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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 5997698" data-attributes="member: 87792">I await the explanation of the 1hp character being as capable offensively as the one on full HP.  D&D is not and has never been a process sim although 3.X sometimes tried.  Both get routinely claimed.  Both are both wrong and an attempt to marginalise 4e players and shut down debate.  Both should be moddable offences in my view - both incorrect and harmful to discourse.  What "D&D of the past thirty years".  3.0 turned its back on many of the fundamental design principles of D&D.  It tried to turn it from an outcomes based game into a process sim, and tried to turn it from a class based system into a point buy system.  For that matter, 2e turned its back on the game 1e was intended to be. 1e was about dungeon crawling.  2e was about high fantasy. You IIRC tried to list twenty ways that 4e was not historic D&D.  And it turned out that you were plainly and simply wrong in over half of them.  And 4e was closer to oD&D in intent and methodology than 3.0 was - that was your own list of ways 4e had changed things.  4e changed things away from 3e in a lot of cases - a lot of those were reversions.  And I believe he would have been much, much happier playing it than he would be about 3.0 which kept the forms but missed the intent.  He didn't say much about 3e but what he did was condemning it.    4e is not D&D = You should not be in this conversation.4e is not an RPG = You are too stupid to know what an RPG is so you play 4e and call it an RPG. You'll note that I single out those two mendacious attacks rather than say any criticism of 4e should be banned.  Those two are both wrong, insulting, and automatically degrade conversation wherever they are used.  This doesn't mean I think you should be baned from saying 4e combat takes too long, 4e PCs have too many hit points, you find powers mess up your immersion (I find a lack of options for martial characters seriously messes up mine).  4e bought into precisely one design principle that was new to D&D - a unified powers structure.  Balance?  Gygax aimed explicitely for balance and tweaked D&D and AD&D many times for it.  Outcomes based?  Yup.  D&D is rooted in tabletop wargaming - which by necessity is outcomes based and not process sim.  And if you are going to make up things about the design principles of D&D and claiming it to be a process-sim for 30 years then I'm not going to take your complaints seriously. What basically happened was that 3.0 was D&D redesigned by people like Monte Cook who fundamentally didn't get Gary Gygax's D&D.  And really didn't get why many of the design decisions had been made.  (I don't think mid-2e TSR got it either).  This more or less meant that there were two groups of people for 3.X.  Those who approached it the way they had 2e and just thought the maths had been tweakedn and cleaned up, and those who took it on its own terms. You are one of the 2e players.  For you 3.X works because you play it as if it was 2e.  And if you aren't going to stress the system at all then it works.  Just about. Take 3.X on its own merits, and wizards rule the world.  The game is a perverse gonzo construction in which casters rule and fighters drool (<a href="http://www.d20srd.org/srd/spells/feeblemind.htm" target="_blank">sometimes literally</a>).  The nature of classes and of saving throws has changed almost beyond recognition.  And as for hp, Save or Suck.  The fighter always had problems bringing more to the party than a cleric did - now he fails utterly.  Hit points are now an unlimited resource - see the Wand of Cure Light Wounds. 4e on the other hand saw this mess and went back to basics.  It started out the way Gygax did, looking to surrounding hobbies for inspiration rather than simply looking back into itself and chasing its own tail.  It then focussed on providing the best possible experience for one strand of the D&D hobby it possibly could (the one traceable back to Dragonlance and 2e not to Gygax's table) - that of being mighty heroes.  It accepted many of the design principles  Gygax had such as balance and effective power limits, while changing the forms.  Which was the opposite to the 3e approach of just leaving something like the outer shell.</blockquote>

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