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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nnms" data-source="post: 5502696" data-attributes="member: 83293">Well the classic one that still has my friend (who was DMing) pissed off is Speak With Dead.  Imagine what modern murder investigations would be like if you had that spell.  That was a pretty blatant "solve mystery" moment.  Looking at the particulars of the spell, in order to compensate for it, a DM would have to either always have murder victims die unaware of their killer, prepare cryptic answers to nullify the spell or have the murderers cast it on the corpse before they leave the scene to confound magical investigation.Now a cleric doesn't have a set spell list like a Wizard that the DM can just read and try to anticipate.  They could prepare any spell available to their level when they pray after resting, so trying to anticipate every possible "gotcha" is a bit more work than many DMs want to do. In this case, Speak With Dead limits the DM to having murder mysteries specifically designed to nullify the spell and cuts them off from using situations that aren't specifically designed to confound the use of that spell. It's enough of a problem for enough DMs that they wanted to make it less of an issue with the latest edition.  All I can say to the above is that I take my hat off to you for some excellent DMing.  And for the more average or casual DM, there are other games on the market. After playing 4E since release, I think that 3.5 with a properly paired down list of feats, spells, items, etc., might actually do a better job at dungeon delving.  4E seems to be better suited for scene based play with hard scene framing focused on a story.  Now you can do that in a dungeon where the exploration bits are simply scene framing.  The 4E Rules Compendium even uses pretty hard scene framing by the DM as an example of how to handle dungeon exploration. I don't know if you've been paying attention to any of the proponents of the "Old School Renaissance" or read any of the Q&A articles with the old guard of the early TSR days on Dragonsfoot.org, but there's definitely very divergent approaches to how to game very, very early on.  In old school dungeon design we have examples of extreme railroads and precursors to the very modern idea of a DM setting up the situation but never the plot.  I know many, many current players of OD&D, BECMI and AD&D would talk about dungeon crawling as the least railroading form of play. Built into BECMI (and other older versions of D&D) was a lot of very different game elements that don't rely fit into this characterization any more than 4E does.I found 4E so refreshing on release because it was more like pre-2E versions of D&D.  Far, far better suited to improv based play and low prep play than 3.x and it's universal system of simulation.  I like it because it supports wildly creative, story/setting exploring, earth shattering type stuff that goes beyond just pushing figures around a battlemap.</blockquote>

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