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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 5503709" data-attributes="member: 11999">The point was that it's not as ridiculous as it may first sound.Consider these points about my gaming group:1.  We play one four-hour session roughly every other weekend.  The Christmas holiday season tends to be busy, so we take a hiatus for about 4 weeks (missing 2 sessions).  Real life interferes about once every couple of months, so we'll lose another 6 sessions throughout the year.  That leaves us with about 18 game sessions over the course of a year.2.  3rd Edition assumes 13 to 14 level-appropriate encounters in order to acquire enough XP to advance one level.  4th Edition drops this to 12, I think.  For simplicity, I'm going to assume 12 encounters to advance a level in either edition.  If we can get in 4 encounters per session, then it will take 3 sessions to advance in level.  This means that the party will just be reaching 7th level by the end of one year of play.  Four encounters per four-hour session is pretty optimistic, and won't leave a lot of time for non-combat play, so 6th level after a year is more likely.3.  In 24 years of playing D&D, I've never participated in a campaign that made it longer than one year in length before being disrupted by real-life concerns.  Sometimes you can take a long break and get started again, but in my experience by the time we are able to get started again, half of the players are different and it's been so long that nobody remembers what was happening anyway.Given these facts about how we play, many "problems" are complete non-issues for us.Odds are, we're never going to even hit 10th level, so planning out builds to 20th level is totally irrelevant and unproductive.  If we were to continue with 4e, we'd be unlikely to ever reach Paragon and Epic tiers.  My wife and I have one child and are planning for a second within two years, and that will likely result in a break from gaming that ends the campaign due to #3.I think that the more dedicated gamers among us make very different assumptions about the game and how it plays than do less-invested players.  In my experience, the more casual players aren't paying attention to how their characters objectively stack up to the others in the party.  If they feel like they are contributing and they are having fun, then that's about all that matters.  They don't care if they didn't choose the most optimal feats when leveling up, nor if they chose the most tactically-sound actions in battle.  Your definition as to what is "viable" in the game is going to be different than my wife's, for example.My experienced players aren't really into optimizing, and the casual players certainly don't care.  Yes, the 4e fighter is a terrible beginner character (marks, combat superiority vs combat challenge, etc).  The Slayer is probably the best option for new players.Bringing this back on-topic:  The complexity of building a character is only one aspect of how the game's level of complexity has been increasing over the years.  4th Edition has a much higher degree of front-loaded complexity than does any other version of the game; by that, I mean the minimum level of understanding of how the game works that a new player needs to have in order to sit down and play with a straightforward pre-generated character.I started working through the how this has changed from one edition to the next over the years, but it's a pretty big chunk of text, and I'm not finished yet.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-P" title="Stick out tongue    :-P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":-P" />  (So I'm not simply making an assertion about 4e's front-loaded complexity and not backing it up. )</blockquote>

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