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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 4284238" data-attributes="member: 18280">About my idea that 4e is the edition where Greedo shot first:The original Star Wars trilogy pushed the boundaries on special effects, but there is little doubt that some of those effects look dated by modern standards.  Like the remastered Star Trek TOS episodes, one can argue that digitally updating the effects of the original Star Wars trilogy allowed it to resonate with a whole new generation of viewers.  It also reminded older viewers of what Star Wars was like on the big screen…an important point considering the prequel trilogy Lucas was about to offer.However, Lucas did not just update the movies; he changed them.  Some of these changes were really cool….who didn’t like the first shot of Mos Eisley (before the cluttered street-level scenes) or seeing herds of banthas on Tatooine?  Who didn’t like seeing the dewlaps actually move?  Or a sense that the Death Star was packed with more storm troopers than Lucas’ budget for extras/costumes allowed?Yet, the original Star Wars trilogy had critics.  Some of those critics argued that Han Solo wasn’t really a good guy…look at what he did to Greedo.  And they said Star Wars wasn’t really a sci fi movie because of the Force, which was clearly mystical in nature.  It also had fans who examined the corner cases of the movies…things that weren’t really all that important to the stories, or were implied, like the background of Boba Fett or what the wampa really looked like.  And Lucas responded.  Forget that Han Solo wasn’t supposed to be a good guy when Obi Wan and Luke meet him.  Now Greedo shoots first.  Forget that we don’t see the wampa clearly in Empire because it was more effective to not see the wampa, now we see the wampa all too well.  The wampa and Boba Fett were cool because they were mysterious unknowns.  Now they are not unknown, and they are considerably less cool.  Similarly, midi-chlorians as an explanation for the Force is not only lame, but (because there is no non-mystical explanation for how the midi-chlorians work) it doesn’t solve the problem Lucas sought to address.Before releasing 3.0, WotC performed a massive poll to find out what people liked about D&D.  Well, one of the things people enjoy is finding cool magic items, figuring out what they do, and using them.  Of course, people also complained that they didn’t find all the cool items that they wanted, and that it was hard to figure out what they did – sometimes, too, it had negative consequences.  So, in 3.0, WotC made sure that player characters could potentially make any item in the book.  They also made it easier to identify items.  Problem solved….or so they thought.  Yet this one decision is at the heart of almost all the problems 3.x has.  Because of the ease of getting any given magic item, no item seems really special.  The DM is not encouraged to create new items, because creating new items means determining how that item can be created.  Because characters have all the specific items needed, they maximize their buffs.  Because characters have all the specific items needed, they carry a golf bag of items.  Because characters have all the specific items needed, the game requires a by-level baseline taking this into account, creating a level disparity that can cause difficulties if you want to play in a lower-magic environment.  The expectation that every character can (and should) have optimized buffs and items also means that the numbers escalate sooner and higher than they should, making high-level 3.x the pain in the ass that it is.  This escalation is written into monsters, and into classes, because a certain level of optimized magic is expected.Rolling these “item powers” into characters doesn’t solve the problem, and it opens up a whole host of new problems.  There are other things that feed into these problems, of course, but 3.x, like the reimagined Star Wars movies, demonstrates amply what happens when you try to fix “problems” that don’t exist, or when you don’t really understand why things worked (or did not work) before.  Simply because folks ask to see the wampa doesn’t mean that you should include those shots.  Simply because folks point out that Han shot first doesn’t mean that you should make Greedo shoot first.  Changing these things undoes good design.4e is even more like the reimagined Star Wars movies than 3e.  As with Lucas’s “new vision”, things are changed for no better purpose than to change them.  To add “cool” things here and there that end up far less cool than Lucas (or WotC) imagined, and detract from the story (or gameplay).Of course, Lucas could be accused of repackaging old merchandise with the intent of reselling it to folks who already had perfectly good prints of the trilogy.  WotC cannot be accused of the same.  After all, 3e had Attacks of Opportunity and five foot steps, and 4e has Opportunity attacks and one-square slides.  No similarities there at all.   <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=";)" /> RC</blockquote>

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