I just… well, I xkcd’d it.

Quoted for truth:
I have read the new Better Joy Cookbook and I am devastated to my very core. Their macaroni and cheese recipe, the very macaroni and cheese I’ve been making since I was in college, has been ravaged and disfigured and left bleeding on the page. Where once it contained only cheddar cheese, now the recipe calls for a mix of cheddar and Colby. It may contain macaroni, and it may contain cheese, but it is not macaroni and cheese. This is a slap in the face and a knife in the gut. You have lost me, Better Joy Cookbook. I would bid you goodbye, but I wish you nothing but the pain and rage you have delivered unto me.

Very cool round.

Forced movement doesn’t provoke opportunity attacks, but even still. Cool.

Oh, for crissake, everyone just shut the hell up and play a frakking game already!

This overanalysis and “X is broken/unfun/gimped/ghey because I said so” does nothing but perpetuate the stereotype of gamers as a bunch of argumentative geeks.

4E not for you? Then get over it, play another game(please!), and stop accusing it of destroying the goddamned hobby.

Team performance is more so because it’s self sustainable and peer reinforced.

The Warlord, off course, being defined by the fact that his powers interlock with other characters, it would be kind of silly to use him as an example of bad game design. Akin to saying “I don’t like games with magic spells, and this game has wizards… Eww. Icky.”

4E encougages teamwork and combinations; but they don’t really hide that fact nor force you to take advantage of it… That said, the first time your players pull one of these off? They’ll be hooked for life.

Wizard lays down a one-round duration zone of damage; rogue forces baddie to slide backward three squares… through the wizard’s AoE effect and through one of the fighter’s threaened squares. Fighter takes his attack of opportunity, and the baddie ends his forced move next to the ranger. The ranger smiles, quick draws his twin longswords and unleashes a flurry…

And they do this at level one. By accident.

My gamign group converted after that one round of combat.

I have to agree with his point about being connected to your character and not treating it like another piece on a game board. That’s kinda why this is roleplaying and not wargaming. I can see where he gets this impression from 4e, that the game supports a “detached” style of play. But in my 30 years of experience as a roleplayer, people are gonna play the way they’re gonna play regardless of how the rules are written. This is the same issue I have with Ron Edwards’ GNS theory – you can write the perfect Narrativist game, but someone’s still gonna make some house rules to add a Gamist or Simulationist slant to it, because that’s what we do. Kit-bashing the rules is part of what makes it fun. Playing “inappropriately” can be part of the fun.

The bit about scaling encounters so that something is as challenging for 5th level character as it is for a 25th level character (or whatever the example was) ism, well, it’s that rules kit-bashing I was just talking about. I’ve scaled adventures to run them with inappropriately-levelled characters, in both directions, running low-level characters through high-level adventures and vice-versa. Game balance, to me, is in the hands of the game master. the GM’s job is to select encounters appropriate to the character(s) and make sure everyone has something appropriate to do. 4e tries to do that with the system, but that’s always been the hallmark of a good GM. It has nothing to do with “fair” or adding an “I win” button, it has to do with making things interesting. TPK is fun once in a while, but not interesting in heavy rotation unless you’re playing Paranoia. Killing everything with no real threat of getting killed, as if you’re playing a first-person shooter in god mode, is fun for a while but gets old. Maintaining a challenge and keeping things interesting requires conscious effort to read the mood at the table, change things up, know when to knock ‘em down when they’re getting cocky, and knowing when to throw them a bone after they’ve had their asses handed to them.

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Yes the rules are confusing and there are a gazillion of them but hot damn I wish I could reconnect with the sheer thrill of rediscovering it all for the first time.