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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7027644" data-attributes="member: 82106">Honestly, my evaluation of 3.x is it was BAD at supporting anything but its actual play style. I mean, sure people engineered various differing ways to play by either very significant table conventions, or actually hacking the heck out of the game (E6 for instance, which I find very prevalent). Truthfully any attempt to play 'stock' 3.x is at the very least  bound to lead to a strange game of utter caster dominance almost inevitably. I think what 3e/d20 provided was a fairly generalized system that could be extended in a lot of directions and which invested a lot of its specific character in class design and subsystems like magic. That means you can fairly cleanly slice away a lot of its character and create alternative kinds of game, like Iron Heroes, or many of the various d20 non-D&D systems have. 4e is really more of a specific direction, you can likewise slice away large pieces of it, but because its systems are more cohesive you will run into somewhat more effort. For example its easy enough to drop D&D-style casting from 3.x but its a little bit different proposition to remove powers from 4e, since they underpin all classes, items, a lot of the feat system, etc. You could do it, or you could graft say Vancian casting classes onto 4e.Still, in terms of USING 4e to play in different styles, it proves to be pretty flexible within the general heroic-action family of genres. You can play superhero type games, something approaching classic D&D, over-the-top high fantasy, wire-fu, etc without really needing to change the rules so much as just providing the right color. 3.x had problems in this regard, the extreme inherent superiority of spell casting, the clunky 'full turn action' mess, etc made only specific sorts of play 'work' without actual rules hacking. You could supply whatever color you wanted, but combat still came down to spell-casting rocket tag pretty quickly.</blockquote>

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