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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steelwill" data-source="post: 5634268" data-attributes="member: 90458">I by and large agree with what is said above, but would like to add a bit.  Regarding Skill Challenges and Emergent Gameplay, props to Gardukk for speaking to this issue and putting it more clearly into words than I have seen it phrased before.  That said, I would like to add that combat encounters in 4E being resolvable in only one way, that being grinding down enemy hit points, I think is similarly applicable to the emergent gameplay issue.  In 3.5 more options, especially through magical effects, existed for resolving combat encounters in a variety of creative ways other than simply slogging it out against a wall of monster hit points.  4E sacrificed too much in terms of emergent gameplay.  Regarding broken math, the balance being so tightly tuned in 4E contributes to this problem, because everything mathematically needs to balance out in parallels between the challenges and the PCs.  The problem I found with this is that leveling up and gaining new powers no longer puts the characters ahead of the game, but just keeps them with their heads above water against an even challenge, however fails at this in the places where the math doesn't work.  In 4E the leveling feels more like Elder Scrolls Oblivion, in that it can actually count against PC's if they aren't careful about how they level up and the choices they make. Regarding Option Bloat; I can't agree more with the frustration with the magic items in 4E, for the reasons you have stated and the fact that there are too many with encounter and daily powers on them.  In the 3ish years of playing 4E, I have only had one player ever use their item dailies, they get forgotten about 95% of the time, and are too tedious to keep track of compared to their general worth. My groups and I also have found them generally uninspiring in many cases, probably because their design is so overcautious about messing up the tight balance that many don't see them as being very powerful (vorpal blade 4E, or vorpal blade 3.5?). As well, everything in the way of feats, magic items, and powers are all too specific.  4E is not a very modular system in this regard.  Even before Essentials was released, which upset many people with its specific builds with limited choices, people were complaining about how choices were perceived as limited because you had too many best in slot/best at level options that made the other crap options effectively no choice at all.  This I feel is a big part of what made people upset at essentials classes as it showed a shift in a design direction that made what was already a problem even worse.  As well, each class basically being a completely custom class needing 300 powers each taking up 20+ pages isn't very good design either. In conclusion, in these years of playing 4E, I have come to miss several options that existed in 3.5, but can't return to that because I have come to appreciate several just brilliant and well executed options and mechanics that 4E brought to the table.  So I am of the mind that the perfect, at least for me, fantasy rpg system would have to be one that is a hybrid of whats good from 4E coupled with what I miss from 3.5.  I don't find Pathfinder to be this, as it is mostly just 3.5 extended and not enough of 4E.  So if WoTC is reading this, or some budding RPG designer, there is the need identified, the demand without a supply at the moment.  My 2 cents.</blockquote>

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