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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 4609601" data-attributes="member: 55271">I'm not the OP, but for me it's because the rules have been dissociated from the game world.Essentially, my primary POV and goal when playing an RPG is to interact with the game world. The rules are a means to that end (and I like it when the rules are interesting and well-designed), but the goal is that interaction with the game world.So my natural mental process is to take the input ("I want to do X"), translate that into mechanical terms ("make a skill check at DC Y"), use the rules to adjudicate the result, and then translate that result back into the game world.This works well in 3rd Edition and previous editions because the rules shared my design ethos: There were a few legacy gamist elements laying around, but 99.9% of the system was designed to model the reality of the game world.Trying to use 4th Edition, on the other hand, feels like I'm pouring sand into my mental cogworks. Because the rules of 4th Edition weren't designed that way -- in fact there's frequently (if not usually) no meaningful connection between the mechanics and the game world at all.This makes using the system unpleasant for me to use under almost any circumstances, but it makes improvisation under the system particularly difficult. The key aspect of any improv is the smooth flow from impulse to thought to action. For me, 4th Edition distrupts that flow.Now, on the other hand, if your primary goal with D&D is to have all the numbers come out "right" and for all the game mechanics to be "balanced", then I'd imagine that 4th Edition simplifies things considerably.I remember discussing a similar issue with a 4th Edition afficionado awhile back. His position was that 3rd Edition needlessly complicates things: You want the slippery floor of the room to be DC 15 because a DC 15 check will be challenging to the players given their current skill level. So you go to the rulebook and you figure out what cause a DC 15 slipperiness and that's what you put on the floor. Wouldn't it be much easier to just say that the floor requires a DC 15 check to cross and then describe that however you want to?From his perspective, that made sense. 3rd Edition requires this multiple step process, whereas 4th Edition just says "level Y = DC X".From my perspective, that looked like lunacy. All I do is say "the floor is icy" or "the floor is wet" or "the floor is uneven". Then, if somebody wants to cross it, I determine the DC for that. It's a two step process: "condition Y = DC X"</blockquote>

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