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Message: <blockquote data-quote="trollwad" data-source="post: 3739090" data-attributes="member: 19187">There are two design essays on the Wizards website that show that the mentality if not the rules of 4e are a bit more old school than 3.5e.  The first is called Dungeon Design in 4e.  Many grognard types point out that the gigantic stat blocks and obsessive "CR matching" in 3.5E logically culminated in the Delve format and very set piece battles which reduced DM discretion and flexibility -- look at the 3.5e Ravenloft vs. its 1e predecessor.  Many classic 1e modules such as the ship battle in Saltmarsh or the Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun have flowing multi-room, multi-stage battles.  This essay implicitly criticizes 3.5e for its static nature and its inability to have flexible plans of attack moving from room to room.  It will be interesting to see the impact that this has on 4e modules.  They may improve (from a Grognard's perspective).The second is called "Points of Light" - it basically says that the implicit default world for 4e will be "points of light" in a world of wilderness -- i.e. you are safe within an hour of your village or a day of your city but beyond that, peasants should be scared.    I scratched my head when I read this as wasn't this the same assumption for Karameikos (the default setting for Basic D&D)?  For Greyhawk, you kind of have to read between the lines, but if you look at the population figures vs. the land area and compare those to medieval Europe where France alone had 10 or 15 million, and little England had up to 3 million at points in time vs. only 3-6 million for the Great Kingdom and Keoland, you can see that Greyhawk was a similar "Points of Light"  implied setting.  Does this mean that the sort of hyper-urban, magic shops on every corner implied by the magic item rules for 3.5e will be deemphasized?  Will we see more outdoor encounters?I'm sure that 4e rules will be a new system loosely based on 3.5e and thus will drift even further away from classic d&d rules but it is interesting to see that the default assumptions on how to run encounters and how the world is may be reverting back to the classic norms.</blockquote>

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