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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6579150" data-attributes="member: 996">Prior forms of the game, sure.  3.x wasn't exactly old at 8 - if anything, it was 'too young to die' - provoking some outrage -and, of course didn't die (it's still going as Pathfinder).Though 4e slaughtered all kinds of sacred cows, details that people freaked out about, the bottom line difference was that it was better balanced.  The more robustly a game is balanced, the more different character concepts, play styles, campaign tone, pacing, sub-genres and other individual preferences it can handle.  A reality that is exactly the opposite of what a certain range of complaints about it would imply.  Now, it is plausible to think that a mere misperception could have been behind that blatant disconnect from reality.  Consider:  D&D had never been a very balanced or flexible game as presented, but it was the first RPG, and a lot of us, back in the day (as I'm sure you remember) went ahead and heavily modified it to make it do something we wanted.  Vancian didn't fit many genre or personal visions of magic, so we had lots of mana and spell-point systems floating around.   Hp damage was a fairly bland count-down, so people spiced up combat with crits & fumbles.  Fighters were meant to 'tank,' but outside of forming a 'fighter wall' in a 10x10 corridor, had no way of doing so, so attacking the 'biggest' PC became a standard 'dumb monster' tactic.  Rules were vague, baroque, and/or contradictory, so DMs selectively ignored and modified them to suit.  For 25 years we did that sort of thing, making the game our own through what amounted to herculean efforts spread out over 2 decades.Come to a game that has clearly presented rules that have obviously been carefully balanced, and you (the indefinite, hypothetical 'you') think "I can't work with this!"  Because any substantial mod is going to throw it out of whack.  You've been modding D&D for years if not decades, and now you can't, so you figure you can't possibly run the campaign you want.  Tragedy!  The irony is that you probably could run the campaign you want with no modification, or with just re-skinning, whole-class/source banning, and tweaks that wouldn't impact the overall (really rather nice to have) balance of the game.  And, of course, if you actually /want/ imbalance, then there's nothing stopping you (as a DM) from modding it in the first place.  Imbalancing a neatly-balanced game is easy - probably easier than re-imbalancing an already imbalance one in a new direction.  It's just going to be obvious to your players what you're doing.  That's charitable.  I'm not sure I agree.  The edition war had a certain implacability as it played out - and continues to get re-ignited in pockets - over the years.  Heh.  There were really three camps.  4vengers, old-school H4ters, and modern H4ters.  It was the old-school H4ters - doubtless due to the current OSR fad - that essentially 'won' the edition war, and got a 5e something like they wanted (though they already had the old game, re-prints, and many OSR products).  The modern H4ters still got what they wanted from Paizo (though d20 was always going to be there, whether much was published or not, even if Paizo hadn't been ready to go), and, really, 5e has little to offend them, just less reward for system mastery than Pathfinder.Now we have 5e, and it is a game that demands, in the most basic explanation of how it's played, constant DM intervention, and is written with the assumption DMs will modify it - which means both openly encouraging that, and also not bothering to put much clarity or balance into it, either initially, or later via errata, because it's only a starting point, and doing so would only discourage tinkering.  I like to tinker at least as much as the next old-school DM, so I'm pretty happy with that, and I'm fine with supporting 5e, even though it failed completely to deliver any of the promised 'compromise' or 'best of 4e' that we heard in the early playtest.  I've played the game for a long time, I can enjoy it returning to its roots (or at least stump, it hasn't gone all the way back to being a Chainmail reprint or anything), even as I regret it giving up so much progress to do so.I guess that does suggest a 'favorite thing about 4e' that's also a mixed blessing:  I like that it was robust enough that I could run sessions, scenarios, or even campaigns that:- featured only 1 encounter per literal day, and not every day- were decidedly 'low' magic, whether low-magic-item, or genuinely low magic- features a party all using the same source, even all-martial- let players choose the character concept they want rather than the one the party 'needed'- keep everyone participating in both combat and non-combat- featured challenging, playable battles with anything from a single, vastly superior foe, to hordes of lesser onesYet I missed tinkering with the system.  I still did tinker, I just didn't /need/ to just to do all the above, and more.</blockquote>

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