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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thasmodious" data-source="post: 4685819" data-attributes="member: 63272">I agree, completely.  A video game requires internal consistency and player knowledge of the working of the game world (the rules) because your choices are so limited and your interaction with that game world defined.  I love turn based strategy games and am playing a lot of Galactic Civilizations 2 lately.  A good strategy game has lots of options because, in a video game, options stand in for freedom of action.  You choose your civilizations government, but that choice has a defined set of results.  You choose your alignment and it has specific game system results, things you can do with this alignment that you can't do with the others.  You choose how to allocate your economic resources to achieve consistent adjustments to the overall resources of your empire.  If you have enough options, the game feels very open when it really isn't.  For me, this is what 3e attempted to do.  A lot of fans of that edition trump its "open" character design as a feature and attack 4e for its lack of "freedom".  That's not the way I see it.  4e, like previous editions, does not insist that the system fully define your character and class is just one choice of several.  With 3e, if you wanted your character to do something, you had to pick an option from the menu.  It was a large menu, 175 base classes, 782 prestige classes, 3304 feats (according to WotCs indexes), but it had to grow large because there was little real freedom of character, everything had to be defined.  You couldn't just say - "my dwarf fighter is a talented blacksmith" and have that be part of your character.  You had to justify it mechanically, and that meant a trade off in your effectiveness at your class.  In the end, if you really wanted that option and didn't want to be gimped (not that fighter wasn't already gimped), you have to search through the options like it was a multiple choice test with thousands of possible answers to the question "how can I make a character that is a strong melee fighter and a master crafter?" and find a viable set of options.    I'm with scribble, in that this is much more videogame like to me than the way 4e handles it, which is "write it down and we'll come up with something if it comes up in the game in a manner in which the results need to be randomly determined."  4e embraces (within a D&D system anyway) freedom both for players, who mechanically define their characters abilities as adventurers but are unrestricted elsewhere and don't have to give up effectiveness as adventurers to color their character; and for DMs in putting the game world back in their hands as opposed to the "hands" of the rules system.  That's not to say 3e is "videogamey", just that video games, by necessity, are all about the simulationism, so when a game system makes simulationism its goal, to me, it feels forced and restrictive to me.</blockquote>

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