According to many people (not all, I grant you) recreating the BECMI feeling with 4e is not that easy.
4e changed both the sensibilities and the mechanics.
Combats are a lot more complex, at least as complex as those with 3.5, and take a lot more time.
The core of BECMI was simplicity - there are some very good OSR games that do a much better job of recreating that BECMI feel than either 3.X or 4e - DCC comes to mind, in particular.
Both 3.X and 4e are complex games, 3.X is complex across the board while 4e focused on combat.
Dozens of powers and abilities, many with nearly identical mechanics but different names, the ability to push, pull, and otherwise maneuver the enemy models around the board. (Remember when WotC tried to claim that what they really meant by 4e not being in the works was that a 4e that requires miniatures was not in the works? By and large... they were either lying, or failed miserably in the attempt to limit the use of minis.)
So, not BECMI, by any stretch. I am not saying that 4e is a bad game, not my cuppa, but enough people like the thing that trying to claim that it has no good points would be an exercise in futility, and silly to boot.
Nor am I claiming that you aren't running a BECMI style game with it - if you are then good on you! Make the game your own! I am merely saying that the BECMI style is not intrinsic to the game, and it would take a fair amount of effort to do so. A good DM can do an awful lot of stuff by thinking outside the books.
Well, of course everyone brings their own thing to the game. But the main sensibility of BECMI/RC that I mean here is that you do bring your own thing to the game, and
that is what becomes determinant. We've had a lot of talk about what D&D is. To get to the core of my point, let me make some radical statements about what D&D is not:
- Not extensive backgrounds on every NPC.
- Not "long adventures" where you follow along while the DM tells some NPC bard's story.
- Not "kits".
- Not "Merchants and Mayhem".
- Not a long campaign in Ravenloft or Athas or sailing a Spelljammer.
- And sure as bloody hell not a Jane Austen novel.
- Not crafting rules for your character.
- Not prestige classes to join an organization.
- Not feats that prohibit normal things that your character can do unless you have them.
- Not equipment balancing by setting an expected amount by GP value.
- Not building every PC and NPC and monster with common rules.
- Not stat blocks that take up 3/4 of the page.
- Not "templates" that require refiguring the stats of the monsters.
- Not "powers" for every character.
- Not tielflings and dragonborn before gnomes and the world assumptions that go with them. (An example of a more pervasive problem of trading one "not D&D" thing for some other "not D&D" thing--as if mere change was useful.)
- Not even more "feats".
- Not the improvisational theatre version of always finding a way to say yes to anything the players suggest or making sure that they "win".
- Not decently design but poorly explained "narrative" RPG techniques.
- Not the "Big Wheel" or Sigil or the 4E planar cosmology or any other default planar layout.
- Not any given set of "alignments".
I'm sure I left something out, too.
And don't get me wrong. Across all of D&D play, people have done all of those things with D&D--even the Jane Austen novel--and had a blast doing it. More power to them. I've even enjoyed some of them myself. Plus, I think some of those things are objectively less trouble than others to the core sensibility--flexibility being useful in and off itself. And in fairness, once you start making that kind of list, you must also include things such as, "Wizards not using swords for arbitrary reasons," and even D&D's version of "Vancian magic"--though that last is borderline. Get too strict, and we'd nullify D&D down to nothing. But this is a list about the center of a sensibility, not a philosophical treatise.
And every last one of those things, some official author for TSR or WotC has added to D&D at some point--directly, or by implication. This "kruft" that has accumulated around the center has become, for a lot of people, what "D&D is". But it ain't, no matter how much that might be close enough to the truth for them personally. And again in fairness, one of the reasons that it did, was because those same people often
wanted D&D to become one of those things. And official stamp goes a long way, ever since Gygax made his twin injunction about running your game, but it wasn't official D&D if you strayed too far from AD&D rules.
Even then, we were building up "Gygax's houserules" around the core of D&D. Which is hardly surprising, since the core is a sensibility instead of a hard thing you can pin down exactly, and someone's version of the house rules had to get published, if it were to get published at all. But those grappling rules in AD&D 1st ed? And the psionics? They weren't D&D, either.
So I hardly think that Mike and Monte and company will be flawless with their execution. It is the nature of the beast. But both have demonstrated the ability to really break D&D down into its real parts, and then reassemble those parts in interesting ways--that ends up being not exactly D&D, but something a whole lot like it and fun too. In fact, you could say both of them have been part of such an effort at least twice (Monte--3E, Arcana Evolved, Mike--Iron Heroes, 4E).
Whether they can convey some of that essential core in a modular fashion that will attract fans of some of those different aspects above, is another question. That's a much tougher beast. RC wasn't perfect, either. But there was a product when a designer got pretty close to subsuming his own house rules for the core sensibility.
