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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jan van Leyden" data-source="post: 4547289" data-attributes="member: 20307">Perfect timing for me! Some time in 2007 I was starting to look more closely at other game systems and building chains of arguments to convince my very traditional player to diverge into a new direction: I was rather fed up with 3.5, the chore/fun ratio steadily rising. For the next few years, I'll happily run 4e.Furthermore, 3.5 clearly showed its age from a design point of view. We were either offered new Feats and Prestige Classes ("Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you the 5,000th Prestige Class: the One-eyed Master Beggar of Baldur's Gate!") or completely new subsystems.The great thing of 3.X as compared to former editions had been the systematization of the game. Instead of obscure rules for specific situations we now had a basic system you could use to easily improvise nearly any situation. This clean design, which strangely didn't encompass magic, became more and more "polluted" with special systems glued to its structure.Adding new parts to a well-running machine may add new features, but it doesn't necessarily make it better.One could also ask whether an approach like True20, Pathfinder, Arcana Unearthed, let's call it 3.75, would be better. Economical realities aside, it wouldn't have won over me.If I could handle it using perturbation theory (Pathfinder), it wouldn't solve the problem of the chore/fun ration, hence being no alternative at all.If its deviation from the 3.5 standard is greater (True20), it is essentially a new system. As I mentioned at the beginning of this reply, I was entertaining thoughts of exchanging D&D for something else, so such a beast would be eligible. But then the differences are too few/insignificant for me to change trains. I was rather looking at Savage Worlds, e.g.In the middle of the road we have things like Unearthed Arcana, which takes the 3.5 system, exchanges several parts and re-interprets a lot of things, races and classes, e.g. This might have worked fopr me, bt not for my players. From their point of view it's not D&D.I think all these variations of the 3.5 system and all these tweaked versions are fine for players and game masters who play or run four campaigns per year. We run two parallel campaigns with different players in five years...As you can see, 4e is a good thing for me, regardless of its quality. Maybe my players clamor for the return to 3.5 next year, maybe I want to do or run something that will be impossible with 4e (which I highly doubt). I don't think 4e is perfect, maybe I'm fed up with it. I'll surely be fed up with 4e at some time in the future and start looking for alternatives, just as I'd done in the past.I'm looking forward to 5e in several years. I'm anxious to see the coming interpretation of the elusive D&D. Maybe I find some future edition bland, childish, not to my tastes. But then I can easily dust off the books of some other editions and play what I want.Keep those editions coming! <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/laugh.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":lol:" title="Laughing    :lol:" data-shortname=":lol:" /></blockquote>

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