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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4926519" data-attributes="member: 2067">After playing 4e almost since it came out, I can only (still) give a conflicted opinion. A lot of what people are raving about in 4e, I could care less about, or find that 3e does better. Tactical combats? Whoop-dee-doodle-doo, I still hate counting squares, and I find the roles and the powers systems absolutely dull. Free-form DMing? I am more comfortable with a system that handles everything neutrally like 3e than I am with 4e's constant hassle to make stuff up. Ease of monster design? Dude, reskinning and fiddling with numbers is as old as the d20, I don't need 4e to tell me to do that. The suspension of disbelief is in many ways kiboshed, and the sense of the world existing independent of the game has been reduced to an irrelevancy. For me, combats always were an important part of D&D, but they weren't the entirety of the game by any measure, and 4e's weakening of many non-combat aspects into mostly "everyone does the same thing all the time and no one cares, you don't need rules for roleplay!" blah is not appreciated by me. That said, it does a lot of things right. I appreciate a system that fixes the math, that tries to get rid of accidental suck (overpower I'm less concerned with). The combats are smooth and work absolutely as advertised. The rewards system in 4e is leaps and bounds better than 3e's "Big Six." A lot of the sacred cows of D&D that were truly useless (iterative attacks? slot-based magic?) have been deservedly thrown to the moon never to return. A lot of these things might not sound like much, but they make it VERY hard to go to Pathfinder for me, which improves in many ways, but retains a lot of narm-worthy elements in the name of backwards compatability. I'm kind of the philosophy that we need more than Pathfinder can give us, but probably not as big of a change as 4e gave us. I liked 3e, and from my perspective, there's a lot of stuff that can stand to be changed, but there's also things that I wouldn't change for the sake of changing. 4e is mostly a totally different beast, and it's good at what it does, what it does just isn't the only reason I play D&D. 4e is probably also easier to add stuff onto because it's much more modular than 3e, while 3e was more fun to fiddle with because it didn't have that modularity (a change like "dwarves are small-sized" is significant in 3e, but is mostly fluff in 4e). 4e is solid enough that I don't want to give it up, but I miss a lot of what 3e could do, and I'm trying to find ways to meld the two better. I think 4e can stomach a lot of additions to make it play more like the game I want -- better than 3e can stomach the changes, anyway.</blockquote>

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