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Pyke_Moonshadow wrote:

No, no, no, that is not what I mean.

I just mean that if I don't ever want to use those powers why have them on the character sheet? I have yet to see enough non-attack options for powers. At wills, sure I guess, they are pretty basic. but haveing a huge ration of encouter attack powers or daily attack powers seems to no represent what I want for the character. I want him to represent on paper how I want to play him. I don't want him to be good at combat but that does not seem like an option in this edition.

am I correct?

You could roll up a wizard that focus' on stealth skills and ritual casting, as for powers, you could take things like illusion powers. You are not attack directly, but you input is still helping the party (I believe you will find illusion powers do "damage" because they effect morale and a creatures will to fight), It isn't exactly what you are after, but you may be able to capture some of the same feel of the character and this way you have a useful character that can do all your stealthy stuff, and still has the aid the party in combat feel. Illusions are covered in a Dragon magazine.. i can't remember which one though..

Edit - Ok I read a bit further on and you say you want to be really useful between combat and only mildly useful in combat? Well, you could roll up any character you like and roleplay being no good in combat, simply take no part, decline to take you turn or sit it out all together and be a cheerleader. Nothing in the rules says you have to take part in combat, and when you build your character you could use your stats to boost you skills and ignore your combat stats (i.e play a sneaky wizard, high dex and low int)

Crimson Lancer wrote:

Except that 3.5 had a lot of needless complexity that, while neither necessary to make a System run well or create depth within such a System, still makes a lot of people happy. It also lacked any semblance of Balance, which may have made 3E much more modular and adaptable, but also was unnecessary in the first place. Nonetheless, this too makes quite a few people happy. I'll also say that System Mastery takes a lot of work and books cost money, so I hold absolutely no grudges against people who want to play 3.5 because it fits them much better. I'm glad they have something they can enjoy so much.

What I will say is that 90% of the complaints aimed at 4E are all about how someone subjectively views certain aspects of the game; all the Classes feel the same, it feels like it's all about Combat, I feel like I'm playing a video game. If I complain about 3.5, it's because of the myriad number of objectively identifiable errors in the Designer's calculations of how their System should have worked. Again, as I said, I'll never tell someone they shouldn't be playing 3rd Edition DnD; however, it is my opinion that it is an entirely inferior System that just did an excellent job in pioneering many aspects of DnD that 4th Edition can make great use of while simultaneously doing it's best to not make those same egregious errors.

Yeah, I have to mostly agree with you CL.

Specifically when dealing with skill systems and such. The way I see it there is no RPG which is really terribly realistic. Many have gone down the simulationist path of trying to create a set of rules that will provide a credibly realistic set of results in game. The problem is that any RPG (at least one that is even remotely playable) is such a gross simplification and generalization of reality that it turns any such attempt into a failure. What you end up with is what happened to D&D in the transition to 3.x IMHO. Lots and lots of charts and rules and complex subsystems get added to the game, but the goal is never achieved. In fact, given the realities of what people can achieve, the result usually has less verisimilitude than a simpler system does.

Worse it ultimately has less flexibility and definitely has less playability.

After participating in this thread what I'm overall getting out of the 3.x vs 4e thing is that 3.x has enough knobs you can tweak that there are indeed characters you can build that have (so far at least) no exactly correlate in stock 4e. The other thing I get out of it though is that in all cases such characters are far from being in the space of what was every envisaged by any edition of D&D. There's nothing wrong with playing such characters, it really isn't anyone's business to say someone else is having badwrongfun unless they're at your table and it indeed isn't fun for them. It is pretty much pointless though to criticize 4e for it. 4e is a lot better at doing what it was written to do than any other edition I've played. It may be worse at doing something totally different, but I wouldn't expect Traveler to be very good for running dungeon crawls either. Every game designer has to make trade-offs depending on what they're aiming for.