My honest opinion is that I see 4E actually stressing and emphasizing “coolness” and “combat effectiveness” over player input, thinking and role-playing –- not to mention that DM’s are more-or-less subtly manipulated into thinking that their “job” has become “easier” and requires less work and creative effort than ever before. For example, in 4E, DMs are “able to drop things out of the books” without any pre-play prep work -- is that cool or what? Somehow in my mind this translates as “fostering” or encouraging new DMs to be lazy –- maybe the idea behind this “design goal” is to lower the threshold of DMing, but I see it discouraging improvisation and thinking on a DM’s part (and these skills are –- in my opinion –- quite relevant to being a DM). James Wyatt’s first ‘Dungeoncraft’-article actually seemed to underline the point that the *setting* and *NPCs* are not very relevant –- just steal some ideas and get the ball rolling, and the PCs will take care of the rest. I’d call that “sloppy” DMing. Your own blog also contains a very telling example of this as you said that you don’t want to “waste” time in having to explain things to your players –- if that’s how you generally view DMing chores, I personally wouldn’t want to play in your campaigns (and this is my honest personal opinion/criticism and *not* meant as a deliberate “attack” –- hope you see the difference ). I wish to ask you some questions: it appears that your own “houseruled” version of 3E contains many mechanical aspects from 4E (monster “roles”, "simplified" special abilities, movement rate in ‘squares’, etc.) –- have you always played 3E in a more “simplified” way or did you “playtest” some 4E game mechanics in your recent 3E campaigns? Is 4E how Mike Mearls want to play D&D, or how the majority of us –- or a new generation of gamers -- want to play it? That is the central question here.
See, again, I have to turn that question around to you. I don't like putting a lot of detail into my campaign worlds, but you do. Which of us is right? The answer, to me, is neither, as long as we and our groups have fun.
