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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Morte" data-source="post: 3476205" data-attributes="member: 9413">Those should have been the key points of 3.5e, never mind 4e. I refuse to waste time on PnP D&D while it involves so much paperwork. As somebody said: "twenty minutes of fun, packed into four hours". Oh, add another four hours homework for the GM. [Even Piratecat, possibly the most famous D&D GM in the world, wanted to use some sort of hero point mechanic partly so he wouldn't have to calculate XP any more.]Do WOTC, in this day and age, seriously expect me to fight a six round battle between four adventurers and six orcs and spend whole hours on it, when it takes 36 seconds in NWN (simplified realtime combat) or about 2 minutes in the ToEE CRPG (somewhat faithful turn-based)?Judging by the state of computer gaming, which involves budgets WOTC can only dream about, I think that sort of AI is at least one decade away. Unfortunately.You got it nailed.Do you think this means 4e might go for a less "exception and extension based" approach to mechanics to simplify computer implementations? Feats are pretty much exceptions from the normal rules, and they're hard work for computer programmers since they add extra code to be implemented/tested/debugged. They're especially hard to add onto existing code, which is a problem for "publish core rules now and extra stuff later". It can be orders of magnitude simpler to add something mildly concept-shifting like "spring attack" to an existing paper ruleset than an exisiting computer program.IMO, having rules working on unified principles that are finished then released is the holy grail of computer-based RP game programming. But it would mean a huge change to the business model of selling extra rules (splat books etc). I think WOTC are between a rock and a hard place on that one.</blockquote>

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