Mnemon's page

Selling a group that has been playing 3.5 for an extended period of time (I was an early adopter of 3.0) is a difficult and time consuming task. It won't happen overnight. It the case of my gaming group it probably wouldn't have occurred at all if we had not had access to leaked core rulebooks (we all have since purchased many a 4e product).

In my gaming group, we played the Games Day adventure and Keep on the Shadowfell pretty early. Those experiences left a bad taste in our mouth, but not necessarily a hate. So we tried some more sessions with homebrew starting at first and then a short story arc with paragon level characters to see what that would be like. This experimentation occurred over a six month period of time.

The only specific concern you expressed was about combat and powers. 4e definitely is different. The speed of combat will only get better with experience. Once the character become more familiar with their powers and let go. The amount of decisions to make can seem overwhelming to someone coming from 3.5 where the only decision for non-casters really is what do I swing at. People who play casters in 3.5 tend to have less trouble switching. Power cards help.

The greatest advice I had for my players to speed up combat was to let go, have fun, and relax. The 4e system was built in an extremely balanced nature (to the extent some don't like the balance). Some decisions are better than others, but ultimately rarely is the choice to choose one power over another game breaking. In my experience, the difference in optimal and sub-optimal in 4e is at most 10-15%.

Ultimately I as the DM came to love 4e and would go back to 2e before I would go back to 3.5. The players have come to enjoy it as well and when I had to leave for an extended period of time and they started up some short pickup games, they were all 4e. This is from a group that is heavily invested in 3.5 (I have all but a handful of the WOTC 3.5 books).

I used to think humans were underpowered compared to the other races. I even considered house ruling some additional bonus to make them more attractive.

Two years of play and I've come to see humans as balanced with the other races. Many racial powers are only as good as some at-will powers; some are worse and useful in extremely limited situations. Don't get me wrong; some are pretty awesome (i.e. Dwarf).

The extra stat bumps is nice, but is really only useful when your building a narrowly defined character concept (X race make great insert your class here). Humans tend to be more versatile and the extra feat appeals to many of my players aiming for a specific tree of abilities (every new book with feats makes being human more attractive).

Ultimately our play experience has shown us that the extra stat bump is good not great. You can spend hours making the uber race/stat/class combination and your only 10-15% better than the next guy who spent thirty minutes and was ok with just being good enough (often dice rolls end up being a greater arbiter than stats).

My intent to house rule the human race fell by the wayside as my parties over the last two years have all been majority human.