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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4862504" data-attributes="member: 2067">I read it more like calling 4e a good RPG is like calling Transformers a good movie. It's fun and entertaining and all, but it lacks depth and substance and if all you're going to do is watch explosions and look at hot girls, you can satisfy this by buying a gun and watching porn, without needing to go to a movie theater. That the movie is marketed mostly at young men and teenagers shows it as a middle ground between boyhood and manhood in the US -- a stepping stone between playing with action figures and pulling girls' hair to entering the military and grudgingly settling for monogamy. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />The implication there being that 4e is shallow, not that it's not fun, but it's not something you can invest yourself into, and the sort of fun that it provides can be found in other places as well (board games, video games, whatever), places that actually focus on it. Transformers is entertaining, but prurient, cheap, tawdry, base, and simplistic. It is eye candy, it is pornography, it is nothing beyond titilation.Note that this isn't necessarily a bad thing for 4e to be, depending on your perspective. I'm not sure most people would say that D&D has any sort of responsibility to do anything but let me have fun. There's a tangle of assumptions and annoyances that would do well to become disentangled, here.First, the final bit: a lot of 4e is deviant, seen from the perspective of other editions. It switches cart and horse, it sacrifices sacred cows, it is about action and combat not about survival and resource management, etc., etc. 4e being deviant isn't limited to what it does or doesn't do to the combat/noncombat mix.4e is like every other edition of D&D in that its support for things to do outside of beating things upside the head is sparse. You are meant to fight things.However, utility powers are for combat, by and large. They just aren't attacks. You do things during combat other than attack.Rituals are not for combat. Skill challenges are not for combat. But every other edition had "rituals" (and had more of them, because they were wizard and priest spells), and we've had some form of skill challenges since the introduction of thief skills, mostly with more granularity and variety than 4e provides, so 4e does offer fewer things to do aside from combat.4e doesn't offer anything really new, and the things it does offer -- the quantity of skills and rituals -- is significantly less than existed in most other editions.4e isn't particularly aberrant for D&D in not providing a lot of things to do outside of combat. 4e provides less, but no edition provides much.But if you were running a fairly combat-lite game before 4e, certainly you can see how 4e provides fewer options for that kind of game than 3e or 2e (regardless of if they provided a huge number or not, 4e does provide less).</blockquote>

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