4e has left me pretty cold for a number of reasons, reasons which I even went so far as to blog about a few weeks back just to get it off my chest. Mostly it comes down to the lack of options. With the campaign I'm playing in still at first level, there's time for things to change, but the combat is getting old already. And isn't 4e supposed to be about the combat? (As for the MMO influence allegations floating about...one member of our gaming group said the system reminded him of WoW. Surprisingly, this was a neutral observation.)

Also, I find it funny that the article accused the 3.X core books of being too mathematical and stale in layout and design -- I LOVED the 'adventurer's journal' look, and helped give it that Renaissance feel (as opposed to the Middle Ages, ye old favorite if not mandated fantasy milieu). 4e, on the other hand, is literally a chore for me to read. I have read many a textbook that had more interesting layout and contents than the 4e Player's Handbook. (And don't get me started on the cover...)

There's also the nagging sense that 4e is trying to imitate mechanics found in other games, but with my limited experience with other systems I don't know if that's an accurate or fair assessment...

But hey, 3e (not 3.5) was my first RPG system, so it's what I think of as D&D. And 4e is (at least to my mind) such a drastic change it's ceased to be D&D.
 

My preference tends to be for mechanics over flavour. It's actually been quite a jump to move from planning to use Savage Worlds, which is (or at least tries to be) setting-agnostic, to Burning Wheel, which is definitely Fantasy. It's not specified fantasy like the Forgotten Realms, but it's the classic high-middle-ages the SCA are recreating the good bits of. Fortunately, my setting (shamelessly ripped off from a lot of sources) is also high middle ages, and I can crowbar in the steampunkish anachronisms without too much difficulty...
 

I prefer gaming mechanics over set worlds or flavor in the rule set.
Our gaming group's DM always created his own richly detailed worlds for our campaigns to take place in. So it was nice that 3rd Edition finally removed all the flavor assumptions from the mechanics of the game.

Two of the big advantages for a DM creating his or her own world is that it will be specifically tailored to the players and the campaign. Second, players can't go buy source material or books set in a certain game world the DM is running and complain or be disappointed that the DM "got it wrong".

A unique DM game world is also full of surprises and mystery that an established, well-known setting just could not achieve with players.

Finally, I always felt that certain published campaign settings were far too generic, since they were forced to try and incorporate every monster, item, class, and rule from D&D. I'm looking at you, Forgotten Realms.

I haven't had enough exposure to 4th Edition to comment on it, but as a D&D player since 1st Edition, I appreciated the streamlining of the rules and introduction of skills in 3rd Edition, especially after the rules bloat that was AD&D 2nd Edition(AD&D is still my favorite edition, just for nostalgia's sake).
 

My opinion is different depending on how I approach the game. On the one hand, I LOVE games with rich backgrounds. The more fluff the better, and that sort of thing.
On the other side, having a system with a rich background attached encourages players to metagame, and discourages GMs from customising parts of the setting, since there's all these expectations about how things are 'supposed' to work.

Oh and 4e left me completely cold too. Instead of feeling dramatic, with ups and downs, every combat ended up feeling like that overly long boss fight at the end of every jRPG.
Also, most of the character classes feel quite generic in a way that 3e base classes never did; probably because of the extreme modularity of the system. To use that article's analogy against it, 3e feels like a box of random Lego pieces of all different sizes and colours with weird funky bits that don't always fit properly, while in 4e every piece of Lego is a 2x2 cube and only the colour differs.
 

I feel kind of weird. I've tried four different game worlds: 3.5, 4E, White Wolf's World of Darkness, and White Wolf's Exalted. I'm a relatively new DM (I'd always read and kept up-to-date but never ran a campaign until 4E came out), and of the four I dislike Fourth Edition the most.

White Wolf's games are fluff-tastic. I love their worlds, especially for their mutability to my campaign's needs. I can make spells and enemies and events really quickly and easily, and the world's flavor simmers into my creations readily.

By contrast, I find 3.5 much more difficult to work with, but it's far more seamless and efficient when I do build something. With the help of some of my more DM-experienced friends I've been able to simulate pretty much anything I've wanted, but then I've been forced to "paint" the flavor on myself. Still, both WW's works and 3.5 have let me build whatever I want.

By contrast, with 4E, the books told me that this was the setting and this was the world, and that everything was designed presuming this setting. It then failed to really give that much setting, truth be told. As a new DM I felt myself flailing around for their chosen setting, or trying to make my own which meshed terribly with the given items and powers.

Still, I can't resent 4E too much. After the frustration and pain of dealing with it, no other tabletop game I've used has been as much a hassle, and I've gotten 3 excellent campaigns out of one dead terrible 4E mistake.
 

I prefer mechanics that are tailored to fit the world. I also like creating my own worlds, the few times I have GMed. What this means is that the few times I've tried my hand at tabletop world-building instead of going to GURPS or another more generic ruleset I've preferred to take something from a similar genre (Say, grabbing CP2020 or Shadowrun 2nd or 3rd Ed. rules for a near-future SF/cyberpunk setting) and running with it. I think that in many ways the mechanics you choose affect your world and affect the way players behave and the way stories are told.

To use damage and healing as an example, if healing is scare and weapons are deadly, players will probably be more cautious and thoughtful and death will be a more serious threat. On the other hand, readily available healing and resurrection encourages a more freewheeling playstyle. This will (or at least SHOULD) affect the way the world works: What does a setting with readily available resurrection look like? If it's fantasy, maybe something like Stephen Brust's Dragaera where you might hire an assassin to (temporarily) kill someone just to make sure they get the message when they're resurrected. In SF maybe it looks something like the world of Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon. Either way, it's going to require more work and forethought to tell stories focused on things like grief over losing a party member.

Anyway, as I said I prefer adapting an existing specific system IF I'm using an original world, rather than adapting a general system. That said, I love a good setting designed by someone else: Planescape, Shadowrun, Blue Planet, Fading Suns, Deadlands. Even if I don't always like their rules, I enjoy exploring the settings as a player and as a GM.
 

I'm still undecided on 4E. I was not a fan onf the 3x stuff and the glut of d20 (about the only d20 I liked was Darwin's World 2ed.. that was really well done).

I'm a fuzion fan but fuzion gets no love :(

To me dnd suffers from rule bloat, and the greater number of rules the less chance of fun.

4e is... megalithic its so big and slow.

As a cp2020 guy I shouldn't moan about rulebound dnd taking out the fun.
 

I should add i REALLY dislike what they did to the forgotten realms settings. I much prefer the 2E version of FR than this new fangled bleagh 4E version. 4E FR has no flavour, no gravy, no nothing, but someone added too much salt and now its gone bad and rotten.
 

I've been running a 4th edition campaign for some time, and I like it a lot.

I've played every edition of D&D, and my brother and I played 3rd edition and 3.5 a lot. Enough to find the flaws.

The worst is the multiclassing. In the older editions, multiclass characters were heavily restricted through level and race combinations. All this was chucked out the window with 3rd, and the result was an unbalanced mess. Prestige classes were even worse; they created blatantly unbalanced characters that could completely destroy campaigns.

And yes, when you have a mechanics-heavy game, the kind of players you get who excel at it are ones who spend their time crunching those mechanics... there's no thought about their character as a person with personality.

I noticed that the first eight years of Dungeon magazine, most of the adventures presented had very flavorful story lines and backgrounds, and ideas that transcended the rules system. 3rd edition adventures in contrast were sterile. It got better towards the end, but the truth was that the rules had overthrown the story.

4th Edition is not bad. My favorite addition as a DM to the game is the more complex encounter system. The DM has to put some thought into encounters to make them not only lucrative, but fun. I've found that when I just threw a monster with a lot of hit points at a party, they said later the fight was dull. A mix of monsters is not only better tactically, it makes the fight more exciting.

One welcome return is the "magic effect that I do not have to explain" paradigm. 3rd edition reinforced the "even playing field" idea that the DM and players had to follow the same rules on everything. That's fine, if what you want is direct competition between the DM and players. Some groups play that way, but the game's never been about that. It's good to know I can say "Yeah, that magic field gives him a +2 bonus" without some snide rules-lawyer trying to argue that such an effect is impossible because of rule X on page Y...
 

Probably mechanics over flavor. You can always add flavor with supplements as you require. If you don't have time to prep everything, you can pick up a module or a sourcebook that fills in the gaps that you don't want to deal with. I always used the 3e forgotten realms book as a base for my adventures, but wrote them all from scratch. I didn't have to draw many maps or come up with a lot of backstory. Being able to pick and choose what you want to have pre-made for you is great.

Good mechanics are adaptable and allow for all kinds of situations. I think that's definitely a weakness of 4e. I can't see how it would be suitable for any kind of campaign setting that didn't focus heavily on superpowered combat.
 

@Adamantyr: My husband is also running a 4e game (it was my introduction to the system, actually) and he also likes it a lot. Specifically, he cites the ease of creating combat encounters, in comparison to 3.X's inconsistent CR system.

Maybe I'd give it a little more slack if I was a GM running a game -- maybe, after all, that's where the simplicity of 4e shines. But as a player, I want options, and 4e took streamlining in the name of balance too far in my opinion. It's streamlined to the point where I have trouble seeing the differences between classes other than an effect or two and melee squish factor. And using the same two or three exploits ad nauseam is old at level 1...and I'm not exactly keen on the idea that at higher levels my equipment is going to play more of a role in what I can do than my character (this last is based on hearsay, though, so I might have it wrong).

On the other hand, I'll grant that the "linear warriors, quadratic wizards" problem has been addressed, even if I'm not a fan of the soluton used.
 

Mechanics over flavor, undoubtedly. I make my own worlds anyway, so tying things down with gods and organizations and famous figures and such rather annoys me. Fortunately, those sorts of things are relatively easy to prune from a rule set, but if that's bad anyway, there isn't much you can do.
 

Mechanics over flavor, undoubtedly. I make my own worlds anyway, so tying things down with gods and organizations and famous figures and such rather annoys me. Fortunately, those sorts of things are relatively easy to prune from a rule set, but if that's bad anyway, there isn't much you can do.
 

I would generally have a preference for flavor over mechanics. Games like Amber DRPG or Dogs in the Vineyard draw their appeal from their setting as much as from their mechanics, and that's the sort of game that really gets me interested. (It also explains the lasting appeal of GURPS sourcebooks...)

That said, it does depend a lot on your GM. Some are very good at making up their own richly realized worlds, while others excel at telling stories in a pre-packaged setting. It's always best to play to your GM's strengths, regardless of your personal preferences.
 

Mechanics FTW. In my experience, the mechanics of the system heavily influence the quality and fun of the game play itself. Specifically, the two things that matter the most are intuitiveness and consistency. The most amazing story/world setting can be rendered unplayable by an obtuse, non-sensical rules system.

For example, The systems I've enjoyed the most are Gammaworld 3.0, MERP/Rolemaster, and CP2020, because the rules were generally consistent, made sense, and were fairly easy to remember and use. The rules rarely impeded the game play, allowing for better storytelling and roleplaying. (Based in part on my experience with CP2020, I really want to give Fuzion a try. It's a system that is quite robust -- it covers all the bases while remaining consistent and intuitive.)