NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Manbearcat" data-source="post: 8017243" data-attributes="member: 6696971">* 4e does scene-based, Story Now meets Magic the Gathering tactical depth, Mythic Action-Adventure to a level that no other game on the market can even touch.  There are a few other games that have some elements of this and/or try their hand at it, but they don't get there with the completeness or with the depth or with the ease-of-use that 4e does.Degenerate 4e play comes about when 4e GM's either (a) don't know how to run snowballing thematic, scene-framed conflict that centers exclusively on the tropes embedded in the PC (these could be technical/creative/improvisation skills like not knowing how to appropriate "Change the Situation" when a noncombat action scene should evolve from a failure or it could be just an inconsistent or poor sense of genre logic), (b) they don't know how to structure diverse and compelling combats (that incentivize movement/battlefield interactions/stunting and/or emphasize team monster synergy or attack team PC weaknesses and/or have compelling objectives that don't involve merely removing an enemy HPs to 0) or some combination thereof.Degenerate 4e play is surely boring, with brutally long and uninteresting combats, and noncombat conflicts lacking in dynamism and thematic potency.* BECMI/RC and 1e is best at high-resolution, high fantasy, sandbox hexcrawls.Degenerate play is pretty straight-forward.  Play can become unwieldy from a table handling time/book-keeping and look-up perspective.  2/3 of the way through the Expert Set spellcasters become dominant because of their ability to consistently obviate obstacles, destroy most aspects of the "crawl" component of play, while ensuring a rest schedule that compromises their supposed-to-be limited-use resource scheduling weakness.  As a response, GM's can get desperate and annoyed and play devolves into a Rock-Paper-Scissors Calvinball game (basically with GMs shooting whenever they want and/or having access to all the nukes).  GMs feel like in order for any level of satisfying play to persist they have to endlessly leverage their unique access to the offscreen/backstory to deploy an endless cavalcade of spellcaster power-play blocks; a passive-aggressive arms race and fictional position haggling cluster.Stop at about level 9 (or even 7) and you're typically fine!* AD&D 2e and 5e provide the best experience for an Adventure Path or Metaplot-heavy, GM-driven game where talented (in all the ways a bard would be) GMs can keep the plot and the action moving at a fast pace so players can enjoy a minimized overhead experience and a sense of participating in a far-reaching fantasy story (without the serious demands/workload of propelling play).Degenerate play here is simple.  If players are unwilling participants in the GM's or AP's preconceived story and dislike the covert Force techniques required to keep the story machine going.It just so happens that the market for this is BY FAR the biggest for TTRPGs, likely because the % of casual players that can be caught in this net is massive.</blockquote>

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