I run a very traditional weekly campaign, set in my own invented corner of the core setting, for a group of novice players. The modules are essentially on rails, which the players enjoy (they like to feel like they’ve ‘completed’ the challenge). The character creation system has been great for them. The new take on classes and builds gives them a clear idea of what their character is like, helping them wrap their heads around roleplaying. The powers system actually asks some fundamental questions (what spells or abilities do you have? where did you learn them? how do you cast them? how will you learn new ones) that give us more roleplaying hooks. I keep my NPCs very open. Any and all roleplaying is accepted. For example, my characters captured a gnome assisting a hobgoblin warlord and wanted to convince him to help him get his fellow gnomes to join them. I turned it into a skill challenge and then reconfigured the encounters to take into account the gnomes would probably be switching sides (or sitting out of the fight). There’s nothing MMO about that. The speed with which my players jumped into the game would have been difficult to achieve in the 3.x days. The complexity of the rules grows with their experience, instead of tossing them into a shark pit of options.

I also play in a homebrew sci-fi campaign with a group of veteran players. This game is high-powered and deadly dangerous. Characters are designed to take full advantage of the rules and blur boundaries (my Ardent has been an effective Defender, Leader, and Striker when needed). The world is a completely open sandbox and we often create our own adventure paths and plot complications. The roleplay is more engrossing than any game I’ve ever played. Each character is totally unique, and bizarre, but is built off of the basic skeleton of PHB 1, 2, & 3 classes. This campaign really put to rest the idea that the race/class system was incompatible with immersion or simulation. It is and has always been a product of good DMing and playing.

Lastly, I play in the D&D Encounters at my local store. This is pure gaming for gaming’s sake. It’s all about plugging in every week, playing tactically, and moving on. It’s quick, casual, and has very limited roleplaying opportunities, but it’s a fun afternoon diversion. This type of play would have been impossible in 3.x. I’ve seen teenagers, totally new to the game, and old vets that haven’t played since 2nd edition walk in and have no trouble adjusting to the play. They all walked away with some core books, and the intention to play more.

I just really don’t see the problems. None of them seem to be grounded in my experiences. If anything, 4e is more effective at becoming different games for different groups of players, depending on their needs.

But maybe I’m wrong. I’d love to hear some anecdotes of 4e going wrong for groups.

This really isn’t that strange an idea, since if you didn’t allow this, there’d be no reason to attempt the longer-running, campaign-based adventures. Gygax himself assumed the characters can retreat and train in some modules, particularly Keep on the Borderlands. The assumption of ‘one level per adventure’ comes from the dungeon crawl idea, where the characters would have no access to a safe home base and a trainer.

Of course, in a time-based adventure like the one we’re playing, stopping to train might not be that great an idea…

We’ve actually done another session, but I keep forgetting to drag out the log and type it up here when I have time.

Most of the other issues you brought up are nonexistent. Fighter-rogues have to take their armor off if they want to use their abilities well… so what? That’s the price they pay for being a fighter-rogue. I played a very fun Paladin/Rogue not so long ago, and I just wore a chain shirt for my armor because that let me use rogue abilities reasonably well. I really think you’re picking nits with the 3e system and ignoring the bad parts of 1e here. Even the ‘dipping’ you mention is discouraged in the rules by having an XP penalty for multiclassing with a gap between your classes, though I think the rules are a tad too lenient on it, what with Favored Classes and all.

That said, 1e didn’t have the ridiculous matter of a Fighter suddenly deciding to pick up Wizard spellcasting, while the Wizard had to spend years in apprenticeship before chargen. 3e was a phenomenal leap forward in many ways, but it wasn’t without some major wallbangers.

Copperfield? Really?? I can guess who that was…..

“After a valiant struggle that critically injured the Ranger and Monk, the party killed both and settled down to rest.”

They killed both the Ranger and the Monk just because they were critically injured?? Man, is First Edition tough or what!

For information on Gestalts, check out the Unearthed Arcana for 3.5, by the way. Just thought I’d throw that out. Hybrids aren’t Gestalts, however… Gestalts are more powerful than vanilla classes, and aren’t intended to be mixed with them. I’d give more of an overview, but I was never fond of the idea to begin with, so I’m not that clear on the details, myself. I don’t want to misinform. You might be able to find the info somewhere in the SRDs online, since the UA was mostly a collection of 3rd party mods rolled back into the system as optional rules.

Like I’ve mentioned, 3.5 wasn’t perfect. I’m not going to argue that. A way to limit multiclassing somehow might help prevent those combinations… they did attempt to do so with the XP penalty and such, but in practice that didn’t work out so well. It’s really rather simple… I think that if someone goes through a few levels as one class, then decides they’d like to change to another, they should be allowed to. A short-term penalty should discourage this from happening too long, but in the long term you’re more flexible. Maybe make the penalties steeper the more times you do it.

As for the MMO thing… I’m not sure what to say. To me(and I’ve played several MMOs, though I’m not too active in them right now), D&D 4e feels more like an MMO than, say, the World of Warcraft RPG. This isn’t to say it mimics WoW perfectly or anything… they are, by their nature, different games. Just as NWN needed to alter the rules to make it work on PC, some assumptions of the PC don’t work so well on tabletop. Of course, NWN immediately had people modding it to make ‘hardcore’ servers that were more strict with the rules… and discovered that, hey, needing to manage your rations in a PC game wasn’t all that fun, but it worked on paper! Same thing with 4e.

Again, I’d better end this by clarifying that although 4e isn’t the game for me, I’m not too fond of people who blast it with silly excuses. Even the MMO thing, while it’s a criticism, isn’t /entirely/ a bad thing. I didn’t make a big deal of it in my article for a reason. The /big/ issue was the way immersion was hurt, but that’s sort of beyond the scope of this comment. I’ll take a look at your article and try to come up with something a little more clear when I’m not at work. I don’t exactly have my books with me.

D&D Online, an MMO based on Dungeons & Dragons, was actually based on 3.5e, so clearly, D&D in general already has components that allow it to fit in with MMOs. I honestly attribute that entirely to the fact that MMOs and D&D are roleplaying games.
Neverwinter Nights and Diablo 2 came closer to a D&D feel than any MMO ever did, but nobody complained about that.

I think it’s ridiculous for a single character to have far too many “jobs” or “professions” in one lifetime anyways, which is what I consider a class to be. From a roleplaying perspective, 3e multiclassing never made much sense to me. I always saw it as people not being able to make up their minds as to which option they wanted to choose, and instead choosing all of them. “I want to use a sword and wear plate! Aww, but I want to cast arcane spells too. Maybe I’ll be Fighter/Wizard!” That multiclass doesn’t work in practice, of course, but I think you get my meaning. Options are great, but when you have a hard time choosing, you shouldn’t just be able to say “Oh, well I’m a Fighter/Shaman/Sorcerer/Psion.” I have to wonder how the hell he even utilizes all of his class abilities, or decides how his character should fight in any given encounter. Forget how much power he might have, and how hard of a time he will have in choosing his actions in combat; how did the character even manage to acquire skills from so many places? He can channel the primal spirits of the earth AND cast arcane spells of mysterious power AND use psychic abilities that have a mana-like power reserve, not to mention wielding weapons and possibly wearing armor (though that leads to arcane spell failure). It is a very good thing, in my opinion, to limit just how much a single character can do in regards to what power they have, while still supplying them with many options as to HOW to wield that power.
I think that’s one of the good things about the 4e powers system. While it’s true that it can be frustrating for all the characters to feel similar, this means that you don’t really NEED to multiclass like crazy to get all the things you need. A lot of Martial powers can actually provide similar effects to those provided by a Wizard, though obviously not exactly the same. In 4e, what people are lusting after are the specific class features each class has, and multiclass feats cover that! Hybrid characters seem to cover that even better, though it basically leads to creating your own class by mixing two pre-existing ones together.
You can still swap in and out powers through the power-swapping feats, but I think that’s not something anybody needs to do to acquire the powers they want.

I like the concept that is used for 4e mutliclass feats, though I hate how they are releasing pieces of important information piecemeal, across several supplements. I have a dwarf fighter who dual-wields twin waraxes, and while you think right off that he is just a Tempest Fighter in 4e, if I were to remake him, that’s not the case. The Tempest Fighter gets almost all of it’s class benefits from wielding weapons with the Offhand property, and waraxes don’t fit that. So I grabbed a Multiclass Ranger feat to get the feature that is normally given to a Two-Blade Ranger, to allow me to at least WIELD the second axe, if not gain certain class benefits. And while a Waraxe is certainly stronger than a Handaxe in almost every way…I am giving up the Offhand bonuses I would have acquired, which is a rather logical penalty, one I happily take much in the same way I would take a penalty to my attack bonus in 3e. Is that a majorly big merging of Fighter and Ranger? Not at all. And I didn’t need it to be. That small little extra feature, taken from the Ranger’s two-blade fighting style, was all my dwarf needed.
I have read online about people actually successfully creating a Sorcerer who fills the Defender role, which is normally something a Fighter or a Paladin would do. I’m not quite sure how, but it apparently works. So, you see, the builds and roles they present don’t limit you in the slightest. You just have to be creative within the new limits of the game rules…something people did all the time in 3e anyways.

Your response to the whole MMO thing: they may have said they wanted to make it feel like an MMO, but it just doesn’t feel like one to me. If that WAS their goal with 4e, they failed at it. I have played plenty of MMOs, besides just WoW, and…4e just doesn’t feel like one. I have been an avid video gamer all my life, and I am painfully addicted to MMOs since I first touched one…and D&D just doesn’t feel like an MMO to me.
They streamlined the rules, much in the same way that MMOs have everything streamlined in their game mechanics, this is true. They made the game easier to understand, more accessible to new players, this is true. But there are no similarities that I can find. I wrote a rather long blog upon the topic, and I think I made some very important points that there are at least no mechanical similarities between D&D and WoW. Literally, there are none.
The only similarities I can find is the basis in a fantasy setting, and that’s not saying much. A roleplaying link is something all roleplaying games have in common; it’s to be expected.
You can read it if you want, but don’t feel you have to, as I’m not really all the amazing of a game theorist: http://drakewurrum.blogspot.com/2009/05/d-4e.html

I think I want to just finish off with what somebody commented on it with: “people continue to make the comparison as a way to diss 4e for making the game more accessible to new players and streamlining a lot of things that, frankly, needed to be streamlined in interest of a more fun game.”