I was emailing this to a bud of mine and I thought I’d repeat this info a lot and decided to blog it and refer him here. (Hi Mark!)
After researching the idea and giving thought to something I heard Gygax say once, I don’t think I’m going to pick up 4th.
Gygax basically said that people didn’t need the rulebooks… they needed imagination.
4th edition basically offers a different method to conduct character craetion and combat. It stifles existing, established methods of doing things such as character creation and combat and is basically a new revinue stream for WotC.
I may buy the books once day, but if a game is 4th only, I’ll probably move along. Spending time flipping through pages looking for the solution of some rule is not my idea of having fun. Playing the game is my idea of fun.
June 17th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Im the bud.. Hi Walt…
I want to disagree with you only marginally.. I can not discount your opinions on 4th Ed.. But I will counter with this. I had a chance to speak to Richrad Baker a week or so ago and got some impressions from what they were thinking when designing 4th edition. The thing which stood out in my mind that gets to the core of 4th ed is this paraphrased quote. “$th Edition was designed for Game Playability, not simulation.” To me that yes they changed how the mechanics work in an attempt to make the RUles easier to enhance creativity.
The DMG is the best they have ever done IMHO as it spends more time focusing on how to run a game not mechanically but creatively. It talks about backstory, plot and moving the story forward. It gives better advice on how to organize and run groups and how to better prepare as opposed to the odd rules and magic items which used to take up the DMG. Im not saying that it isn’t a new revinue stream for WotC , it is, nor am I saying 3.5 is a bad system, its a great system.
But You are right in that 4th Ed is a different system, but for my money it is worth it as it is in many ways simpler and gets out of the way easier then 3.5… Though I am not opposed to running a 3.5 Game on Saturday, as I would run most anything if I can find 3-5 people to show up regularly.
June 17th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Hmmm… good thoughts…
I suppose in the end it’s just the story that matters and I am interested to see how they are organizing the new books. It may be worth looking into.