tindrli said:
can somebody explain me the difference between.... or even just explain to me why the 4th edition is shit?
A lot of people would tell you that it's WOW on paper. A lot of people who say that haven't even read the PHB, let alone played a single session of 4e. It has a LOT more in common with Magic: The Gathering now.
For instance, you know that MTG cards have certain keywords like "haste, tramble, fly, unsummon" etc. etc. right? Well the powers that characters get read exactly like an MTG card, only they are "slide, knock prone, use healing surge, daze, slow" etc. So for instance each power reads like "1W dmg + mod and you knock the targe prone" or "2W dmg + mod and the target is dazed until the end of your next turn". Now this wouldn't be too bad if the class archetypes would have had their own flavour just like colours in MTG do, however ever class can get powers with all of the available effects. This means that each class pretty much plays exactly the same as the other one. Which means that multiclassing, which lets be honest was necessity for most in 3.5, now loses all of its perks. There is no reason to take levels of another class when you know that you would not get anything different than what you get if you stay straight.
Spellcasters are really lame now that other characters get everything that they can do. So magic doesen't feel that "magical" anymore. It's a real shame. What they should have done is give fighters a mechanic similar to the one they have now, but let the spell slingers have their own unique mechanics and let them feel like they are actually wielding magic powers. They REALLY dropped the ball with this one.
Leveling up is extremely linear. Every class receives levels up the same way now. At 2nd level everyone gets to pick a feat, at 3rd everyone gets a new power and so on. In the end everyone is about the same. Saving throws are defences and they increase by 1/2 your level for every class, which is again very lame. I do like the fact that your AC increases as you level because it denotes not damage reduction but damage avoidance and it makes sense that you get better at dodging as you grow in experience.
Skills are pretty fucked up. They have reduced the number of skills to 14 from, was it 30 in 3,5??, and since a character can know about 4, it means that 3 or 4 adventurers can have them all covered. They condensed a lot of skills, some with good results some with bad. For instance there's just one "stealth" skill now but you pretty much needed both "hide in shadows" and "move silently" if you wanted to sneak anyway. But there is bullshit as well, such as "Thievery" which covers "open locks", "pickpocket", "disable device" etc. They too increase 1/2 your level so you can end up at lvl 30 with a barbarian with 15 in "arcana". Yeah..
Speaking of skills, there is a new bullshit mechanic called "skill challenges". Basically what it's a sort of out-of-the-game encounter where the DM tells you which skills you need to use to pass a certain obstacle like convincing someone to help you, or escaping from your enemies, and you need a certain number of successes until you fail. It's basically a way of handing out XP for roleplaying without having the players to think, just roll the dice. Now I'm not saying it can't be fun (the one where we were chased by guards through town was cool because if we failed we would have had to fight them and they were pretty tough so it was pretty exciting) but for the most part they are really shitty. DON'T use them if you plan on playing 4e.
The argument against the new races is completely retarded since all of the old races are there plus new ones, so if you're a "purist" just torrent the fucking character generator with its latest update and there you go. I think people who get butthurt about this issue (or should I say NON-issue) are those who can't sleep at night knowing that someone somewhere is playing the game other than how the D&D god intended.
Not sure about the settings, but I'm sure there's a workaround for them.
I don't HATE the game, in fact I play it and we're having fun since D&D is first and foremost a social activity, and if you're having fun in general with a people you play with then the game does it's job of providing fun. It's also easy to learn and run and that's always a plus in my book. Ultimately my biggest complaint about it is the samey-ness of the classes. They listened to fan's complaints about class balance so now each one is TOO balanced. It takes a chink of fun out of the game especially after playing it for a while.