Where do you see the evolution of the D&D game heading?

[Dragonblade]

The complexity issue is an interesting one, especially as levels increase. I actually think the degree of complexity on the player side is almost perfect right now even on into epic levels. The difficulty comes in at the DM side. The game shifts radically in power and focus from level 1 and 20, but the DM is expected to manage not only his epic level PCs, but also NPCs, monsters, and story. Story being a big one in my opinion. Its hard to shift your thinking from running dungeon crawls and throwing orc warriors at the party, to dealing with True Resurrection, Wish, all the other abilities that epic PCs can bring to bear.

Now getting rid of high level play would be a mistake, I think. One of the enduring advantages of D&D over other RPGs is that it can handle Warhammer style gritty play at the low end, and also does a fair job of Exalted style play at the high end.

What's lacking is helping the DM to manage that transition from gritty to epic. Both mechanically in terms of streamlining high level NPC and monster creation rules, to story-wise in terms of training DMs to be able to create and run adventures that account for high level abilities like True Resurrection and Teleport without them feeling like they are losing control of their game and thus need to start over at level 1 again.

 

[hong]

I suspect 4E will discard, or at least loosen up, the paradigm of using one system to stat PCs and NPCs/monsters. PCs can be infinitely complicated, or at least as complicated as the player wants it. NPCs should be easier to build and run, since most of the time they're only going to be around for a few minutes. You can see something of this in Iron Heroes' villain classes, which are much simpler than the classes in the main book and cover most of the bases when it comes to villain schticks: combat tank, spellcaster, mob leader, demonic being, etc.

So yeah, full circle.