I certainly hope the new Essentials line doesn't become the dominant direction WoTC takes the D&D franchise in, because I
hate with a fiery passion and fury attempts to simplify things that don't really need simplified by
removing options.
4th Edition D&D isn't especially complicated - it's a highly streamlined ruleset that admittedly made individual classes seem somewhat "less distinct" by virtue of giving them all options to do badass things more often and allowing them to heal themselves in combat or whatnot, but it's disingenuous to assert that at-will, encounter, and daily powers translate into "all classes play the same now". They don't; the rule changes allow party members to be more self-sufficient certainly, and the power system definitely alters the
disparity of the power level between classes like Fighters or Wizards[footnote]Where at first the latter tend to be next to useless thanks to their reliance on expendable daily abilities coupled with physical frailty and the former are awesome due to better combat survivability and the "I just hit things" principle, only for the reverse to apply at higher levels.[/footnote], but my paladin isn't anything like our party's rogue.
When 4th Edition first came out, long time D&D players lamented the dearth of Gnomes and wondered just where the hell races like Dragonborn and Eladrin came from and why WoTC seemed to think we needed them and
not Gnomes, but Gnomes are in the game now. So are Githzerai, sentient collections of crystal from the Astral Plane, shapeshifters, Revenants, Devas and Shadar-kai. Old familiar classes like Monks are back in the game, and there are a bloody ton of new ones (or at least I think they're new, I'd never heard of them before anyways), some of which are really cool. There are a bloody ton of options when creating a character, and even more when leveling up and advancing them.
And then we have something like Essentials and the Red Box, where you have Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings. Fighters without daily abilities so they'll "feel more like fighters".
No bloody thank you. I never played a run of the mill fighter in any CRPG system based on a D&D ruleset
precisely because I didn't want to play a character who couldn't really do anything other than "hit stuff until it dies". I played Paladins, who had special abilities and could learn to cast spells, I played monks (who had all sorts of special abilities that were sort of like spells), I played elaborate multiple class/prestige class combinations, but I
never just played a bloody fighter.
- [HEADING=3]I am routinely jealous of my current party's dwarven fighter (who is playing a character I actually redesigned for him), because the stuff he can do is really damn cool[footnote]Not jealous of that fighter's player mind you, as he tends to fail miserably at doing those cool things he theoretically could thanks to abysmal dice rolls, but I still look at what he should be capable of with envy.[/footnote].[/HEADING]
Sacrificing all the nifty abilities fighters can use in 4Ed simply to make "fighters and wizards feel different" strikes me as a wrong-headed approach to a problem that isn't there - fighters
do feel different from wizards. Fighters are all about getting up close and personal, acting as a bulwark against attacks on other party members, and generally singling out individual targets (or just the ones close by). In short, they pretty much just hit things, but in interesting and varied ways.
Wizards on the other hand are all about AoE, altering the battlefield environment through persistent effects, dominating enemies minds, blasting things with columns of flame, etc. They are almost
never going to be in melee range of their own volition, and while 4th Edition spellcasters are a great deal more durable than spellcasters from earlier rulesets, armor restrictions and their class features still leave them "squishier" than martial classes like fighters.
Both classes have access to at-will, encounter, and daily powers, but to equate these classes with each other simply because they both have the same number of daily/encounter abilities to use is silly - wizard powers and fighter powers do very different things; the implementation of that whole power setup wasn't to make all the classes feel the same, it was to make everyone feel
useful all the time by giving them more abilities to use besides the ever present "basic attack" or "die from a single blow because my class has no hitpoints oh noes".
You're not going to bring around the complainers who don't like 4th Edition now because it's more streamlined and simplistic than 3.5 by simplifying it even further, and taking away options from players like me does not endear you to us - 4th Edition is only barely complex enough
now to really capture my interest, "streamlining" 4th Edition sounds to me like a recipe for making it dreadfully dull. I therefore sincerely hope that Essentials doesn't really catch on to the point where WoTC starts developing for it exclusively, and it remains forever "4th Edition for Dummies" as I perceive it, the exclusive domain of absolute beginners and nobody else.
