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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6127915" data-attributes="member: 22779">I agree with most of what you said.Only thing is, I don't think that 2e was very successful using the 1e rules for a more story style.  The reason that 2e was, for the longest time, the red-headed stepchild of D&D is because it tried to be a bunch of things for a bunch of different styles but generally failed at all of them.  Die-hard 1e fans hated it because it was too poncy and into Thespianism and the story gamers hated it and fled for Vampire and other games of that ilk.4e, IMO, fails because it is so transparent.  It doesn't hold anyone's hands.  People suddenly see under the hood and they don't like it.  Take the whole, "Encounters must be winnable" line.  That's not what 4e says.  4e says that, by and large, most encounters that the PC's face are winnable.  Now, you never saw anything like that in the 1e DMG because Gygax didn't have the luxury of 30 years of gaming to look back on and make pronouncements like that.  But, the 4e devs did.  They looked at the modules and whatnot produced over the decades and made a pretty easy generalization - most encounters that the PC's face are, in fact, winnable. 3e went some way down this road.  When you read the CR/EL guidelines, they pretty much say the same thing.  It might be fuzzier - but when most encounters, according to the guidelines, are EL=Party level par, then most encounters are winnable fairly easily.Thing is, 3e monsters vs parties were so tight that it's a very fine line between a cakewalk and dead PC's.  The monsters didn't scale very well.  AD&D isn't really a problem since monsters in combat, outside of save or die, were individually so weak.  3e, OTOH, was a much different animal.  4e is different again in that it makes the monster math 100% visible to the DM.  A level X monster can do Y to Z damage.  Raise the level of the monster and the damage scales.  I honestly think what people are really reacting to is the transparency of 4e.</blockquote>

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