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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kannon" data-source="post: 5625353" data-attributes="member: 95097">I'm a fairly young gamer and DM (AD&D 2e came out the year I was born, just to make you all feel old.), so most of my experience is with 3e-4e. I also may be the odd one out being a very aggressive DM who has no issue with handwaving a rule that gets in the way of the table having fun, who still really likes 4e.Now, since my particular writing style tends to come off a bit incendiary without people able to tell I'm kidding over the internet, I'll get this out of the way first: I don't care what edition, game system, or even game type you play. As long as you're having fun, more power to you. I don't have enough energy or time to stomp my feet and pout because you're not having "my" kind of fun.That being said, I do think I know why I enjoy 4e more than 3.5/PF. First, I'm a coder and a computer gamer. So my brain already works in a lot of the "gamism" aspects of 4e. Second, 4e makes it a whole lot easier to build an interesting, challenging encounter without doing enormous amounts of work.And, with the caveat of the gamism of the "encounter" and "daily" powers, I really do like the power system. I think the trick is to look at the power system as a more concise version of what there was in previous editions. (In 3.5e games I played and DMed, people generally had something similar to power cards anyway to make it a little easier to remember what all your character knows how to do well.)I like the bigger focus on balance as well, it makes it substantially easier to build challenging encounters (That the PCs can take on or avoid, or find a third option at their choice), without having to worry about needing to fudge the dice to avoid a stupid TPK. (Stupid in this case meaning, high rolls on my side, low on their side, a round later, half the party is dead.)Now, this doesn't mean I think it's perfect. I think rituals are an awesome mechanic that they missed with so hard it hurts. Not having to clutter up limited spellbook spots with noncombat utility spells that'd take longer to cast because you didn't have them mostly-prepared before hand? Awesome! Sounds like something a pragmatic wizard would come up with. But they fumbled the implementation badly enough it's hard to even fix, because players are used to them being mostly useless.Also not fond of the use of magic items to set the power curve for the players. It makes shiny things expected and common. Fortunately, DMG2 has an out in the form of inherent bonuses, and combining that with creative and interesting magic items brings back the wonder and awesomeness, and keeps balance. That needs to be pushed harder.And while I notably dislike vandian magic (I never really thought it made sense, and houseruled it out of 3/x,), the power limiting balance construct they came up with to replace it is not really better. I'm just not entirely sure I could fix it in an elegant matter that didn't require prohibitive bookkeeping. (While the system our group came up with for 3/x worked well, we had enough geeks handy that we just wrote up a computerized character sheet tracker for it, and a tabletop one that tracked everyone's for when we were playing in person.) And I seriously like the new monster statblocks, I do miss the detailed noncombat information the previous edition bestiaries had. If anything, I want them to bring that back. Have a noncombat statblock, then a quick reference one, that has the current MM3 stats. One funny little anachronism that I carried over from my days DMing 3.5e, are meta-powers. Instead of listing the 5-6 abilities that a versatile spell-casting enemy would have, I toss a note to which power list they have for their "spells" in the sheet, then have a list of thematic powers made up or cribbed from other monsters that fit for spells, their usage, and all that.That, and the new unified skill system. Makes it less annoying for a player trying to shoehorn Chef (french) into whatever the hell they're currently doing.Now, I know for the above reasons listed, that 4e isn't for everyone. But that doesn't mean it's bad for everyone because you don't like it, or there's nothing to learn from it. If nothing else, you learned what you don't like, and hopefully (and more importantly), why, so you can better find stuff you like in the future.</blockquote>

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