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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wulf Ratbane" data-source="post: 4419256" data-attributes="member: 94">I meant that 3e has a lot of hobby metagame literally away from the table. If you are a DM, you can spend an inordinate amount of time doing game prep-- mostly statting up NPCs from what I understand, but I don't do that much myself. (My bad guys don't live long enough to make it worth the effort. We stack 'em like cordwood. Plus I prefer monsters to NPCs.)If you are a player, you can spend hours tweaking your build, plotting our your career path, when you will take each level of each class and each feat to qualify for which prestige class; what magic items you're going to try to acquire or create to shore up your weaknesses and min/max your character, etc.And, yes it's true, you can spend hours copying your character from an old character sheet onto a new character sheet and just making sure all the numbers are right!This is not the game-- this is the metagame: The things you spend your afternoon doing the night before you actually play.In Magic the Gathering terms, it's the difference between spending hours building a killer deck vs. the five minutes of fun you get from actually crushing your opponent with it.I think it's safe to say that as a design goal 4e seeks to streamline the amount of time you HAVE to spend away from the table to maximize the amount of fun you can spend actually playing the game. That's certainly not a condemnation of 4e. In Magic the Gathering terms, 4e is like pre-built decks. It puts the focus on the game, NOT the metagame.And for the record, I think that's the right approach to bring more people into D&D. (And that bringing more people into D&D is the right approach for the game.)No, I definitely didn't mean that. I didn't exactly mean that, either, but it does remind me of our current wizard player. He loves burying his nose in the spells section of the book while we play.</blockquote>

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