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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6569370" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, and this is why 4e's very generalized system was so welcome to me. Something like what Pemerton was describing is SO EASY in 4e! It has very few strictures. The different mechanical elements are very easily brought together in different combinations to support the fiction. You can employ large swaths of the vast array of crunch that the game puts at your fingertips to support any given narrative. It is really a very very flexible game that lets you quickly compose solid responses to player actions, to anticipated or unanticipated plot developments, etc. And honestly, as an exploration game, there's nothing wrong with it. Sure, the equipment lists are not so specific and exhaustive as they were in say 1e AD&D, but there's no shortage of the basic key materials needed to send characters out into the wilderness and have them try to survive a hexcrawl. The DM will probably approach some of the mechanical chores a little bit differently, maybe employ the SC rules instead of random monster checks and generated encounters to see what happens, but I've done it, it was fun. In my first 4e campaign the PCs spent ages working their way through the vast forest hex by hex. Eventually the story arc of that game went on to other things, there's still a lot of unexplored forest, but they had many memorable hours of pretty old-fashioned fun fighting with goblins, giants, spiders, old lost crypts, etc. I've moved on a bit in my employment of 4e to a little more dynamic style now, but the game was reasonably suitable to that kind of employment as long as you paid attention to designing encounter locations in a way that avoided the dreaded rooms full of monsters paradigm. Honestly, for all the theory that gets bandied about in various places, I don't think 4e is REALLY at heart super far off from its ancestors. It has tools for more types of situations, but in actual spirit its just doing what 2e couldn't mechanically manage to pull off, which 3e could only do if the players really cooperated closely with the DM, and which 5e perhaps does even better in a more narrow sense. Its just that by being so flexible and yet making all the parts work in a balanced way together, it became a system that could go beyond where D&D was really ever able to go before. Its the gestalt of all those things that really makes 4e great. I really don't think the poll works TBH. 4e needs all of the things it lists (pretty much anyway) to be what it is, they aren't separable from the whole. This is why 5e doesn't push any of the same buttons for me even if it has some '4e-like elements', it isn't the whole package.</blockquote>

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