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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scrivener of Doom" data-source="post: 7024873" data-attributes="member: 87576">Exactly.We use to mark everyone's positions on graph paper in pencil and, as the character was moved, we erased the old mark and made a new mark. Low tech, to be sure, but it was the only way to be fair about positioning in a game that involved, inter alia, the lightning bolt and fireball spells.And it really was about being fair. Sure being a DM in those days was about delivering the full Four Yorkshiremen experience, but you were supposed to be fair about it.When I read the great cries of support for the wonderful change in gaming technology that allowed TotM to be the default in 5E - and then I actually read the 5E books with their complete lack of any support for TotM (except for a couple of controversial paragraphs in the DMG) - I am reminded of the Emperor's New Clothes. Much like in that fairy tale, it seems that only the wisest amongst us can perceive 5E's magnificent support for TotM... and then some of us are left wondering why the TotM emperor is naked. 4E is a natural evolution (for the more prissily pedantic, a logical mutation) of what came before it. As I posted somewhere else in this thread, it was the first edition that really delivered on the implied promise of the cover art and whatnot of D&D that this game was about big damn heroes doing big damn deeds. Of course, we had to get through the Four Yorkshiremen years first - a mode of play still preferred by some. ("Luxury!")WotC was fortunate, though, that while HotDQ was a bit of a dog, Lost Mine of Phandelver was one of the best adventures it has ever published. How I wish its author, Rich Baker, had also written the first 4E adventure. He wrote the second and fourth and they were both very good - even excellent by comparison with the other dreck in that same pseudo-adventure path.I was living in Singapore and Australia at the time of the Global Financial Crisis so I tend to forget that it had a huge influence on the US market (in large part because it was US-created) - it barely touched us. That sort of malaise gets into the bones, so to speak, so I can see what you mean about it being a bad time to release a new edition. When things go wrong like that, people look for the familiar.I like 13th Age in theory, at least, but I just cannot make the jump. A big part is the icons - I don't see why they are front and centre when they're just a loosely modelled version of something a lot of us have been doing for years/decades - but the full heal-up is, as you point out, a bit draconian. Its combat system and monster design are both incredibly elegant bits of design. I think I would just like to replace most of the existing classes with my own but that's too much work especially when I am enjoying 4E.The Paizo adventure paths are three adventures' worth of cool ideas spammed with three adventures' worth of XP grind to make the core ideas fit into six volumes. Many would, however, make excellent 4E adventures as combining smaller 3.5E encounters into larger 4E encounters would reduce the grind and make them a lot more exciting.I laughed at this. It's not something you could imagine Gygax doing. His approach would be (and was): 1. "A smart DM would be able to fix that in play."2. "I didn't design that. It was someone else's fault."3. "You think you fixed that but now you're not playing AD&D."One of the guys in our group was reasonably artistic so he made cardboard stands with illustrations of the PCs on them (this is in the late 80s). That was a good start.I sometimes wonder whether "grognard tendencies" is a polite way of saying "is on the spectrum". IME, D&D tends to attract those of us with some OCD tendencies as well as those on the spectrum. If that completed untested hypothesis is even partly true, it does help explain why the customer base is so resistant to change.I remember when the former head of D&D with his exalted title had his monthly column which seemed more focussed on telling us how important he was (exalted title) and how many people worked for him personally. Yes, not the company - for HIM. I pointed out several times that we customers were less interested in knowing how important he thought he was and more interested in knowing what was happening with certain DDi initiatives at the time. He could have used that column to engage with the base on the issues that were important; instead we got self-promoting marketing speak. It was a lost opportunity to display genuine leadership.And because WotC is known in the market for sub-standard salaries, finding someone on short notice prepared to accept a sub-standard salary while working ridiculous hours with little support and reporting to people who had absolutely no idea what was happening was not going to happen.If WotC had been smart, they would have engaged an offshore team for the same local cost and ended up with a lot of people working on DDi for the same cost as one or two local underpaid local staffers. And that wouldn't be stealing American jobs because nobody wants the job anyway! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />If anything, I have seen more RP in my 4E games than in the earlier edition games (some of which date back to 1984) with the same players.Because the game is so well-balanced, the players can focus on the story issues knowing that combat is not simply going to devolve into rocket tag. My experience is that the threat of rocket tag forces players to focus more on combat and less on story - obviously that seems to be the complete opposite of what a lot of people experienced/claimed to have experienced with 4E.</blockquote>

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