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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5213929" data-attributes="member: 4720">I seem to be very late to the party, but I wanted to point out that the entire discussion of relative difficulty is ignoring individual differences and trying to set up a fallacious objective standard.  To wit...No, it doesn't.I'm going to take the apparently heretical position that 1e is harder to run as written gridless than 4e.  For me, facing and volumes alone would be enough to make this the case.  By comparison, opportunity attacks and flanking are substantially more vague in their meaning and application.Along these lines, I wish I could give Umbran xp for this:This is important.  The rulesets abstract slightly different things and abstract them in different ways.  Therefore, for some people, 1e is going to be harder, and for others 4e is going to be harder.  For me, without a grid to abstract volumes and a mini to show facing, I'm going to have a seizure.  And don't give me measurements in inches and then not expect me to go insane trying to find miniatures at the right scale.On the other hand, while I don't particularly like handwaving "Push 3" and "Close burst 5", I can do so without wanting to hurt game designers.  "Can I get there while avoiding an AoO?" is a bit more irritating, but I've learned to live with that, too.If I wanted to learn how to run 1e gridless, I would be in for an uphill slog, whereas running 4e gridless is just sort of annoying.Many other people have the exact opposite reaction, because they have different histories, preferences, and skills.I would also point out that I never, ever saw anyone run 1e or 2e as written.  Since everyone was throwing out rules they found inconvenient, that might have made running 1e gridless much simpler, but I don't think the RAW necessarily supports that analysis.  Leastways not as an objective standard that can be applied to all people.This stretches back conveniently to the disparities earlier in the thread, where some people have seen their time spent per round drop dramatically going from 3e to 4e, while others have seen these horrific rises in time spent per round.  There's a case to be made that, cognitively speaking, some people simply get along with better with certain abstractions and ways of chunking information, which may be driving that disparity to seemingly absurd degrees.  Or maybe it's not a raw cognitive disparity, but some people are simply over-trained in a "3e way of thinking" and are forcing a way of thinking onto 4e that is hindering rather than helping.It's like translating in your head as you take a test in another language.  The process itself eats up cognitive resources, and you do worse on the test than you would have on the same test in your native language.</blockquote>

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