Gary Gygax R.I.P.

[Burnsaber]

I'm kind of sick of people dissing 4th edition right away. It's sort of easy to just read intercepts of the book and instantly hate it (to be honest, I did too). Is it a completely different game than the previous editions? Yes. Is it a good game nevertheless? Yes.

I think the biggest problem of the game is the "D&D" in the title. It sort of gives a wrong picture for the veterans of the game on what to except. As for the "videogamish" abilities and rules, it's sort of silly at first but once you play the game you see it in a different light. It just plays so well. The combat is fluent, cinematic and really gives you the feel of being a hero. Team work is rewarded by the in-game rules and there are a lot abilities that allow you to support others while doing something yourself. I'm currently playing in a D&D 4th edition campaing as a cleric and I can use one of my healing powers as a sort "extra" action so that I can whack a dude and heal my friend in the same turn. In the previous versions if you healed someone, that was basically your turn. (and the dude you healed quite probably got whacked again, so your next turn also went to healing him and so forth..). The healing as a extra action is just a example of thing that looked silly on paper when I made the cleric, but when I actually *played* the character it just worked like a charm. I had a blast.

That's sort a the biggest thing I look in a system. The combat is the point of the game where the rules matter the most. When the game is on outside of combat, like interacting with NPC's it is the players who roleplay, not the rules.

It's not a perfect game of course, the skill system is pretty much mutilated and the classes have lost some of their old charm as they have been balanced. But that is sort of a give-and-take. D&D 3.5 class balance was a joke afterall and I feel a bit silly complaining now that it is fixed. I admit that I wouldn't play a "intrique" campaing with it, but in it's niche (high-fantasy heroic adventure), D&D 4th edition is a damn good game. If you don't like playing high fantasy heroic adventure type of games, it's not the system for you and that is fine. But that does not make it a poor game.

[Wrana]

Originally Posted by Burnsaber

I'm kind of sick of people dissing 4th edition right away. It's sort of easy to just read intercepts of the book and instantly hate it (to be honest, I did too).

You are welcome to be. Well, I looked at the 3 ed. I didn't like it (though there were good ideas and things which were past time to implement - including, by the way, advanced class system taken from Warhammer RPG). I was told that it's unreasonable and that I should take part in test-play. I took - and was bored out of my brain. The same for 3.5. How much more tests I need you say? If something looks like a duck, walks like a duck...
Yes, it's videogamish - but that wouldn't probably be a problem if, like you said, it wasn't called D&D. But such a name should require a continuity within worlds - which are already described in their realties. And this changes completely. If so - why should I play completely different thing? There are many other systems. As for D&D worlds, I, like Chris said, still consider 2nd edition "the One and True".
And as for a simple and dynamic system - there is always Feng Shui RPG, Rune (actually better videogame system than DD$), Forgotten Futures (free, by the way) and many others. While if I want a game within a detailed world (and it's more interesting than an abstract goblin-bashing) the system itself should detail many other things besides combat. And there are many such systems too. Though I won't consider Rolemaster among them - not because it's made needlessly complicated (I played TriTac Bureau 13 - and it was quite good!), but because it managed to be complicated without being actually realistic and - mainly - because it's tried to be universal and never managed a good game world. Middle Earth Roleplaying it started from was better regardless of obvious holes in its rules. By the way, what I like very much in Dominions is a detailed game world with a number of detailed cultures and their complex interactions.