AbdulAlhazred
Legend
lol
Exactly."Rawr! I hate when more games are made to cater to my tastes."
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I don't think we can reasonably say whether this happened or not. They might have agonised over the bits of 3E they chucked out, or they might have done as you suggested, or more likely somewhere in between. (Feel free to quote the preview books at me on this, I haven't read them in a while.That does not mean I am saying 4E should be more like 3E. Only that I think they should have taken more time to explore why the previous team made some of the decisions they in regards to the previous set of rules. Even if they looked at a previous rule and decided they felt it was total crap, I still feel as though taking that little bit of extra time to look at 3E in various stages of its life (beginning, middle, and end) would have lead to a more informed game design process behind 4E.
Complexity doesn't inherently equal good design, but on the other hand I do believe 4E strayed too far from a model built for SW Saga that seemed to work extremely well.I also feel there are a lot of 4E ideas which work well, but aren't used enough. The disease track system is one of them. I feel that a lot of granularity could have been added to the game by using that model for more things. Imagine if a save against mind control was less yes/no; less binary than it currently is. Imagine if you instead had a starting position on a condition track -dazed for sake of example. On your turn you then make some sort of mental roll to resist; if you make the roll you improve; if you fail, perhaps you fall to being stunned.
@Johnny3D3D has made some excellent points on how the final game turned out versus the preview books. I never interpreted PoL as grim'n'gritty and low magic, however. That would've been incredibly unlikely in D&D's default setting.
I started my homebrew campaign with every intention of embracing the PoL concept, but it soon became clear to me that the more I made my campaign fit the idea of D&D that has grown in my head over the last couple of decades, the less like PoL it seemed to become. The points of light themselves were expanding, and the untamed wilderness between them was shrinking, and the truly dangerous bits of my campaign were now on the periphery of a civilized and stable land.
4E itself -- the mechanical framework and its assumptions -- still supports this type of game wonderfully, and we've had years of fun with the game, but the default setting as envisaged in the previous books didn't really came to fruition in my case.
Complexity doesn't inherently equal good design, but on the other hand I do believe 4E strayed too far from a model built for SW Saga that seemed to work extremely well.
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I do believe 4E strayed too far from a model built for SW Saga that seemed to work extremely well.
This is exactly the same problem we had with SWSE. A fun game, but far too often grievious wounds forced the players to take a vacation mid-adventure.4E had the problem with the monsters vs character maths at higher levels (which is mostly fixed now), but Saga had a lot of character vs character issues that just got worse and worse. Saga really missed having healing surges; it was just too easy to take wounds you couldn't heal.