Kzach said:
One other thing that really cemented my already firm decision to pick up the new edition was the constant use of the basic concept of, "Does this rule enhance the fun of the game? Why is this rule here? What is it's function and purpose? Does it add or subtract to the game? What can we do to make it more fun and easier to run?"
This set of questions I honestly don't believe have ever really been a core part of designing any of the new editions. They might have been in the background as absent thoughts or occasionally have popped up with one of the more glaring, game-bogging rules, but other than that, were an after-thought rather than the primary motivating factor for change.
That's a good point, and I am not sure those questions have ever been applied to designing a ruleset in quite that way before. Rules are important and necessary, but finding the sweet spot that balances ease of play, ease of GM'ing, and verisimilitude is tricky. Rules should give you options, as both a GM and a player. They should work smoothly together to minimize the GM as adversary mentality. "Armed with my Knowledge: The Rulez skill, I coerce the GM into doing things my way yet again. Bwahahaha".
Too few options for character customization (1E, 2E), and each character of the same class plays the same. Players also feel like they ought to be able to do something in a given situation, but there are no mechanics to cover it. A good GM can wing it. However there isn't time to consider long term game balance implications when you are adjudicating a decision on the fly. Therefore you risk having a "Sure you can do that" one-off maneuver becoming something the players do all the time to gain a tactical advantage. There are also those GM's who just say no, and don't let you do anything that's not in the rules.
I hated my one session of 2E because I'd played Rolemaster for years at that point, and the humble Perception skill was not in D&D. We were ambushed with no chance to react or notice the bad guys. I want at least the *chance* to see them. We were awake and aware, but no, they jumped us. It was very frustrating for me since I was accustomed to being able to make a perception check. Not having that, and other options on what my character could do, was painful.
Too many options for NPC's (3E) results in monsters that aren't playable out of the book and take a lot of prep time to use. Why do monsters need feats? Or Use Rope skill? in my opinion using the same rules to create NPC's and PC's bogs down the GM, and causes power gamer types to start reverse engineering NPC's that they encounter. It bogs down the game for our improvisation-heavy DM, and I honestly don't think it adds anything to the fun. Why does a monster that will live for 8 rounds need 20 options on what it can do in combat? That makes it hard for the DM to run it.
Too many options for PC's (Rolemaster, 3E with too many supplements) results in a game that is hard to learn, confusing, and often unbalanced. It also makes people waste skill points in something that may only be actually utilized once or twice in the entire lifespan of the character - like Forgery skill. Rolemaster at least had a separate set of secondary skill points that could only be spent on fluff and esoteric skills. D&D pretty much required dumping all your points into the most vital skills needed by your character. Sure you *could* put points in Play Instrument if you aren't a bard, but why spend your precious limited skill points on that? If I want my character to be a circus entertainer turned adventurer, then I should have a set of background skills to match my history, but the current skills system mixes up essential and fluff skills and severely restricts the number of points you get. It takes away the fun of picking interesting skills.
Some of the fluff regarding the new system bugs me, and it will create difficulties if we want to continue to use our current campaign world. I'm also concerned that there are a lot of changes being made to the rules still. It seems they are still in flux. To borrow the term from software, we're still in either late alpha, or closed beta testing. It seems all too plausible that we'll be seeing a 4.5 edition that fixes issues discovered during open beta testing with 4.0 after it's release.
Even so, if the mechanics live up to the promises and tantalizing glimpses that we've had so far, and if they've managed to find that sweet spot between too many choices and not enough, while still keeping the game fun to run for the DM, then I'll be all over 4E. At the very least, we'll give it a thorough playtest.
