Why we chose not to go to 4e D&D

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  • wmoomaw
    wmoomaw
    Posts: 13
    I tired 4th ed for about 8 months. I think I have two main difficulties with it. The first being that everyone seems to be magical and the second is that the leap it made from 3.5 is so great its hard to see it as DND. Just because i am bored at work i'll expand.

    1. Everyone seems to be magical

    Ive tried playing several characters in the 4th ed system and of the characters i played there seems to be a massive amount of magical powers for all the classes. When i was playing a fighter, the abilities seemed such that the character was actually some kind of supernatural being whose combat style was near mystical. Now honestly its been a year sine i have played 4th so i dont remember all the powers i was using so that makes this a weak rhetorical point that i wont be able to defend without research. I just remember thinking how could a guy who is really good with a halbard do this stuff without magical assistance. Does anyone else feel this way?

    2. the leap from 3.5

    4th ed also made huge changes in the way the game was played in 3.5. I don't think there will be much argument there (or I hope not). My thoughts are that the shift was so great that it becomes problematic to use that DND branding. Much of my difficulty with the system stems from it being called DND. Now yes, games do change and each edition has implemented changes. But through out the history of DND their have been been touch stones that have linked each system to the previous. For instance, clerics were a main source of healing. if you wanted to heal and didnt have potions or a wand to take care of it, you either had to suck it up and wait or ask the cleric for healing. Sure clerics did change through out the previous systems. How they turned undead was shifted around. being able to sack memorized spells for healing. THACO (oh i loved THACO) was gotten rid of. But the core archetype remained intact. In 4th ed, this archetype shifted much more radically than it did in previous revisions. all characters can heal themselves and the cleric shoots lasers. Now i won't argue that one version of the cleric is better than the other (though i like earlier versions moreso than the 4th ed version), my point is that the shift is so great that it seems hard to call it a DND cleric.

    Now that is just one example and im sure that people will argue the fine point, but my real notion is not the fine point but the bigger picture. If a game radically changes why call it, aside from monetary reasons, a name whose branding elicits certain expectations that you are not going to meet. If you play Final Fantasy and then all of a sudden you don thave Sid some where in the world, and black, blue and white mages are removed from the game and replaced with Sorcerers or something, isnt there a point at which you should just say its something else? just say "hey, you liked final fantasy, maybe you will like this new game" instead of lifting a brand name to sell the product.

    I think i would have enjoyed 4th ed more if it wasn't being called DND. I would have though, "oh hey. Here is a d20 fantasy role playing game. And i get to pretty powerful characters, how cool. when in the mood for powerful characters ill play this or Exalted. But when i want to play DND ill play DND." Instead WOTC and gamers kept yelling about how 4th ed is so superior to preveiosu versions. Other gamers kept saying 3.5 was a better version. And it was hard to see the game for what it was. A fun high powered high fantasy game that was not DND.

    *shrug*

    thoughts?
  • wmoomaw
    wmoomaw
    Posts: 13
    I do miss the multi/dual class rules from 2nd ed and before though. sigh.
  • onsilius
    onsilius
    Posts: 50
    I'm in the "not going to 4th" camp (obviously :) ), but I read the core books all the way through twice. Every time I go back to considering people's arguments for playing it and wonder about it again, I can't get past what you have mentioned. It doesn't look anything like the game I enjoy. It is so different, it might as well be called another name. I agree.
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