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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 3715630" data-attributes="member: 694">A couple of months ago, I found myself so fed up with the revised 3rd edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons that I just couldn't bear to play it anymore.  (And make no mistake, folks, just because WotC dropped the "Advanced" from the title in 2000 as a marketing ploy to draw in younger blood, by no means does that mean that 3e was anything but the most rules-heavy incarnation of D&D ever.)  For seven years, I tried to play 3e and 3.5 and to run campaigns that felt like they used to, games that were immersive for the DM as well as the players, but something was always missing.  No set of house rules ever really felt right, even when I decided to try running 3e after chucking feats, attacks of opportunity, and prestige classes out the window.  The unlimited plethora of options (especially multiclassing) still made something feel off.  Not wrong or bad, just off.  Not the game that I had remembered having so much fun playing.So lately, I decided to drop 3e like a bad habit.  I switched the current campaign I was running back to AD&D 2e (since the conversion was easiest), and I decreed that from then on, any new campaigns I started would use the best, simplest, least-advanced version of the game: the last incarnation of OD&D (ostensibly OD&D 5th edition, if you consider the original game to be OD&D 1st edition, Holmes Basic to be the 2nd, B/X the 3rd, BECMI the 4th, and the Black Box/Rules Cyclopedia to be the 5th).  I love classic D&D, and I discovered after playing a few one-shots that I was very happy with those old rules - the feel was the same, the fun was there, the soul was back.I'm convinced now that there is but a finite ammount of creative energy flowing around the game table at any given time, and this energy can be expended on either the immersion in the story, the fantasy, the role-playing; or dealing with numbers and rules.  Don't get me wrong here -- I'm not that "diceless role-playing, Vampire-LARPing pansy" type of gamer.  I used to defend with all my heart and soul the notion tha role-playing and roll-playing were perfectly compatible, not mutually exclusive.  I really used to believe it.  But 7 years of 3e proved me wrong and nearly killed my desire to play D&D altogether.  So... now, along comes 4e.  And I hear good things and bad.  The good?  Encounters are meant to be scenes of a story.  Monsters have a role, not just a type and a set of stats.  The monsters are obstacles on the battlefield, and battlefields in 4e are going to be all about large numbers of monsters (rather than one BBEG) as well as interesting and interactive terrain features.  Fewer classes, fewer skills, easier combat rules, fast-and-loose magic-item creation.  These are the rumors I've heard floating around that I like.  The bad?  Playing a characer will be all about building a character, *even more* than it was in 3e.  You get a spiffy new toy at every experience level, either a feat or a racial ability or a class talent.  This is just... the worst thing I've ever heard.  Hands down.  I can't shudder with enough revulsion.  Not because it smacks of video games (after all, I love video games and I love it when D&D feels like a good video game), but because it means that even more than it has been for the past seven years, characters will now be collections of "perks" (a la point-buy style RPGs) coupled with a list of numbers, rather than the simple set of stats and the oodles of personality that used to be what defined characers previous to D&D's Y2K overhaul.For the next several months, I will continue to play AD&D 2e and OD&D.  And I will wait, somewhere between utter apathy and cautious optimism that the 4th edition of (Advanced!) Dungeons & Dragons will have a little more heart than 3e had.  Hey, if it proves easier to DM than 3e did, by delivering the promised cutdown on "DM prep time", that alone will be worth it.  But more likely than not, I'll probably just wind up pirating the ideas I like and porting them into OD&D 5e.</blockquote>

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