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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3758971" data-attributes="member: 4937">Celebrim doesn't do the funny well.  Deliberately exagerrated emotional reaction?  Hyperbole?  I mean obviously I never actually believed you smoked crack.  Oh nevermind...Pardon me if your offended.Of course you can ask.Let's suppose I had a 1st edition M-U and wanted to port him to third edition wizard.  How dramatic would the change be?  I'd gain some new skills.  I'd gain some new feats.  I'd have slightly different spells per day.  But, I could generally have the same spell list, race, equipment, and so forth.  Everything would be very familiar to me.  The process would largely strike me as being an enhancement of my character.  The translation process would be largely additive rather than transformative.  This is not dramatic change, and this was by design.  It was one of the goals of 3rd edition's design.Of course, a few of my characters might not port very well.  In particular, the single biggest change from a player perspective between 1st and 3rd is the multi-classing rules.  If I had a multiclassed Thief-MU or Fighter-MU, I would not be able to make the same additive translation.  I would loss things in the process of translating, because say a 11th level M-U/13th level Thief is really about a 14th level character in 3e, and I couldn't both keep my full thief skills and my full 11th level spell-casting ability in 3e.  The character when translated would be a very different one in 3e than it was in 1st.  That represents actual dramatic change.  Of course, you might think that on the whole the new multiclassing rules was a good change, but it was nonetheless a truly dramatic one.An actually more dramatic change than feats and skills was the relative power level of a 10th level fighter between additions.  Your fighter might translate fairly exactly, but in the new D&D universe his actual relative power might be closer to a 7th level fighter in 3.0 and a 5th level fighter in 3.X.  For example, a 10th level fighter in 1st could probably take on Balrogs single handedly.  This is alot harder in 3.0 and impossible in 3.X.  So there might have to be a dramatic change in campaign balancing and power expectations.Have I made clear how I define 'dramatic'?  Third edition was a dramatic change from some of the direction that 2e had been going in toward the end (for example 'Skills and Powers' and other quasi-point buy systems), but it wasn't a dramatic change compared to 1e or mainstream 2e.Whether they are a logical evolution is not the point.  The point is that they are a dramatic change.  _IF_ your character is one from the Bo9S, by all appearances you will have less of a dramatic change in your character transforming him into a 3rd edition fighter than you will if you have a 3rd edition fighter and want to translate him into a 4th edition fighter.  By WotC's own admission, there will be dramatic changes in the structure of every class.  Or previous example of the Wizard is going to be losing the entire Vancian system that is at the heart of his class since the early days of D&D, is probably going to lose many of his named spells, and in many if not all cases is going to have to lose much of his spell list at a given level.  He's going to lose powers and acquire new ones, and his relative power level regardless of addition is going to be dramaticly upset because of the proposed expansion of the core classes out to 30th level and the stated goal of increasing the sweet spot, increasing the granularity of the classes plus thier survivability at low levels.  Here is my prediction.  When 4th edition comes out, much of it is going to be unrecognizable as D&D apart from the fluff - and even that is going to change significantly if the rumors about Warforged and Tieflings going core are true.</blockquote>

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