Well, dragons and the like have double or triple standard so you roll twice or three times and can end up with multiple coins.
3e does have some flaws. They spent 18 months updating the game from 2e and then less than a year to move between 3.0 and 3.5; they focused on the BIG problems such as class, magic, monsters, etc. They added skills and feats and new classes and such.
But some things were only given a once-over. They never sat down and crunched the numbers for combat.
4e is shaping up to be the first real new edition where they looked at everything as they would designing a game from scratch. Where they didn't just throw something together based on an older version and say "good enough".
Emphasis mine
I don't know were to begin setting him straight... any ideas?
Well the first game that they ever really looked at as designing a game from scratch was Chainmail. There isn't a lot to recommend that as a design platform.
But in a sense he's right. 4e appears to be designed as a board game, not as a "world" or a role playing game particularly. The amount of treasure that you find is going to be the expected amount (or 1/6th of that if it turns out the DM gives you stuff you don't want or need), because characters in the world don't actually "have" anything. The black sword carried by an evil knight is just a sprite or piece of card art, no black sword actually "drops" when he dies.
Once you free yourself from actually representing a world or having events happen while the PCs aren't in the room, then at least theoretically you have gained a lot of leeway with regards to designing the game. But we actually don't have any evidence that the game they have designed will be particularly good. Many of their statements, like the idea that the ability to become more powerful for 1 round per combat "does not matter" while the ability to be more powerful for an entire combat does is obvious horse shit. Combats last some arbitrary amount of time, so a 1 round bump that is N times larger than an always on bump is the same total bonus in any battle that lasts N rounds. Actually it's better, since getting your big attacks early is better than getting them spaced out because it prevents more enemy counterattacks.
And since they seem to be seriously trying to give us a +1 always-on bonus every five levels as their standard of excellence, we can easily see how some bonus might be N times larger than that if it came in a burst. Heck, a bonus d6 is beating the N standard in 3 or 4 round combats.
Yes, they built the number engine from the ground up. But no, they didn't apparently put any mathematicians or scientific testers in to build that numerical engine - so there's no reason to think it will hold up any better than the original D&D engine that was built by Arneson and Gygax.
Well, dragons and the like have double or triple standard so you roll twice or three times and can end up with multiple coins.
3e does have some flaws. They spent 18 months updating the game from 2e and then less than a year to move between 3.0 and 3.5; they focused on the BIG problems such as class, magic, monsters, etc. They added skills and feats and new classes and such.
But some things were only given a once-over. They never sat down and crunched the numbers for combat.
4e is shaping up to be the first real new edition where they looked at everything as they would designing a game from scratch. Where they didn't just throw something together based on an older version and say "good enough".
Emphasis mine
I don't know were to begin setting him straight... any ideas?
What, exactly, do you mean by setting him straight? By and large he's correct, even if 4e is something you don't want, and 3e is something you think is really good.
Personally, the only way we can tell if the designers put time and effort behind the numbers is to be at the tests ourselves. Otherwise, everything is pure speculation so far.
Jerry wrote:Personally, the only way we can tell if the designers put time and effort behind the numbers is to be at the tests ourselves. Otherwise, everything is pure speculation so far.
Or we could, like, look at the numbers they have released so far? I have not seen anything in 4e that would persuade me to drop Exalted 2nd. And seeing as I can't look at a Charm without wanting to hit Mark Rein*hagen on the head with a Grand Goremaul, 4e is not shaping up to be a a game system to wow me.