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Message: <blockquote data-quote="delericho" data-source="post: 4571728" data-attributes="member: 22424">For me, the key difference was that the 3e spells were all at the back of the PHB, which meant that by the time I got to reading this big wall of text I'd already learned enough of the system to start playing. With 4e, the 'wall' is early in the book, and made getting past it to the meat of the game quite painful.That said, 4e has different needs than 3e in this regard, since every class has powers. I don't think the same arrangement would have worked for 4e, and neither can I immediately see a better arrangement.Each edition has seemed to strip out the flavour of the writing in favour of the clarity of the rules discussion. (And it's not just 'fluff' names like Bigby, or setting organisations, or what have you, but also includes the use of words, sentence structure, tone, and so forth.) AD&D 2nd Edition was written in simpler language than BECM D&D, 3e was much more of a textbook than was 2nd Edition, and 4e seems to have gone even further in this direction. To a point, it does actually make for a better game, but there is a danger that you reach a point where people just don't read your 832 pages of rulebook, and go play WoW instead. It would appear that 4e hasn't yet reached this point, given the sales it has seen, and the relative lack of second-hand books that are available.For what it's worth, I found 4e read a whole lot better than I had feared from the previews, and played a whole lot better than it read. My group decided against it for other reasons.</blockquote>

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