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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4924399" data-attributes="member: 5143">3E was awesome when it came out.  I loved everything about it.  It was an improvement in nearly every way over 2E.  It allowed more customization, there were a lot of cool new powers, there were real rules for grappling people, spells weren't so stupidly powerful, fighters had some real options instead of just attacking over and over again, BAB made way more sense than THACO, there were rules about how many magic items people had instead of guessing how many to hand out.  It was all good.After a while, the seams in the system just started to show.  The same thing will happen with 4e and will cause me to want a 5e and so on.  The more you use something, the more you see the flaws in it.  My cracking point was with 3e was about the time I was running a 17th level wizard with a 16th level fighter against a group of 15th level characters.  They were able to kill the fighter in round one before he acted and grappled the wizard in the same round so he was completely unable to cast spells(not a single spell prepared without somatic components).  Then they slowly beat him him to death with their fists.  It was about as dramatic and heroic as dirt.Once that happened, I couldn't help but see the imbalances between the different PCs in the group, the differences in power level between the PCs and NPCs, the problems with the CR system, the differences between DCs and skill ranks, and so on.Nearly everyone in the group was something like a 1 Barbarian/4 Fighter/10 Frenzied Berzerker or a Dark Template(I think that's what it's called) Human Warlock/Something/Something/Something(all wizard PrCs) who could hide in plain sight at will with such a huge bonus that he couldn't be seen by anything.All I could see every time I played was that it was way too easy for some people to succeed in rolls and way too hard for others.  You were constantly getting into situations where one PC had an automatic success and another one couldn't make it except on a 20.  This applies to saving throws, skill checks, attack rolls, grapple checks, trip checks.  Pretty much everything in the game had so much variation in it that most checks became a "yes or no" rather than a chance to succeed.  There might be a person with a -2 in a skill in the same group as someone with a +60.  There might be someone who had a +5 to hit in a group with someone who had a +35.It was pretty much then that I saw the entire game needed an overhaul to fix those issues.  From the bottom up.  No stone left unturned.And the key things that needed to be changed were anything that let players get too far off the baseline.  Multiclassing, PrC, Feats, Buffing spells, Rolling for random stats, skill ranks, and the like were the main culprits.And it appears that the people at WOTC noticed the same things.  It was the number of options that were actually causing the game to have issues.  So, when I see claims that 4e is too homogeneous, my response is always the same.  Yep.  And that's a good thing compared to the alternative.</blockquote>

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