Was there a real need for a fourth ed.? Or would tweaking 3.5 have done it for you?

[DungeonmasterCal]

First, let me say it's good to be back at ENW. I've not had internet for many months now, and it feels good to surf the digital waves again.

Secondly, I personally feel tweaking 3.5 was all that was needed. 4e has its perks, but I don't like the (at least to me and some of my group) video-gamey feel of the game. We decided to stay with 3.5 rather than make the switch (largely due to the insane amounts of money we poured into 3.5 material).

 

[Remathilis]

I think 4e was warranted and justified; reselling 3.75 as 4e wouldn't have cut it for most of the RPG community. If they were serious about 4e, they needed to make it different and better. They certainly got the former, opinion is divided on the latter.

 

[Grazzt]

Tweaking. No need for the power structure (which I don't like at all)

 

[RyvenCedrylle]

It would have been darn near impossible to just tweak 3.5E again. Look at Pathfinder, for instance - they're doing a darn good job streamlining and taking player input for their new flagship RPG, but backwards compatability is a constant bite on the ankle. There are just too many splatbooks to make a nice, tidy systemwide tweaking. I rarely play 3E myself because of the staggering quantity of material (also a stopping point for GURPS); there had to be a clean break to 4th.

 

[Serendipity]

Unnecessary. If they'd fixed turning and shored up a few things (like grapple) I'd have been happy as clams. New editions of RPGs generally tend to fall into the category marked "regrettable but necessary evil" for me. I mean, if I have that much of a problem with a rules set, I don't wait for them to revise it, I play something else.

 

[Cadfan]

Its possible that tweaks could have been invented which fixed 3e for me, but they would have had to have been pretty extensive. By the time the game was tweaked enough to make me happy, they might as well have made a new game.

For example, I think that the 3e Fighter, Rogue, Ranger, Monk, Druid, Cleric, Wizard, Sorcerer, and Bard all have intrinsic, fundamental flaws. And I think the idea of each character having an extremely different mechanical subsystem is unnecessary, and that the chance of making a game like that balanced diminishes rapidly as more classes and subsystems are added.

So I think that tweaks might have made a better game, but they would be a patch. And I'd rather see a ground up fix than a patch.

 

[Hussar]

It's funny, had you asked me in say, 2006, if 3.5 needed a cleanup edition (3.75) I probably would have agreed.

Having looked at 4e, listened to the justifications for why the changes were made, and looked pretty closely at my own game experiences, I think 4e lines up pretty nicely with what I've dealt with in 3e. So, yeah, I think 4e was a good thing overall.

 

[Runestar]

I felt that a 4e of sorts was needed to appeal to a wider demographic base. Personally, I just wished they had simply released 4e under a different name and continued supporting 3e. I am still waiting for my ToB errata!!!

 

[smdmcl]

I do not think 3rd edition could have been tweaked enough for me to enjoy it again. After 5 years of playing I had had enough of the system and was asking members of my group if there was another game we could play more than a year before 4th was announced. Too many elements of the game just weighed down on my enjoyment and I am glad WotC wasn't afraid to dump most of the unablanced clunkiness of 3rd edition (IME) in their creation of 4th edition.

 

[malraux]

I don't think a WotC 3.75 would have gone over well from a business PoV. And for me, a huge number of the problems with 3e were pretty fundamental. Treating monster HD as something akin to class levels, for example, is a basic element of how 3e works, but makes DMing harder than it should be. Or the unbalance of at the table time different classes involved.