Why did you quit playing 4e

[Toben the Many]

Finally, the books were not meant to be read. With 3E, part of the fun is sitting down and reading the thing while figuring out what you might want to add to your character.

Yeah, I have to re-iterate this point for emphasis.

If you go back and look at the 3.x books, they are very easy on the eyes. There is not a lot of garish white space. There are faint lines on the page, evoking the feel of a journal or tome. The sketchy artwork for characters and equipment also lends itself to that feel.

The 4e books, on the other hand, really feel cold and utilitarian to me. And, by putting the powers right after each character class section, there are large sections in the middle of the PHB with no artwork to break up the pages. The 3.x PHB, on the other hand, had artwork throughout - except for the spells section in the back of the book. When I first got my PHB, I flipped to a spread where it listed a bunch of powers and then noticed that from a distance, with the color-coded charts, it looked like one of my old chemistry text books.

The large, empty white spaces in the MM...I'm just baffled by. Preventing large white spaces and gaps in the text is layout 101.

 

[billd91]

I'm not baffled by the layout of the 4e books at all. I find them far easier to reference than the 3e books ever were... which is exactly what I want throughout most of a game rulebook that I will use a reference as I need it.

 

[RFisher]

If you go back and look at the 3.x books, they are very easy on the eyes. There is not a lot of garish white space. There are faint lines on the page, evoking the feel of a journal or tome.

Wow. Exactly the things I hated about the 3e books.

The large, empty white spaces in the MM...I'm just baffled by. Preventing large white spaces and gaps in the text is layout 101.

Again, completely opposite to the things i’ve studied about text layout.

 

[mmu1]

Yeah, I have to re-iterate this point for emphasis.

While I'm not fond of paying for large fonts and empty space either (even if I think better organization is something every RPG book should strive for in the sections dealing specifically with the rules) I thought Darrin's point was not the nature of the layout but the fact that the 4E books have no literary qualities that might make you want to sit down and read them for fun, that they're just reference volumes. Like a dictionary. Or a phone book.

I'm not sure that 3E books were written works of art either, but they certainly were less sterile, with more fluff...

 

[med stud]

We went back to playing Swedish BRP- like games.

While we played 4e, I noticed a trend, both from me and the players. We all started to avoid combats. Skill challenges were fun and good, but everytime it started to look like a combat the players wanted to back out and I started throwing in other solutions. Not because the fights would be dangerous, but because they were dragging on forever. The powers are fine and everything but I don't know if they are the correct solution to class imbalance.

Then we thought that if we were going to play games that were light on combat, we might as well play games with combat chapters that are 5 pages long and we went on to play the above mentioned Swedish games.