My take.

[Doug McCrae]

What am I missing?

The 3.5 PHB version.

 

[Simplicity]

Oh, and the reason 6 hours of rest heals all wounds is that regardless of how many barriers the game system puts into resting, players don't go forward with the adventure until they are at full resources. If it required a week of rest, players would be resting for a week half way through a dungeon. Rather than breaking every adventure out there whenever players run into trouble, it's easier to make the bar low for parties to heal up. You can believe that a player can get 4x hp in healing surges a day, but not that 6 hours of rest can heal them?

Also, just because the PCs get this, doesn't mean that NPCs do.

 

[ferratus]

Bah. It shouldn't come with baggage we don't want. There's a happy medium between 3e's preponderance of skills and allowing barbarians to ballroom dance because they have a high Dex.

Well, I'd be happy to hear what that is. If you handle everything by ability checks for example, it amounts to much the same game mechanic.

I just know I don't want to blow ranks in knowledge (nobility) or Craft (brewing) or Profession (sailor) if I never get a chance to use it. Giving away free skill points (as background points or something) didn't quite solve the problem because it was still scattershot whether you would get to use your skills or not. I'd rather have a little extra spice and do some neat things as opportunities present themselves. For example, if I'm playing Age of Worms and I'm trying to socialize in the High Society of Prince Zeech's court, then why not let everyone have a go and trying to be good at it? It would certainly be nice as a change of pace. I'm sure a player who is determined to be an obnoxious, drunken, frothing barbarian with no social graces will just not bother to roll, or take a -15 circumstance bonus. That's actually a good simulation of life actually. People could behave better if they put the effort into it, but just don't bother to.

My issue lies mainly with the fact that we can see how Achilles and Odysseus are different in the fray, but once the war is over, they begin to look boringly similar.

Well, outside of combat Achilles and Odysseus are rather similar, but I get your point. I think that people will be defined by what they do well, rather than what they do half decently. When you had a bard in the party, nobody cared that the paladin had Diplomacy too. I think that will likely be the case with overlapping skills in 4e. Odysseus trained in Diplomacy. Achilles can do a little diplomacy (such as the scene with Priam) but usually he is just a pushy loudmouth, so he has more scenes like the ones where he berates Agamemmnon and stomps off sulking.

 

[Derren]

I'm sorry, but I find this to be a terrible argument. The OP suggests that 4e is such a good tactical game that it can't be a good roleplaying game because everything will tend to devolve into tactics. You're basically calling 4e bad because the game designers did a good job with combat. Looking at the converse of your argument, if this were true, it would imply that all good roleplaying games then must have annoying combat mechanics in order to avoid encouraging players from fighting. Ummmm... no.

That the game has a good tactical combat system is not the problem. The problem is that in order to achieve such a good tactical system the game sacrifices too much believability.

 

[The Little Raven]

10x10' Face horses... none of those existed in the 3.0 core rules.

5'x10' horses were a violation of the very rules 3.0 presented, since facing was nonexistent and having to align your horse either horizontally (either facing west or east) or vertically (either facing north or south) implied facing. So, yeah, introducing in your core a number of creatures that directly violate your "no facing in this system" premise is a huge oversight.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Please enlighten yourself.

So because you're borrowing (and expanding upon) someone else's bad example, it's OK?

I don't really care all that much, but using examples that look like they are about the problem that weak, Jewish men look tougher than young (Austrian?) men doesn't seem all that productive.

 

[Lackhand]

So because you're borrowing (and expanding upon) someone else's bad example, it's OK?

Exactly.

You don't understand how badass Cohen's Silver Horde is, do you?

 

[Kwalish Kid]

Just a couple of scientific points.

Such things exist in the real world, too.
The Relativity Theory and the Quantum Theory both give a model of our world. The Relativity Theory on the larger scale (big masses, spacetime), the Quantum Theory on the smaller scale (atoms, quarks). Both are part of the scientific model of our reality, and unfortunately, are are at odds if you try to to apply the rules of the one to the stuff described by the other.

Most of quantum theory includes the special theory of relativity. It is in the general theory of relativity that cannot be made into a quantized theory in a generally acceptable way.

Another example of such "dualistic" explainations might be the particle/wave duality of small parts. You can use the model of particles or the model of wave to describe them both, depending on when you want to describe them.
There are elemental particles/wave for the electromagnetic force and the weak and strong nuclear forces. Quantum Theories tell us that, that at a certain (high) energy level, these three "thingies" turn out to be the same particle. (Super Symmetry)

Quantum theory tells us that these entities are quanta and neither particles nor waves. This is not directly related to the idea of supersymmetry.

However, the general idea that there are scientific levels of description that are different yet are still equally valuable, depending on the application, is a good one.

 

[hong]

Quantum theory tells us that these entities are quanta

Quantae.

 

[PeterWeller]

4E makes a nice miniature game but to roleplay in a believable world you have to ignore much more inconsistencies and silliness than in 3E.

I hate this argument because it assumes that roleplaying has to take place in a "believable" world. Now, I'm pretty sure you mean internally consistent more than you mean realistic when you say, "believable," but still, the argument stands, why do you give two craps about believability when you're shooting magic lasers at dragons? Dungeons & Dragons is a game about heroic adventures. I think you burden that when you try to make the world too believable. In fact, I feel it's detrimental to roleplaying a heroic adventurer when you strive for believability because then you spend you're time concerning yourself with banalities instead of pretending you're an adventurer or creating heroic narratives and situations. The 3E focus on modeling everything with rules was detrimental to DMing because it forced you to think about how stuff would work with the rules instead of providing a framework with which to develop interesting and exciting stuff. I think you're own thread about magic-less dragons illustrated this nicely. You ended up pigeon holing a lot of really great ideas because they wouldn't "work."

It looks to me that while 3E made an attempt to consistently model a world where fantastic adventures could take place, it ended up failing at both of these because focusing the rules around the former ended up actually limiting the latter, and now 4E is trying to simply model fantastic actions and letting the whole, "so, just how does all this interact, actually?" bit slip back into the background. This appears to be a return to earlier editions. In fact, aside from the changes to healing and magic, 4E looks more like TSR's editions than 3E.