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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 3791266" data-attributes="member: 42582">Delericho, thanks for your reply. Most of what Reynard said I agree with, so I'll just pick up one one part of your post.I picked on iron spikes (it could equally well have been the 10' pole) just because I find them deeply illustrative of the difference between "old school" play (as I understand it) and contemporary play. (If by "old school" one only means the tropes of dungeon-bashing, somewhat arbitrary collections of creatures and so on, then I have no doubt that 4e will fully support such play. It is the operational aspect of play that I am meaning to pick out with this term.)As an item of equipment, iron spikes are used to secure dungeon doors from the inside, so that monsters cannot get in. Thus, they are only relevant to a game in which (i) the PCs explore dungeons, (ii) the PCs spend time resting in dungeons, (iii) the dungeon is populated by wandering monsters who, when they come to a door they can't open, will simply wander off elsewhere, (iv) the players are happy to spend play time working out an equipment list (and at low levels, before they have bags of holding, their encumbrance), and to describe the details of the camp they make and the techniques they use to secure that camp.Of the 3rd ed adventures from WoTC, I can't think of a single one that supports anything like this style of play. (Likewise for 2nd ed adventures from TSR, but I don't know as many of them.) It may be that the Necromancer and Dungeon Crawl Classics modules do encourage this sort of play - by having lots of empty rooms, a large number of essentially static room inhabitants (or at best inhabitants who react within narrow geographic confines) - but to me that gives rise to the question, if a significant part of the play experience is this sort of operational planning and decision-making, which draws on the players' knowledge (but not mechanical knowledge of the game) and intelligence, why bother with a character-build system that puts so much effort into detailing the PC's knowledge and abilities, and requires so much effort at mechanical mastery before it becomes fully playable?Given the effort the 4e designers are going to to make sure that every player has something to do every round of every encounter (by changing the resource management paradigm, and eliminating the need for the player of a wizard to choose between "I do nothing" in order to conserve spells, or nova-ing and completely outshinging the fighters), I expect 4e to have even more complex mechanics (from the perspective of PC build and PC choices during encounters) and therefore to be an even less attractive ruleset if the aim of the game is to challenge the players' operational skills rather than their mastery of the game mechanics.Btw, this is not meant to be either a defence or a criticism of either "old school" or 4e. It's simply an attempt to explain why I don't think that the two will mix all that well.</blockquote>

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