Managing Expectations for Fourth Edition

I'll admit it; I hate much of what I know about 4th edition. I'm sure part of this attitude is coming straight from my inner geezer--he fears change, you see, and while he rocks on the porch and shakes his papery fist, it's his trick knee I worry about most. It's huge, and the forecast is for a hail of mainstream products that are easier to get into. They will reach a greater audience, I hear, which is a good thing. I'm just worried about how 4E will reach its lofty goals.

Tell me, as a player of D&D or another tabletop RPG, are you really wishing that your game was simpler, or do you appreciate the complexity and depth of the current ruleset? Other than a few situations that are often cited--the grapple rules serve, although I'm actually rather fond of them--I feel that 3.5 and the updates we're seeing in Pathfinder have made a very complete, adaptable set of game mechanics, far and away better than what came before. I suspect that many of you feel the same. And really, is rolling a D20 and adding numbers a difficult mechanic to grasp, even if the in-game outcomes are complex? I don't think so.

As a DM and avid designer, I'm attracted to backstories, and verisimilitude, and a history, of settings, characters, and especially game mechanics alike. When my cleric heals an ally or deletes his undead foes with holy fire, I crave the knowledge that he can do so because he is faithful to a God, (a God, mind.) and the reward is the ability to take and give life. But he can't take or give too much in a given period, because if he could, well, that would feel like just because. That is unsatisfactory.

Not only can everyone heal themselves in the new edition through some just because inner force, but there's no limit to how many times many of their other abilities can be used. The wizard can use his once-exhausting powers to literally create Winter with some time, patience, and his ray of frost. Why?

And then take those characters, like the fighter, who, historically, drew their strength from an inexhaustible supply of canny strikes and physical techniques--these lasted as long as the fighter was breathing (and sometimes beyond). Now, the same arbitrary limitations stop him from swinging his weapon the same way more than once in an encounter. He can only swing really hard once per day. Why? Is he too tired after performing his spinning sweep? Is it taxing in some way? Or, is it just because?

Just because isn't good enough for me, but we can posit that the designers made these decisions because they wanted to keep the game rolling. Ostensibly, if you take away the resource management of limited powers, and if everyone can heal themselves, this shortens needed downtime. But does it make any sense in the game world?

Yes, I understand how silly that sounds; I'm trying to impose a form of realism on an imaginary world, but it's the same concept we apply to movies, books, and stories in all forms. You need to buy it. You need to feel that the rules governing that world are consistent, and voyeurs into fantasy worlds have, for decades at least, built up realities where creatures need to eat, need to practice their skills to maintain them, need to rest when they get tired, and need to avoid the pointy ends of sticks and steel so they don't die. In short, these worlds are a lot like our own, even if our neighbors there are goblins or bugbears. What I know about 4E now worries me that we're losing a lot of that buy-in you get when you realize that your characters, while heroic, are not invincible, and do have limited resources to draw from. There's a lot of growth wrapped up in that, for you, and for your character.

Even so, I'm interested in some of the changes I've heard about, and it's only prudent to reserve final judgements until I play the new system (sometime very soon). My prejudice is obvious, though. I don't really want to play World of Warcraft away from the computer, and many of the changes have left me cold.

How do you feel about the new system? Will you be changing your campaign over, or taking the Order of the Stick's tact by running an amalgamation of your favourite rules? Or, are you going to continue with 3.5 or an even earlier edition?