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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 6335282" data-attributes="member: 18">Supported? I think it's very hard to suggest that, mechanically, previous editions "supported" many play styles.I think the issue with 4E is absolutely not what you claim, that is "supported" fewer play styles than say, 3E or 1E (2E is more complicated), but rather the issue is that 4E made it extremely clear what it did actively support and expect, and it was indeed the first edition of D&D that was actually transparent about that.This discussion has been had at some length and is why people sometimes refer to 4E being kind of "indie" - it's that transparency on what it does actually, actively support.I don't believe that you can make any kind of good case that, mechanically, 4E supported less of a "diversity" of play styles than previous editions (particularly 3.XE/PF, which is the most relevant). However, you can make a very good case, a very easy case, that 4E said what it did actively, intentionally, mechanically support.With 1/2/3E, the issue was not that they strongly mechanically supported a wide diversity of play styles. They did not. What they did do, however, especially 1/2E, is avoid directly telling you what it was that they did support (in part because in those pre-90s days the concept of "play style" was poorly developed), which lead to people using them for a wide variety of games and not really minding that they didn't actually mechanically support X or Y play style well.3E continued this - it was a bit more transparent and had more of a playstyle in mind, a somewhat confused one in which a desire to encourage rules-mastery sat side-by-side with encouraging the DM to just make up PRCs with no good guidelines, but one nonetheless.Whereas 4E, being post-90s, post-Forge, post-Indie, post-OSR (to a large extent), very much knew what play style it wanted to support and was very open and clear about it.Mechanically, though, it's no more narrow in support than any other edition. It undoubtedly supports DIFFERENT play styles mechanically to 3E (which supported different play styles to 2E, and so on), but less? Objectively less? You're not going to be able to demonstrate that, I'd suggest.All that said, it's fine to object to 4E as not supporting your play style. It's just not really impressive to claim it supported "less diversity". No. It was merely more transparent about it's support, and people reacted against that very strongly. Ironically enough, 5E is somewhat similar to 4E in this - it's fairly transparent about the default play style (not as transparent, but closer than previous editions), which is precisely why it's catching so much flak on certain issues! <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=";)" /></blockquote>

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