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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cadfan" data-source="post: 4776277" data-attributes="member: 40961">1. Both 3e and 4e can make a werewolf bard.  But beware.  The 4e werewolf bard will perhaps be less werewolf-y than you might prefer, and the 3e werewolf bard will suck.  4e might work for your werewolf bard depending on how loose you are with your definitions, though.  Druids can shapeshift, and this can represent a wolf form, and you can multiclass druid and bard (or hybrid when the rules come out for it). 2. If you're new, start playing with an edition that's actively supported.  That means either 4e or Pathfinder.  Pathfinder is kind of like 3e, except modified a bit.  Its hard to say how good it is because it doesn't fully exist yet. 3. 3e cares more about proper process, even if it leads to stupid results.  4e cares more about proper results, even if they're most easily obtained through a trite process.   By this I mean: 3e tried to come up with "realistic" procedures by which things occurred.  Then it applied fantasy and 20+ levels of character advancement to them, until you end up with ridiculous outcomes.  For example, 3e came up with "realistic" rules for tripping people.  You can try it as often in a fight as you like, since obviously you never forget how to trip someone.  You have to "get" them first, so you make a touch attack (an attack that ignores armor, since armor doesn't stop you from getting knocked over).  Then you make an opposed check, weighing how strong you are versus either how strong they are, or how agile they are, representing them keeping their feet through strength or agility.  If you succeed, they fall over.  Ok, fair enough.  Now add extra abilities that happen when you trip someone, and a character built with a laser focus on tripping well.  Pretty soon that character enters every fight with one goal in mind- trip every single person in the fight, up to several times in a single turn.  The process was realistic, but the outcome, a farce in which the entire battle becomes a procedural experience of each monster that pc fights getting knocked over and stabbed, then standing back up and hitting the pc, then getting knocked over and stabbed, repeated ad naseum, forever, as long as trippable monsters are around.  And its worse with weapons that let you trip people from far away, then the fight involves the entire enemy force falling over, repeatedly, like a gag involving the three stooges and a dropped sack of marbles.  Realistic process led to unrealistic, warner brothers cartoon like results. 4e cares more about results.  It wants an outcome where a character who knows how to trip someone does it once in a while during a fight, while mixing things up with other attacks.  To get this they went for the quickest, most efficient option.  You have certain attacks you can do only once per fight, or even only once per day.  Some of these might involve tripping someone.  If a fight lasts 7 rounds and you only know how to trip someone with one "per encounter" attack, then the most you can trip someone in that fight is one round out of seven.  On the other rounds you mix it up using your other options, creating a fight that has a believable feel to it- your character might charge one enemy, fight him a bit, and then knock him down and finish him off.  Fairly realistic.  But in terms of process, the feel is not realistic.  You knocked someone down once, and now you can never do it again until the fight is over?  Why?  Did you forget?  How did you forget?  Realistic outcome was generated through unrealistic process. What really matters is which you care about more.  Personally, I care about realistic outcome.  I accept that abstraction is required in a game, and believe that what matters is not the mechanics used to reach the outcome, but rather the events in my imagination.  That means caring about results, not the abstraction used to obtain them.</blockquote>

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