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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6589163" data-attributes="member: 42582">When [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] says the game is/was coherent he does not mean "easily comprehended". He means "reliably delivers the play experience it was meant to deliver when played according to its rules and guidelines."And I agree with him - the game is/was this. (At least at Heroic tier. At upper tiers, the MM3 damage fix is needed, in my view at least.)The fact that many found those rules and guidelines hard to parse is a secondary matter - it goes to presentation, perhaps, but not to the coherence of the game system.I think that 4e utterly depends on its D&D roots! As I posted upthread, one of my favourite things about 4e is how reliably it produces the "story of D&D" in play without the need for outrageous GM force or fudging. If you follow the rules and guidelines, and use the default monsters, your PCs will start out fighting goblins and end up fighting Demogorgon.If you follow the tier descriptions that are included in the PHB and DMG, and extrapolate from these plus the monster descriptions to broader considerations of genre, the fictional scope of the game will grow more-or-less organically as the game progresses.Experiencing the story of D&D, without anyone having to bend or twist things to deliver the story of D&D, is (in my view) a mark of tight design.You seem to be looking at D&D mostly as a set of rules and techniques. For me it is first-and-foremost the story I have just described.But even when I look at techniques, 4e owes much to its D&D roots - it takes the ideas that Gygax stated in his DMG essays on hit points and saving throws and the activity that takes place in a 1-minute round, fully implements them, and extrapolates them to other parts of the game. The abstraction/fortune-in-the-middle that was always a part of D&D action resolution is fully deployed; and is done so in a way that is mostly (not fully) integrated with 3E-style non-abstract movement and positioning tracking!I just did a quick count, and make it 95 pages of a book more than 300 pages long. In my Beta copy of the PF core rules, the spells are 120 pages of a book that is just over 400 pages, and includes some DMG-y stuff that is absent from the 4e PHB.I think the spells in the 1st ed AD&D PHB occupy around 60 pages of a 120 page book (though to be fair, there is even less DMG-y stuff in this version - the combat rules are all in the DMG).Does that mean that AD&D or 3E is all about using these cool spells? Well arguably it is(!), but I think that takes us into one of the real debates around 4e, namely, how ought the capacity of non-magic-using characters to be mechanically expressed?For those who want to play a 2nd ed style game, 4e is particularly unsuitable. That has been the crux of the discussion for the past several hundred posts on this thread!</blockquote>

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