4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons came out last week. Although I will never be the tabletop gamer my brother is (who plays and runs games weekly), I still enjoy it a lot, and I've been looking forward to the new edition.

This sentiment has not been shared by the gaming community as a whole, though. The community is rather polarized on the subject, and many vicious threads can be found on various gaming forums attacking the new edition as simply a corporate grab for more money. Others say the game is too "simplified" and that characters are too powerful, and that the borrowing of ideas from massive-multiplayer online games was a mistake.

The truly hilarous element, though, is how the older gamers sound so much like the war gamers that grumbled when war games were the dominant hobby and role-playing was the upstart. Resentment, anger, and dismissive patronizing comments were rife then, as they are now.

My feelings on the matter are that the game's primary purpose is to provide fun and entertainment for the players and the game master. Anything in the rules system that detracts too much from this should be questioned and if deemed unsuitable, discarded. Sacred cows in the rules should not be preserved if they are in the way.

In particular, I feel that the days of a tabletop RPG trying to simulate reality should be left behind. Most of the older rules systems do this because of their war gaming roots. But these days, computers are far superior at this task than any single person would be. A computer has the time to keep track of thousands of variables and counters, a human being would not.

Instead, I feel tabletop gaming needs to focus on the elements that the computer can't do. In particular, interactivity. This is the Holy Grail of most gaming, and there are very few games that even get close to it. Interactivity means the not reacting, but interacting with the player, and such things simply don't happen. The computer can never replace a human being for true interactive storycrafting.

The new edition actually has a lot of good streamlining and an even more varied encounter system. It is NOT a cakewalk either; any player who walks into it thinking it's easier will be in for a surprise. A lot of the changes really don't become apparent until you actually play. And it may not be for everyone, of course. Unfortunately, trolls are always hungry... whether they dwell under bridges or on forums. :)

This gave me some thought about my CRPG as well; I realized that I should consider simplifying some of the game's elements myself, to cut down the amount of memory-expensive controls it would require. In particular, I was originally intending to offer a lot of flexibility with level advancement. But when I gave it some thought, I realized such flexibility would probably offer little extra to the player and just take up room for other things.

I may want to actually scale back the class/skill system to something really simple... and then add back to it once I have an actual working system in code. I wanted a more complex character system than Tunnels of Doom or Legends had, but sometimes you only got so much memory to work with.