and devils for you (that you never had a problem distinguishing before). Wait, you liked things how they were? But it had all these problems!In development, 4e's guiding lights seemed to kind of occasionally forget that all D&D games are hyper-local experiences, that not everyone has the same problems or plays the same way. Which can totally seem like trash-talking. "Oh, looks like 4e agreed with everything all the haters are saying!" It's not -- not really -- but I get why some folks might get that impression, and it's not just because Wyatt one-offed a bit of misguided Fun Policing. It's a bit deeper than that, I think. [/sblock]</blockquote>

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