Realism! Versamilitude! Other Words!

[Delta]

I swear to crap, the next person who tries to claim 3e was remotely realistic in any way, shape, or form is getting a boot to the head...

If 3e, or any D&D game approached anything like realism in your mind, you need to get out of the house, or get on some medication, because reality and D&D are living on opposite sides of the world.

Honest question -- Do you reserve the same criticism for the 4E's Lead Designer and Associate Brand Manager?
(From ENWorld's front page):

Rob: ... We’ve moved away from simulation towards gameplay. Now that doesn’t mean that simulation is dead, that means that before 3.5 was on the simulation side of the middle ground, and now we’re on the gameplay side of the middle ground. That’s what I think.

Sara: Yeah, that’s about right.

 

[Thyrwyn]

realism (op's comment) =/= simulation (4E's Lead Designer and Associate Brand Manager comments)

 

[TerraDave]

Congragulations! The thread is still open

I agree with the OP. Most of the anti-4E ranting seems to stem from a prioritizing of theoretical over actual gaming... Granted, most of my players only have doctorates from state schools, so maybe they're not as smart as people who argue about D&D on the Internet, but the number of little mistakes and slow-downs was impressive enough that I don't care about the ideological purity of my game: I'm going to switch and make play that much tidier.

Likewise, per-encounter powers. They do the same thing as hit points: convert something that should have a low chance of happening (getting hit, performing a tricky maneuver) from a low-probability, unpredictable, and tactically uninteresting element ("Surprise, you're dead!" "Your chance of pulling off the Flying Tackle is 3%") into a resource that players can manipulate. If you can rationalize hit points, you can rationalize per-encounter powers, and if you can't rationalize hit points, GURPS is really an excellent game that starts by trying to build up a coherent environment rather than an entertaining system.

well we have private ph/m/j/ds...and I basically agree with all of this.

 

[Delta]

realism (op's comment) =/= simulation (4E's Lead Designer and Associate Brand Manager comments)

This is just word games. If the OP titles his post "Realism! Versamilitude! Other Words!" it sure seems like "simulation" would be one of those "other words".