flatscan said:
Oh brother. :roll: It amazes me that so many people knock D&D (especially 4e) complaining about rules for the tactics and no rules for role-play. With 32+ years of gaming experience do you need rules for role-play? I played in a 4e game (Keep on the Shadowfell) and we had an entire session of role-play. That's right, 6 hours of no combat using the latest rules of D&D. You people love to fault the system but you ought to look at yourselves first. You bring the role to life not the game books.
As to those cumbersome rules you dislike so much, 4e actually scaled them back quite a bit from 3.5. Fewer skills and feats to keep track of. Keep in mind that D&D was inspired by a WARGAME. Tactics have always been an important part of it, even if you don't like using minis.
So much fewer as to be practically non-existant.
Do you need rules for reole playing? Hell yes! I have 32+ years of the hobby behind me too, but I still want a game written for someone new. They dhouldn't take for granted that people know what they're doing. Fluff is totally absent in 4e, and semi-meaningful briefs on how elves, halflings an dwarves behave is so minimal it might as well has just said "go watch one of the LOtRs and come back to this book when you're done."
Not only that, but the style of play of any given class in 4e is dictated by the limited choice of abailities at each level. When you choose 1 of 4 each time, and 2 of those choices aren't even optimal or interesting, becmeing a 1 or 2 choice real fast...you get very little character variation. Yes, you can manage it, but try making a Dwarf Paladin. Try making a halfling Warlord. It sucks because all of the boons are geared towards other races being suited for those classes so much and there being so few ways to choose a path to make them better that it's really almost a waste of time.
Now, this fact leads me to clearing up the idea that suddently, without explanation, gamers everywhere have turned agaisnt WotC and decided that they have flipped the industry on it's ear by taking a 90 degree turn into being interested in money. This position illustrated by the many books yet to be published. You are in the camp that argues that "TSR did it too, they had lots of books, and nobody called them money grubbing swine." Well, that's because they didn't print a percentage of the fighter rules in one book, followed by another percentage of them in another book, and so on. With books like Martial Powers, WotC have intentionally created an unfinished product in the initial three core books, to be followed by more and more "core" books after the fact, adding to and finishing off the whole. TSR issued "supplements" clearly defined as such, and totally additional to the books required. There was never the suggestion that you needed more than one players handbook to play the game, but WotC are doing just that; you need PHB1, MP, AP, PHB2...and the list goes on.
TSR can't be termed the "commercial collossus of thier day" because ther simply was no other company out there foing it. Steve Jackson didn't hit the big time with GURPS until far later, and still he kept the all-in-one model, with supplements to add on to the core.
3.0 was one book required gaming, and it had it all in there. Conan RPG has taken that and transformed it into the cream of 3.X. DO you need the Khitai supplement? No. Do you want it? Maybe, but more because of the quality of the previous products than the sense of an incomplete rules set.
Face it, 3.X is the best thing out there, and 4e will die off within about a year. Both because people won't want to buy into a perpetual list of "core" material, and because it's really an inferior, inflexible, 2 dimensional set of game rules compared to the 3.X varients that are still around. The fact there there's still such a 3.X following adds proof.
