Nail said:
My first reaction to 4e coming out was "Oh crap."
Since then, my reaction has mellowed. I'm still not pleased, but I'll look it over when it comes out (and I'll wait until next August, and not fall for any of this "preview" and "quickstart" garbage).
I'm almost to the state now where I hope 4e will be
good.
Give me some more time....
My first reaction was:
Cool!
I think the reason was because I liked the mechanics for the Star Wars game so well and suspected that 4E would have similar well thought out mechanics.
I like good game mechanics. I loathe poor ones. And although 3.5 improved upon 3E, it still left a lot of clunky mechanics like Turn Undead in the game system.
Another thing I like, which I know many other people do not like, is the throwing away of the bigger, better, badder syndrome of all of the splat books.
Yes, we paid a lot of money for all of our books. In 7 years, I've probably spent $1500 or so on 60 or so 3E or 3.5 books. As a lump sum on the surface, that sounds like a lot of money. But in reality, it's $0.60 a day. A lot less than I spend on soda each day. A lot less than I used to spend on gas each week, just getting to our weekly gaming session (we game at my house these days, so that is not an issue for me anymore, but it is for all of my players).
Playing an RPG is a lot less expensive than many forms of entertainment. People will spend that same $1500 (or more) on a single vacation and guess what? After the two weeks are gone, so is the money.
Most people have probably spent more than $1500 in the last 7 years on going to the movies and/or Blockbuster. My memories of old gaming sessions is similar to my memories of movies. Incomplete, but famliar.
So, I have no qualms about blowing off all of the old splat books. I can still use the fluff from the Forgotten Realms books (a significant percentage of those books), I just need to re-create the NPCs.
I'd much rather play a better designed game system and ignore most of my old books than play a clunkier system, just to save entertainment money that I will just go spend on some other form of entertainment like a vacation if I do not spend it on DND. I'd also rather spend my future entertainment money on 4E better designed products than a boatload more same old same old 3.5 products. I'll eventually be spending the money either way.
And in this same vein, it'll be nice to get down to 3 core books again. I used to carry a large briefcase and a backpack to my gaming sessions. Talk about a pain in the butt. Just in order to have each book there in case a rules question came up (usually for a PrC or a non-core feat). It'll be even nicer when we are back up to how ever many 4E pdfs, all of them on my laptop with fast search.