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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thasmodious" data-source="post: 4921919" data-attributes="member: 63272">Ferratus, I tried to give you xp as well, but it appears you were among the last couple I gave it to.I agree with a lot of what Farratus says, especially about 4e describing things in a way other editions of D&D haven't, but many other modern game systems do.  I think a lot of the problems some people have with 4e stems from this subtle shift in the narrative.  The old model was player says what they do, DM tells them if it works and what happens.  That's much less the case now.  Even in 3e with some spells that clearly described what happened, it still fell to the DM to confirm it (whether because he had a saving throw to make or spell resistance on the target).  In 4e, if the DM gives out the target numbers or confirms a "hit", the player then tells the group what happens to the DMs monster, based on the power - "He is blown backwards 10' and falls over and now he can't move".  Then the DM has to deal with that situation.  It's a small shift from the way 3e played and a bigger shift from the way earlier editions played.Someone upthread a bit said it was a fact that 3e had more options than 4e in regards to character creation and action.  By the numbers this is true (hundreds of prestige classes, 60 base classes, etc), but despite all these menu options, I found 3e significantly more limiting than I do 4e for a number of reasons.One is simple menu options.  There were many, many choices but even with all that choice if you created a concept without considering the menu available, you often found it very tricky to create the character you want.  You had to do some ridiculous contortions (1 lvl barbarian, 2 of fighter, 1 rogue, etc...) to get the mechanics you needed off the menu while ignoring most all the fluff that came with a lot of those choices.  No matter how big the menu grew, you still had to choose from that menu and the bigger it grew, the less room it had for out of the box concepts.  I much prefer the way all D&D editions except 3e (and 2e with kits) treated classes as broad umbrellas encompassing a number of different ways to go within that class.  Second, 3e had a philosophy of mechanically representing all the things a character could do.  Not just as an adventurer, but as a person.  I found this severely limiting to what I could do with character backgrounds (and houseruled the heck out of it so my players could make the characters they wanted).  This was my problem with craft/profession/perform and why I was very happy to see them go away in 4e.  I do not think those aid roleplaying, but hinder it instead.  By way of example, a character I've talked about before here in one of my 4e games had a simple, dramatic concept that fit the campaign perfectly.  In every other edition, where backgrounds were open and based on RP more so than mechanics, the concept would work, but in 3e it required houseruling.  He is an Eladrin based very loosely on Elvis, more specifically on a line from Dogma ("Elvis was an artist. But that didn't stop him from joining the service in time of war. And that's why he's The King, and you're a schmuck").  He was an older Eladrin, alive before a great aberrant corruption caused the elvin people to fall from grace.  He was a famous musician, a celebrity of Eladrin culture.  Afterwards he turned to the arcane arts and quests to end the corruption and renew his people.  It's a couple of lines of background in 4e and when it comes up that he sings or plays (he does so often, in taverns to win over locals, at camp to lift spirits, to remind other Eladrin he encounters of the once greatness of their race, etc) we handle it without much mechanical need.  In 3e he would have needed a half dozen skills well above 1st level max ranks to justify the background.  I did not like that.  Same holds true for making a fighter that was good at anything else.  Hell, 3e in general was a low time for the storied fighter, he couldn't even excel at the one thing the system allowed him to do - fight.  Practically every other class, especially casters, far exceeded his fighting abilities.  Another example I've given before is a dwarf brewmaster I first played in 1e.  He was the first son, and heir apparent, in a clan of world famous brewers, his father being the head of the clan.  That was supposed to be his life, but he was struck with that wanderlust and thirst for adventure so many of our characters have.  He turned his back on that and became an outcast, as an adventurer he was a rare fighter/wizard.  This wouldn't work in 3e on several levels.  3e never did fighter/wizard well for one.  But the big one is I needed to, but couldn't mechanically represent his background as a master brewer. To me, 3e was the standalone edition here, the one that changed character conceptualizing into an overly rigid mechanical exercise.  I like the freedom of both earlier editions and 4e in leaving backgrounds open and focusing character mechanics on the central purpose for game rules - conflict resolution.Which is another thing some seem to miss about 4e.  It is not all about combat.  The rules system exists to resolve conflicts (and build characters).  That's what you need in a rules system.  You don't need dice mechanics to determine if a fletcher can make arrows or if an NPC blacksmith makes money in a given week.  Those are details best left to story.  You need mechanics to resolve conflicts when the parties involved are at odds - when the PC wants to introduce steel to an orc and the orc politely wishes to refuse the introduction, or when a rogue seeks to climb a tower that has carefully designed itself to be very difficult to climb.  I like that the game system gets out of the way and lets you play the game.  For me, and I would say others who don't see homogeneity in 4e, this is a major reason.  A game that constantly requires consulting a number of subsystems for simple task resolution is one that interrupts flow.  4e, with its unified mechanics, has tremendous flow.  My group barely ever cracks a book during gameplay.  Every once in a while a longer power or ritual description will require a peek over the card summary or a potion or other consumable that we don't generally make cards for might require a lookup.  But we rarely have to consult the books to apply the grapple rules, or remember all the steps for a disarm attempt, or have to pause the game to reference three spells to see how exactly polymorph works again.  There are character concepts that work in one edition that don't work in others throughout the life of D&D and I had a great time played 3e and don't "hate" the system or anything.  It just was more restricting than I like and I much prefer the openness of a game system that emphasizes a broader, less focused approach.  I like broad skill systems (and I do like skill systems as opposed to "player skill"), broad class archetypes (I really prefer classless, but not in my D&D), love the way 4e encourages and enhances DM improvisation and tweaking (page 42, painfully simple monster modification, etc).Ultimately, I especially agree with Ferratus in that I would simply like to see others who aren't fans of the game to stop referring to it with all the insulting code that has popped up - tactical minis game, all about combat, wow on paper, D&D without the roleplaying, etc.  It's one thing to discuss the differences between editions and another to simply bash someone's choice because its not the game for you.  The misinformation that abounds about what 4e is "really like" bugs me, like the OP stating that homogeneity in 4e is just an accepted fact.  This thread proves it clearly is not an accepted fact but a matter of perception.</blockquote>

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