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The winner is irrelevant. The loser will be the American people either way. 
i don't get why people see D&D or it's derivatives as medieval european. you have medieval knights wearing rennaiscane era armor, wielding roman era falcatas, worshipping greek gods, traveling with native american shamans wearing the hides of saharan beasts, who transform into prehistoric dinosaurs who are accompanied by modern japanese schoolgirls wielding Tokugawa Era Daisho and Wearing black pajamas, and old men wearing robes and pointed hats who chant mathematical equations to control reality, on a journey to kill brain eating space aliens, giant sentient firebreathing spellcasting reptiles and sentient jello. 
Dungeon and Dragons 4.0: A Wrong Turn for an Honored Product No matter how bad you might want it to be, this is not an essay. If you feel as though you have written an essay, you are wrong. Your thread already has a title. You don't need to give it another one just for the sake of the appearance of legitimacy. What you have written is a pseudoreview that should never have been typed in the first place, because your post demonstrates a fundamental lack of familiarity with the game. Your ego's writing checks your experience can't cash. Now that D&D 4th edition has been out for a few years now we, as gamers and dungeon masters, can reflect on its effectiveness as a game product. It's obvious that time played no part in the decision to write this. The only reason time would have been a factor is if you were using that time to become more familiar with the game. It is clear that you were not. You just up and decided you would share your wildly inflamed opinion with the internet. You really ought to cross-post this to the EN World 4e discussion forum. Oh, and RPGnet's d20 discussion board. I'm sure they'll be understanding. While most of the gamers I knew had high hopes for the 4.0 product line before it came out, we were confused and let down when it actually did. That's a shame. The gamers I know are much less easily confused. The system is riddled with flaws, compared to previous editions and competing product lines and I believe a step backwards rather than forward. "Forward" meaning "stuff that I like", "backwards" meaning "stuff that I don't like". Fourth Edition does not simply suffer from a few minor flaws, or one large one either, its weaknesses are broad including: lack of skills, Uh oh. Not a good start, I'm afraid. altering key defenses, Seriously? a lack of ingame economy due to crafting issues, Oh good lord, have you ever played D&D? Of any edition? and giving fighters millions of powers. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Sort of like what skills do in 4e. The wide variety of skills and ranking was created to give each player the feeling that their PC knows something. The feeling of a PC "knowing" something comes not from the choice of a wide variety of skills, but rather from compelling and significant ways in which those skills can be utilized during play. Fourth edition takes much of this control and diversity away. 4th Edition certainly does remove a lot of superfluous diversity and some illusory shells of control. It condenses the skills to the point of lunacy. In the future, consider reserving strong, inflammatory words like "lunacy" for when they are actually called for. At no point should the word "lunacy" be used to refer to an incredibly minor difference in opinion on game design. Hyperbolic language like this would prevent us from taking your arguments seriously, if it weren't for the fact that you've already lost us on that count. No longer can players study nobility, History. geography, Nature and Streetwise. craft a non-magical item, Say to your friendly local DM, "I'd like to craft a non-magical item!" or be a barkeep; Say to your friendly local DM, "I'd like to be a barkeep!" It is obvious that your complaint is not that these things cannot happen in 4th Edition. They demonstrably can, so you'd be (ahem) a lunatic to claim otherwise. Your actual complaint (which you have unfortunately left to inference) is that 4th Edition doesn't have rules that are specific and extensive enough to meet your exacting demands. Which is odd, of course, since one of your primary (and silliest) gripes with 4e is that you think it's a "roll-playing game". You are simultaneously complaining that 4e forces too much die rolling, and complaining that 4e doesn't give you enough opportunities to pointlessly roll dice. It's making your arguments look scattered and contrived, to say the least. these skills were removed completely to make room for the other board game additions. Nothing was removed to "make room" for anything else. Skills were condensed because there were too many skills that served very, very little purpose from a gameplay standpoint, and encouraged players to make suckers' choices when selecting skills - you can either be useful, or you can be flavorful (e.g. "Hmm, I have four skill points. I can make my character flavorful and interesting by picking up four ranks in Profession (Barkeep), or I can make my character a useful adventurer by picking up four ranks in Search. Oh well, guess I don't get to be a barkeep!"). 4th Edition allows you to be both flavorful and useful by putting control of your character's non-adventuring aspects firmly in the player's hands. If you want your character to be a bartender, he's a bartender (as long as your DM is cool with that). A fundamental aspect of a role-playing game is the ability to role-play your character based on their strengths an weaknesses. If a character has fewer ways to define who they are, then the system fails to establish itself as a role-playing game (becoming a roll-playing game). 4e has more ways of mechanically defining who your character is than 1e did. According to your "logic", 1e is therefore even less of a roleplaying game than 4e is! Also, you used the term "roll-playing", so minus ten points from Gryffindor. The complete lack of crafting I think what you meant here was "The removal of the necessity to give up valuable character development resources in order to craft mundane items," is obviously disturbing for most players, No, it's not. Almost no one I've talked to gives a damn. No one wasted their valuable time (and skill ranks) forging non-magical swords back in the day. They spent some tiny fraction of their mountains of gold on a sword and then enchanted it with awesome magical powers. as in many previous editions, crafting added a level of control and fun that players enjoyed exploring. "Fun", in this case, means having the ability to roll a d20 to see if you forged a sword. Again, this is coming across as wildly hypocritical. You claim to abhor "roll-playing", but here you are calling a nearly meaningless d20 roll "fun". If I didn't know any better, I'd think that you just had a laundry list of ill-formed complaints about 4e and decided to vomit them all onto the internet without any regard for whether or not those complaints were at odds with one another. Now, fourth edition didn't get everything wrong when it came to skills. The passive perceptions of Insight and Perception was an excellent way to deal with things seen and unseen before player's rolled. However, this minor strength does not outweigh the multiple other areas that 4th edition d&d lacks on skills. I believe Heinsoo, Collins, and Wyatt dropped the ball completely here. Heh, I was wondering how you were going to handle the skills that Pathfinder also condensed. So condensing skills are bad and remove player control, except when Pathfinder condenses skills. When Pathfinder condenses skills, it's "excellent". Brilliant.
No, just you. But really, can you blame them? as it is ineffective as a device for story-telling. While in previous editions the players and the DM had the ability to role-play encounters and occasionally throw a dice to influence certain aspects, in fourth edition there is little or no non-dice role-playing. This is the point at which I start to believe that you are a troll. You don't understand skill challenges. I mean, you just don't. You don't get how they work, you don't get how they ought to be used, and you don't realize that there are times they aren't supposed to be used. But still, still, you feel like you know enough to come here and whine about them. You don't. Skill challenges are meant to provide a rules framework for adjudicating a party's (or PC's) success or failure at a non-combat task. They are NOT designed to replace roleplaying. If you are replacing roleplaying with a skill challenge, you are probably a terrible DM. They should enhance roleplaying. Ideally, the players won't even be made aware that they are participating in a skill challenge (though they might suspect as much). They should roleplay their actions normally, and when the opportunity to make a skill check arises, you use the skill challenge framework to determine whether they succeeded or failed. This lets you determine, in a non-arbitrary fashion, how well the group did at overcoming the challenge, and ultimately allows you to assign experience points in an appropriate way to non-combat encounters. That's how skill challenges work. You are now educated. Skill encounters in 4th are nothing more than, “roll that skill (x) times to get (y) successes to achieve (z) goal before rolling (n) failures. That's how skill challenges work mechanically. If that's how you actually run a skill challenge, you're doing it wrong.
It sounds like you have been playing with a pretty terrible DM. Or, like you are a pretty terrible DM. But we'll be charitable here, and just call the DM in question "a friend". While the intention of skill encounters is to add what happens into the skill checks by the DM it usually is nothing more than, “You run fast, you run faster, you jump over that well, you trip over a log,” etc. In the end, on average, it is about 10 minutes of rolling dice at an encounter that really could have been a device for active role-playing and fun. Again, this is a problem with you and your group. These examples make you seem cripplingly incapable of roleplaying. That's not necessarily a bad thing, if you don't care about roleplaying, but you've decided to come here and complain that 4e doesn't let you roleplay. If you go out and buy a fancy new washing machine, but forget to load it with detergent, you don't get to complain to the washing machine's manufacturer when your clothes come out dirty. In other words, be a less terrible group. That'll probably do wonders for your play experience.
Oh god. You can't make a profit at anything if you have to purchase the materials at the same price that you sell them for. That's the point. Who thought this was a good idea? Everyone. In addition, a player has to sell things at 1/5th cost? Yes. How does a world which uses 4th edition logic able to even produce magic items? Because there are people who devote their lives to creating items, hunting down buyers and markets, and honing their bargaining skills. Those people are called merchants. Those people are not called adventurers. If you would like to play a savvy merchant who spends all his time and effort looking for the next great deal, you should not be playing Dungeons & Dragons. That is not what this game is for. Go play something else. Or better yet, get online and start trading in real life. In addition, there is no other drawback to crafting items. That's right. No exp needed, Nope. Because that sucked. no large amount of time required, Nope. Because that also sucked. not even a skill check! I think you're confused. Skill checks were not a part of magic item crafting in 3rd Edition. With this set up a DM need never give out any magic at all. I have no idea what you mean here. You probably won't clarify, so I'm just going to assume that this didn't really have any meaning anyway. They might as well give out magical dust or gold all the time and let players make whatever they want, no one in their right mind would sell magic items for 1/5th value, to begin with, Sure they would. If you find an item you don't want, you sell it. Or, if you're planning on doing some enchanting of your own, you break it down into residuum to use for later. But sometimes you just want some quick cash for the party ale-and-whores expense account. they can just buy them and not waste the time making the item for the same value. Sure, if you have the gold on-hand. And you're in a large enough city that magical items can be found. And if you don't have spare residuum eating a hole in your pocket. In previous editions it took time, money, experience, and sometimes special items to craft magical equipment. Yep. A lot of people thought that stuff was kind of pointless and distracting, so they removed it. In addition it was only ½ the value of the item to make, so the economy could exist at a “Key-Stone” markup on average (sold at twice as much as you bought it for). The 4th Edition economic model assumes that you're an adventurer, and don't have time to waste trying to eke out a profit on your magical loot. If you're not an adventurer, again, you are probably best-served by playing a different game. One, perhaps, that is not explicitly about adventuring. However, even this system had its flaws, mostly being that casters who crafted were always behind on experience and levels compared to anyone who didn't craft magical items. That was one of the flaws. Pathfinder irons out nearly all of the weaknesses of crafting. Players still spend 1/2 crafting value, but no longer was their an exp cost. Pathfinder made it cost time, and a skill check. This is far superior for the economy, and I can imagine a world in which magic is made, sold, and traded under these conditions. I can imagine a world where magic is made, sold, and traded in 4th Edition. Maybe, I don't know, work on that whole imagination thing? It's not doing you any favors as is. In addition the casters no longer were below the exp curve, and their was still a cost for creation and penality for failure (no magic item made). In addition, fourth editions rules mean that any character can take a magical crafting feat who has the skills. Yes. Fighters should not be able to cast magical enchantments simply because they have a little arcana knowledge. Ah, I should have guessed you were part of the fighters-can't-have-nice-things camp. In that case, I'm actually rather glad to hear that you're not playing 4e. They must be magically trained and have a well of power that lingers on the items they make. Ah-hah! The corollary to fighters-can't-have-nice-things! The I-know-how-magic-works-and-you-don't line of reasoning! You clearly believe that magic ought to work in a certain way. I don't know why, really, because it's magic and it doesn't really exist and can therefore be anything we want it to be, so putting an arbitrary (and yes, what you're talking about is arbitrary) restriction on what magic does and doesn't do cannot be anything more than an attempt to keep casters at the top of the heap and non-casters at the bottom (presumably with a sneering, "Where they belong."). Crafting should not be like MMO's in which anyone can just choose to be an enchanter, it works for World of Warcraft but it doesn't work in D&D. It works fine for D&D, you're just bothered by it. Because it doesn't work like you think it ought to work. Magic should work exactly how you want it to, gosh darnit, and if they didn't make their arbitrary fantasy magic system in just the way you wanted them to, then they're just big fat dumb heads who clearly have no idea what magic is.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA "Man, who gave the fighters nice things? Don't they know they can't have them?" D&D is not a board game, it is a role-playing game which uses maps for it's combat. Quite right. Wizards and other casters have spells and a large choice of them for a reason, they are casters and that's what they do. "It's this way for a reason! What's that reason, you ask? Because that's just the way it is!" You need to spend maybe thirty seconds or so asking yourself if you have a supportable argument, or if you're just talking. Giving Fighters the abilities to completely control monsters, and do ridiculous creature control effects is just turning them into wizards. That's odd. They play completely differently from Wizards. You'd think that if they turned them into Wizards, they'd be the same. But who knows. D&D is mysterious, and why bother examining it when we already know exactly how it ought to work because you said so? There is a single class called “wizard” as a game designer I could not see the benefit to having 12 classes that are essentially all wizards. I think we can all be thankful that you are not a game designer. And, in the off-chance that you are, that you aren't anywhere near the development of games we care about. Next, and most likely the biggest mistake that fourth edition made, is infinite spells. You use the word "mistake" here. You probably should have picked a different word. A wizard has never had infinite magic missiles, unless epic, and having infinite “At-Will” powers is nothing more than what you'd find in a video game. Or, y'know, any game in which the designers decided that being able to use certain powers at will is totally fine. For instance, the Witch from Pathfinder. Or cantrips in Pathfinder. Or Wizards using Reserve feats in D&D 3.5. Whoops, guess your game(s) of choice are just like video games, now. Eventually power runs out, Except, as I pointed out above, when it doesn't. But, again, this is another case of you knowing exactly how magic works, and the rest of us being idiots because we think magic can work in a different way. Your made-up fantasy trope must be the one true made-up fantasy trope. All others are pretenders to the made-up fantasy throne in your head. and even wizards should run out of energy to fight; that is the price for being a wizard. The price for being a wizard is the 750 gp it takes to buy a wand of magic missile, at which point you have an effectively bottomless source of magic power at your disposal that you can replenish next time you're in town. Or tonight, before you go to bed.
"TOO FAR, I TELL YOU!" Giving each character the ability to instantly heal themselves, is taking the need for a healer out of the game completely. Apparently you haven't played this game called D&D 4th Edition. Having someone who is able to heal the party during a fight is pretty much vital, unless you're really super fantastic. I have run several fourth edition adventures in which a healer was not required to succeed. Given your abject failure to properly use skill challenges, it doesn't surprise me that you haven't gotten the hang of challenging the party in combat. Of course there are limits to this healing (surges) But are surges really a limit? Yes. There are several powers that read “as if a PC had spent a surge,” Those are daily. “regen x amount without a surge,” Regeneration stops functioning once you're no longer bloodied. “Add x temp hitpoint when you do y,” Temporary hit points don't stack. “Heal an extra y when you do x,” This is either limited by surges, or requires you to accomplish something in combat. Either way, limited. “Heal x more to your allies whenever they spend a surge,” Requires surges. etc. I have run some very long and intense sessions of D&D 4th and can say, with an expert degree of knowledge, I can promise you that what you have with respect to knowledge of 4th Edition cannot, even in the most charitable terms, be called "expert". that characters are so resilient in 4th that there is little to challenge them within their CR bracket; there isn't even instant death to help balance the scales. I've killed PCs outright using encounters designed to challenge a party of their level. Maybe try fighting a little better? Now, I like the way that pathfinder breaks the mold between 3.5 and 4th. They add a little extra healing to classes, like the cleric, but still have the spontaneous casting of 3.5 for positive heals. This gives a bit more healing, without making it ridiculous, like 4th edition. The fear of death should be real for the characters, and fourth edition just doesn't have enough of that fear to challenge the players within their CR bracket. Sure it does. Just not when you DM. Most encounters of +4 EL or less can be taken by any party without too much difficulty. You either have super amazing players, or you need to really work on your own tactics. A level+4 encounter should leave the PCs gasping for breath. The only way to challenge the party seems to be going beyond the encounter building rules and adding more to it than is allowed for the CR. If that's what it takes to challenge them, do it. Adding additional CR challenges in this way is not fair to the players, I'm not sure what "fair" has to do with it. Your goal as DM is to provide a fun, invigorating, compelling game experience, and challenging the party is typically key to accomplishing that. If you need to beef up your encounters to challenge them, do it. "Fair" doesn't enter into it. and goes beyond what is recommended in the DMG. Staying within the CR +3 bracket in Pathfinder is more than challenging for players, and certainly adds the sense of fear that every player is looking for. I'm not sure where career DMs get the impression that players are looking for a high level of fear of character death. Many (if not most) players like a game that challenges them without running too much of a risk of having the character they've spent months (or years) shepherding die.
Probably by saying, "You know, this fundamental class structure in 3rd Edition really isn't that fundamental after all!" Base attack is gone, Yeah, man, how could D&D possibly survive without Base Attack Bonus? all attacks are based with + to base attribute with no real bonuses beyond magical and a few feats. Ability bonus, half-level bonus, feat bonus(es), enhancement bonus, power bonus, tactical bonus(es), proficiency bonus...I could go on, but you already ignored most of those so I don't really see the point. Having a solid argument doesn't appear to be that important to you. While this may look good on paper, in practice it is a disaster. In practice it's fine. Of course, you provide nothing by way of example illustrating how this is a disaster, so we're just going to skip right along. In conjunction with races, it is set up for only races that have those bonuses to the attributes and no other may apply. Even +2 to an attribute more than any other can unbalance the system and tables for CR vs. APL. No. Please stop pretending you understand 4e math. You don't. This sense of “we have to balance absolutely everything about each class, has made each class exactly the same as any other. No, it hasn't. As for multi-classing, forget it. Fourth edition has completely destroyed multi-classing, making it feat based, without the ability to mix and match levels. And it works pretty well. If you think Hybred is a viable class, make sure to read it well, it's not even close to multi-classing either. Speaking as someone who has both played multiple hybrid characters and run games with hybrid characters in them, it's pretty much the definition of multi-classing. You are more or less equal parts of two different classes. I'm not sure what else you could mean by multiclassing, unless it's not real multiclassing unless you can go Barbarian 1/Monk 1/Paladin 2/Rogue 2 in which case AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Fourth edition is a single class system Except when it's not. and there is little or no way to fix it with their setup. (another typical MMO concept) Except, you know, for multiclassing, dip feats, hybrid classing, etc. But sure, VIDEOGAMESVIDEOGAMESVIDEOGAMES On that note, races in fourth are completely misguided in concept. First, making all races with 2 +2 attributes and no drawbacks is against the spirit of the game. Yes, you are sole arbiter over what is and isn't the spirit of the game. Congratulations on that. Each race should have a drawback compared to other races. Yes. That drawback is not having the awesome things the other races get. Plus, this system makes humans completely the minority in all worlds, Except for the fact that they're the plurality in most worlds. even more so when races have +2 to one stat and +2 to one of 2 other stats of your choice. The humans +2 to a single stat is nowhere close to the power of all other races. That's why humans get a bonus feat. And some of the best feat options in the game. And an extra at-will power. And a free skill. And a +1 to all non-AC defenses. Virtually no one plays a human in fourth edition AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA and it is because + 1 feat does not equal +2 to one of 2 other stats Again, let's stop pretending you understand 4e's math, please. + other ridiculous bonuses that each nonhuman race receives. You mean bonuses like an extra at-will power, skill, and blanket bonus to defenses?
No, it's not. Humans are one of the top four (if not top three) played races in the game. Extra at will powers are useless, you'll only need 2 at the most anyway. Ugh. An extra skill is also useless when there are only 10 to choose from. This is the same guy who said that being able to add skills to your character gave you control and made your character more fun. Same guy. And the +1 to some defenses is nice, but compared to not having to sleep, eat, breath, and automaking all death saves is ridiculous. Having played a Warforged, the first three are not terribly useful and the last is pretty good but only if you carefully invest feats in making it part of your combat style.
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