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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 6262001" data-attributes="member: 5143">See, that's the thing, I don't think our tastes are completely different.  When 3.0 came out, I embraced it like crazy.  I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.  Feats and multiclassing let you create precisely the character you wanted to create.  There were more options as a fighter than simply "I attack" every round.  It felt like "grown up" D&D.  And I kept that feeling for a LONG time.  I think if I didn't play as much as I did, I might still feel that way.The problem is, I don't play D&D casually.  I play D&D a LOT.  I volunteered for WOTC as a campaign admin in Living Greyhawk.  I ran a Living Greyhawk game's day every Saturday then I ran Living Greyhawk adventures a couple of times a week in addition to having a home game once a week.  I also traveled a couple of times a year to go to conventions just to get more play experiences in as well as running a couple of our own.As time went on and the characters in my home game passed about level 10 and so did our main characters in Living Greyhawk, each game I ran became harder and harder to DM.  I actually sat down and realized our sessions were not about the plot or the adventures anymore.  None of my friends even cared if they played the next part of an adventure series because they didn't care whatsoever about the plot or story of the game.  Our in-between game chat was almost always centered on game mechanics and how to abuse them.  Our IN GAME chat was centered on game mechanics.  Discussions about "What feat should I take next level?" and "What do you think of this build for my next character?" were way more common than any discussion about what was actually happening in the game.  Each round was filled with talk like the one I posted earlier in the thread, constantly going through checklists in our mind and out loud to make sure people followed the rules precisely and didn't forget anything.  Constantly trying to outsmart the other players and the DM and prove we knew the rules better than everyone else....and trying to prove that our particular character build was better than everyone else's.  Lots of "Look at this, because I have feat X, I knock the enemy prone.  But because I have feat Y they can't get up without making a Balance check when within 10 feet of me.  The Balance check DC is based on my Strength and my character has a 32 Strength because I put all my points into it and I have +2 for my race and then I got a +6 stat enhancer. So most enemies have to make a natural 20 to stand up.  Then I have a class feature that says enemies take my strength mod in damage when they start their turns prone within 10 feet of me.  Isn't that awesome?!?!"The longer it went on, the more of a chore it became running D&D games.  It's likely the enemies wouldn't do anything at all because the PC's Uber-Combos of rules bending were built in such a way that non-custom monsters designed to defeat their tactics would simply lose.  So, I was running through the motions of running combats that were impossible for the PCs to lose to while they spent all their time talking about how great their combos were and about whether their next great idea would work "technically" according to the rules.I remembered back to my first game of D&D in 2e and about how interested I was in playing a game where it felt like I was really IN the fantasy world.  Where I got to experience a world of dungeons and dragons from the point of view of my own character.  I remember the wonder associated with it.  We had no immersion in 3.5e at all.  The focus of the game was entirely on game mechanics.That wasn't the case when we played 2e.  There weren't enough rules for people to constantly discuss.  There were a lot of rules issues, don't get me wrong and 3e/3.5e/4e did a lot of work finding a proper balance for the game and came up with a lot of good ideas if applied back to 2e to fix all of its rules issues would make a great game again.  That's the feeling I've been getting since I started running and playing D&D Next.  There's virtually no game mechanic talk at the table anymore.  We discuss the plot and what our characters think instead of what would be tactically optimal according to the rules(although we do have one player who complains relentlessly because that was the part of the game he enjoyed the most and his attempts to do so in D&D Next have been met with failure).</blockquote>

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