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Message: <blockquote data-quote="the Jester" data-source="post: 6112519" data-attributes="member: 1210">Just as with any edition, the "feel" really depends on how the group played it.Nonetheless, I would posit that there are a few things that many, perhaps even most, 4e games shared in terms of feel.1. Narrative control is explicitly shared to a degree never before seen in D&D. Powers, both attack and utility, help to let the pcs define the game more than ever before. At the same time, the dm is expected to provide more exciting and fantastic terrain than in previous editions.2. DMs had an easy time of customizing monsters/npcs, and therefore many groups fought a lot of campaign-specific monsters. This ties directly into one of my favorite things about 4e: Its ease of dming and of constructing monsters. This also ties into...3. Combats are exciting and fun. Between the ease of encounter design (c.f. monster roles, monster stats based on level so reliable math) and the heavy emphasis on the tactical elements of the game, 4e does set-piece battles really well. In many groups, however, combat becomes a slog and can really slow down the game. 4. Players tended to use very little homebrewed material like powers, paragon paths and epic destinies. This is not hard and fast, but when there is an otherwise-excellent character builder tool available that simply fails when you use a custom race or paragon path, there is a huge disincentive for players to use such custom material. Exceptions include groups with players willing to disavow the CB and paper & pencil their way through the various bonuses to get their final defense, attack and damage numbers, groups that hack the old offline builder in order to add custom stuff in (my group falls in this category), groups that don't use any of the electronic/online tools at all, etc. But I think there is far less homebrewed material on character sheets these days.5. The official 4e cosmology and lore fit together smoothly, far more smoothly than any pre-Eberron cosmology. Also, the background re: the creation, the Dawn War, etc. is awesome. The whole primordials-vs-gods thing is cool and logical and evokes the classical Titans vs. Gods clash. It all ties together very, very well; however, it does not tie together particularly well with old-skool D&D lore. There are a bajillion places where you really have to work to fit them together, if you are so inclined to do so (perhaps because you have a long-running campaign whose cosmology was already established and you want to keep it consistent while still using the new material as best you can). But the Feywild and Shadowfell as mirrors of the world? Excellent. The Astral Sea and its dominions? Very cool, and logical for a return to spelljamming. And so on.6. The Math is Tight. This makes the game easy to balance at the expense of making it hard to throw a really unpredictable encounter at the pcs. You can feel how tight the math is during play, sometimes, at least as a dm. This one can really be good or bad, depending on how well you can tweak expectations and leave the pcs worried about an encounter.</blockquote>

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