Trithemius has hated D&D for years.. if he had embraced 4e then I’d take it as a sign of Armageddon. 
I have a level 60 hunter on WoW (well, had, suscription is cancelled, I’m now concentrated on Eve Online, I like much more sandbox games).
I continue thinking than the direct comparison of DnD to WoW is very close minded. There are very talented designers in other fields (computer games, board games,…) and if they have good ideas and they fit your field there’s no logical reason not to take them.
About the powers per encounter and things like that. Some blood powers could be used X times / Y unit of time, now some skills can be used 1 time / 1 encounter. Wizards just found a way to keep track of skill uses that involves less management than the system we had before. Nothing new under the sun, they just polished an old idea.
MMORPGs roles were taken from roleplaying games, it’s quite fun to hear that DnD is taking that idea from them when MMORPGs were the ones that copied it… The iconic DnD wizard casts fireballs, meteor swarms,… (AoE), the iconic cleric heals and resurrects (healer), the iconic figher goes to melee with the tough monsters (tank), the iconic rogue hides and stabs (DPS),…
Of course they probably took some inspiration in other fields, but people are blowing it out of proportion. Wizards already made a step on digital programs in 3e and failed miserably but saw potential. I agree they are going to fail again because DDI is useful, but there are far better and cheaper programs to play a RPG game online (Fantasy Grounds etc etc).
There’s a lot of market for that kind of programs (just look how many of them are out there) and it has nothing to do with MMORPGs, it’s a natural need of players who can’t get together to play.
But the fighter from 4e is a PC and a hero not the average grunt.
So… I think we need to pull back and reflect a bit.
Is the reason to convert to 4e simply wanting to “stay current”?
What are the consequences/benefits of going to 4e?
What are the consequences/benefits of going to an entirely different game system (Traveller, Savage Worlds)?
As with any rules set in any RPG, it’s all how you interpret the rules into the story. We could provide BR flavor guidelines for the various powers, but consider that even the Fighter’s powers can really just be represented by different swings of a sword or axe, striking a different part of their foe, etc. It’s not about some fancy technique, just about different footwork and bladework–not even just one type of swing, but each attack option can be represented by many different descriptions of how it is carried out.
It’s really not that hard. Anyone that is having trouble fitting the powers into the gritty BR setting, bring up the power and we’ll discuss it.
Well, I’ve addressed why I think 4e won’t be a problem to integrate into the story. As for why we’re doing it anyway, it is to keep the game fresh and alive and attracting new blood. If we do not, I can guarantee BR will only survive among die hard veterans. And many of us will have converted to 4e anyway, because it will be easy to parallel our other games and play groups, and because it has certain streamlining advantages over 3e.
BR will not only not grow significantly if it goes to another game system, but much of its existing D&D fan base will abandon our efforts here, as we will no longer be relevant to them. I don’t want to learn another system, anyway. 4e is enough. I’ve played in too many systems and don’t really care to branch out anymore; I expect other people are the same.
Refuse to update to 4e and we’ll probably lose our “official” fansite status, and BR will slowly wither and die. Abandon D&D and BR will quickly wither and die.
Accept a little inevitability here; it’s a fact of life 
Isn’t that what it’s already doing?
Consideration of other systems for the setting is good, but it just doesn’t seem sensible to ignore 4e, since D&D is the giant system and 4e is its current incarnation. This must be a situation where we hope 1000 flowers bloom.
Example of silliness: Minions - have 1 hp. Either live or they die. Probably good for cinematic combat, not good for my sense of internally-consistent-game-world (it doesn’t have to be realistic as such, only consistent).
I also think that many things are corrected in 4th edition.
- Speeds up gameplay. I hate being bogged down with 2-3 hour long single combats.
- Fighters are more interesting and balanced for higher levels.
- Clerics no longer have to waste their spells on healing between combats.
- Wizards aren’t over-powered at high level (instant kill spells.)
By no means is it perfect, but I like the improvements above.
-BB
4e following on form above
-can be play by ever 10 year old in the world welcome wizards to Game workshop style of packaging and money makeing.
I’m all for them trying to cut us for money but aming the rules so any 10 year old can understand them and reverting the game as some thing akin to a bord game make me sick.
Consistency and simplicity of the rules is a good thing as long as they can still describe all the situations you want/need them to. So far 4e seems to describe even more situations (such as skill challenges) better than any previous edition with simpler, more balanced rules.
It’s also pretty easy to fix things about 4e that you don’t like, easier than other editions, I think. I agree that the 1hp Minions was a stupid move. The concept was that these foes should drop with one hit. Sounds fair, since most people in combat would drop with one hit of a sword; extra hp beyond that actually reflects the fact that you have a strong will to fight, you’re avoiding a solid hit and are harder to knock off guard sufficiently to strike a mortal blow (the significant, life-threatening blow not falling until the final one that drops you below zero; healing surges would represent getting back in the fight, getting your guard back up, shrugging off the pain and dazing effect of non-lethal wounds).
So the concept with minions can be adjusted pretty easily to bring it back in line, I think. Figure an average damage that a character can dish out at a given level in a single attack and give a minion of that level that many hit points. That way, 5th level characters fighting a 15th level minion are still challenged. Meanwhile, the minion’s disregard for their own safety is still reflected by it being fairly easy to knock them out.
Minions are just people who ought to drop with one hit, without the need for tracking hp. If you have them as much as 2 hp, you’d have to do bookkeeping anytime someone did 1 hp damage. Is that worth it for the extra consistency and realism? That’s a call each DM needs to make on their own. In a lot of ways its a return of the 0-level character.
I can appreciate the simplicity of not tracking every skeleton when you’re 5th level characters chasing down a an evil spectral scion who holds a grudge against your family. Most people I imagine they think of as minions are skill bundles as far as I’m concerned. I don’t expect people to fight the blacksmith, but I do want to know if he can fabricate what the players want. Frankly I don’t know how often I’ll use minions, but its nice to have the option (as though I never would have thought of hand-waving minor NPC deaths before).
Feng Shui deals with the minion problem by splitting people into ‘name characters’ and ‘mooks’. Mooks drop if you hit them by more than a set number - anything less and their wounds don’t affect them, anything more and they are down - you only track damage for the people you cared enough about to name.
That said what works from a book-keeping point of view fails miserably from a realism perspective - I’d rather exterminate by DM whim…
Lets not use realism on a D&D site. I think the gods of logic would cause it to implode.
The 4e Standard Array is 16, 14, 13, 12, 11, 10.
The array suggested for PC’s in 3.5 was 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. This is a noticeable power up. I prefer the old array, but wonder if its worth it to embrace a different array for the setting because its gritty and of a lower power than some other settings. In the old point buy system this was a 25 point buy. Its a 17 point buy under the new system.
Then on top of this, racial ability modifications aren’t neutral, they are all bonuses. So, in practical terms ability scores are much higher, which makes more a more fantastic set of PC’s.
In addition you get ability score increases more frequently and to a greater effect.
+2 at every 4th level and when making the switch between “power levels” you get a +1 to all ability scores.
Some of the cumulative stuff doesn’t bother me so much. One of the problems I had with 3.x was that you hadto get into mid level before you had enough powers to do interesting things (other than take a whack at an opponent) or enough skills to be able to do something that the guy next to you couldn’t do untrained with a modicum of luck.
So I can certainly see some upsides. One of them is that I won’t feel the pressure to bump NPC’s up a few levels to give them the air of competence. I can easily see play sticking to heroic levels with only the most brightly shining stars breaching the paragon boundary.
I think the idea of all the stat boosts is that you no longer have enhancement bonuses to abilities. Then again, it could also be just to make everyone more powerful and individually even harder still for “balance”.
True, though since BR tended to do away with a lot of these magical enhancements anyway, some of these stat boosts seem gratuitous. Now its also true that we back-ended some stat boosts in the form of bloodline bonuses directly or indirectly. If all the PC’s were blooded I don’t see any problem with just describing some of this as the consequence of blood.
I’ll have to see characters in play doing familiar BR things.
I like more frequent ability score bonuses. The traditional ability scores all represent attributes that should be readily increasable over time through training or life experience. In some ways, these increases make more sense than level ups. A hard life on the road with a lot of combat or a lot of training should increase all of a person’s physical ability scores pretty rapidly, to a certain above-norm level. Study and meditation and so forth do enhance your mental skills and acuity. Frequent social interaction does increase your charisma. 3e’s 5 ability score points over 20 levels is just too few to represent these increases, IMO; 4e’s I think is much closer, though unless many characters are getting into the paragon tier, still perhaps too slow.
Take into account that there aren’t items capable of increasing attributes on 4e while those weren’t very uncommon on previous DnD editions (attribute enhancement items require a level 8 caster in 3e).
Same with spells: Bull’s Strength, Cat’s Grace and Endurance are level 2 spells.