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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5613589" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, yeah, as I said there are actual issues with 4e. I just think they are perfectly understandable in the light of it being a completely new game. MANY of them fall into the realm of comparison to previous editions, but it really did stray from the mark somewhat in terms of play at the table.Combat really is too slow. The tactical teamwork encounter concept is nice, but there are simply too many competing options, too many things to track, and a lack of any ability to make really quickly decisive moves. The whole super precise formulaic encounter paradigm makes DM prep easy and reliable but adventures seem to inevitably fall into a rather fixed overall rut that you really have to consciously break out of. You CAN do a lot more in 4e that was pretty much impossible in 3.x but the DM needs to work it. Things otherwise are so reliable that adventures just seem to take their inevitable course. With earlier editions the game was always in a state of semi-pear-shaped mess, but in a way that kind of forced a certain amount of DM creativity. There was a sort of "oh wow, look what happened" kind of thing that went on that probably drove adventure writers nuts but added a certain fun element.The other aspect that I see, coming from playing all way back since the mid 70's, is just that the complexity of the game has gotten way out of hand. It goes along with the clockwork encounter/adventure thing. Should the game go pear-shaped for the party you're looking at a lot of work invested and a lot of downtime to build up new characters. Rolling up a PC and filling out a character sheet back in 1974 took all of 5 minutes, tops. That included hand drawing the character sheet on a sheet of blank paper, rolling dice, filling it in, and making all of the 4-5 choices you had to make. Heck, the first time I ever played I was what, 12? It still took 5 minutes to roll up a PC cold without even knowing the rules. Maybe in 1e/2e that was up to 15 minutes (and we had printed sheets), but remember, this was by hand, no character builders, no reference material, nothing, just a pencil, a sheet, some dice, and the PHB. Maybe it took 20 minutes if you were a magic user or a cleric. Nowadays? Heck, you can't expect someone to do it in 45 minutes using a character builder program that no matter how much anyone complains about it is 4,000 times better than anything we ever had before. Sure, you CAN just push all the 'take the defaults' buttons but what you get is crap and STILL takes 20-30 minutes. The game simply desperately needs to be stripped back down some and a little more uncertainty reinjected into the game. This is where 4e really did miss the mark. Leveling the playing field between all classes and getting rid of a lot of problematic mechanics and game elements worked well. Things like healing surges, the skill system, etc are all great, but that didn't have to go hand-in-hand with removing practically all uncertainty from how encounters would go. Leave in these good elements so that you can viably play any character of any class and the DM can easily build good plots, but strip the character building process back down to 5 minutes, let encounters be swingier, drastically reduce required system mastery, and get rid of most elements that require tracking during combat. It IS possible. That would be a highly polished 4e successor which might still piss off a good number of traditionalists, but it would have the fast loose play of OSR type games and the good aspects of 4e. We're probably 80% of the way there.</blockquote>

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