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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5045236" data-attributes="member: 82106">Personally I think there are a lot of misconceptions about 4e and I favor it myself. I really have barely played 3.x but I found that the same things bugged me about it that bugged me about earlier editions. 4e FAR more than previous editions acknowledges itself as a game and its design is focused on making it work well AS a game. This really does tell in a number of ways.In terms of play you run into a LOT less issues with the rules fighting against what you want to do. A prime example is "plot busting" mechanics like Detect Alignment. Why powers of this ilk ever existed I don't know, but their primary effect was to give players a "gimme". Want to know which guy in the room is the evil badguy? All you need is a simple low level spell. Yes, the DM can go out of his way to THWART these kinds of things, but that's exactly what I mean, its DM vs the rules. A lot more thought went into this kind of thing in 4e and it shows. The DM has a LOT more narrative control.Narrative control also shows up in the resting/healing system. Want to give the PCs a little boost? Give them a short rest. They can recover powers and use surges but you don't have to let them "spend the night" someplace or be forced to drop some kind of Doom-style recharge into the middle of an adventure. Want to really push the players? Make them accomplish a certain amount before an extended rest or shift extended rests to plot points instead of always every single day. It gives more flexibility right out of the box in how you can pace adventures. Overall DM workloads with 4e are also a lot lower. Monsters are simple and easy to use and its trivial to set up even fairly involved encounters on the fly. Making custom monsters is very easy. NPC opponents can be just templatized MM entries and there is no longer a notion of character class as something that applies to anyone except PCs. Mechanically I just see 4e as solid. It has a LOT less subsystems than earlier editions. Don't be fooled by that. The system tries to stay mostly out of dealing with a lot of purely RP stuff beyond giving you a good toolbox to let the players define non-combat aspects of their characters how they want. The mechanics it has outside of combat are simple, but they WORK and they work well for the vast majority of things you'll ever want to do. Because they are simple they are easy to use in new situations that come up. This means its very good for dealing with unexpected situations that aren't covered by the rules already.If there is a downside to all of this it is that the system really asks you to understand it and work with it and not fight it. It wants you to trust it, but when you do it rewards you. Combat is expected to be detailed and tactically rich. This can be a downside for some players who really aren't at all interested in learning even the simplest rules. On the other hand you can have perfectly acceptable encounters that don't force the players to get too involved with tactics if they aren't into it, you just have to understand that they'll find an encounter that would be easy for a tactically savvy group to be more difficult and adjust things to suite their style of play. Given that there is good support for encounters that don't involve combat at all or focus on doing things like spying, infiltration, etc and you'll find it works pretty good.Really the main problem people seem to have with 4e is that it isn't 3.x. Its just a rather different game. The flavor of D&D is there, but it is structured a little differently and downplays some atypical kinds of play like the guy that wants to have a legion of undead follow him around or something like that. The misconception is that you CAN'T do these kinds of things. You can if you want, they just aren't something that the rules elaborate on. Because things like ritual magic are very open ended systems you just have to do a bit of extrapolation. The system will handle it if you do.Personally I couldn't go back to older editions. There are just a lot of things that are much easier to do with 4e. The difficulty with doing a lot of that stuff really always bothered me in the past and I've played since the OLD days before AD&D and its only now that I see the game as mature enough to really open up all the possibilities in the genre without a lot of hacking.</blockquote>

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