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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Rel" data-source="post: 4326074" data-attributes="member: 99">Hey, Mourn, just so's you know, you're edging toward getting booted from this thread.  Tone it down a bit.But that's not what I'm here to talk about.I have a lot of mixed feelings about 4e.  I have now played it a couple times with my wife and daughter.  I think it serves well as a cohesive rule system for the kind of games I ran for them.  I think the PHB doesn't read particularly well and doesn't inspire me a lot.  But that's ok.  The game plays fine and I get inspiration from plenty of other places.But something about it just feels a bit...limiting I guess.  I can't quite place my finger on it but I think I'd sort of describe it as a bit of a "movie set feel".  The world is pretty and shiny and a great backdrop for the adventures of the PC's.  But if you glance behind it, you see that it's just a backdrop and not all that functional.That peasant over there?  He has whatever qualities that the GM decides he needs to be an adequate peasant.  No mechanical underpinnings but that's not important.  He's only a peasant.  Same with the King.  He's got whatever qualities a king has.  Was he once a Fighter or Warlord?  Is he NOW a Warlord?  If the PC's aren't going to fight him, who cares?Is this a bad thing?  In many cases, no.  I don't need to have the hardness of the walls of the peasant's hut written down.  The PC's aren't going to try and knock it down anyway.  It's unnecessary.  But it also just feels a bit shallow to me.I know that some of you are going to say, "What?  You had the hardness of a peasant's hut written down in 3.x?!"  No I didn't.  So why can't I shake this feeling?  I don't know.  I've not puzzled it out yet.However, I think I've made another realization as well:  It may not matter for the foreseeable future.My next game was probably going to trend towards a "back to basics" style fantasy RPG anyway.  Nothing huge and fancy.  No intricate backstory or grandiose plotlines already in place.  Just some fairly lighteardted, kick in the door plots with enough NPC's and BBEG's to make the whole thing compelling.  Maybe a bit of depth will generate itself as we go along.Perhaps 4e is the perfect vehicle for this.  I may give it a more full scale try than I'd been thinking.  At very least I'm going to demo it for my gaming group for a night or two and see how it grabs them.  If they like it better than Savage Worlds then I may well opt to use it for my beer & pretzels romp of a next campaign.And if, by the end of that run, I find that 4e has more depth than I'm currently giving it credit for then dandy.  We'll get some extra mileage out of it.  And if not, no big deal.  Plenty of other systems out there that we can use.</blockquote>

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