When we played D&D, we only had the core material in the three core D&D 4 books - and this was the best time we had with the game. Every book we added we felt was excellent, but the power creep and changes just wrecked the game for us in the long run.
We hated the "level 10, leave for the planes" multiverse setup in D&D 4 and after. It marginalized every campaign world and made the tired "go anywhere, do anything" multiverse play the norm. To us, having a world scale from 1-30 was really cool, and it meant out there on this world, there were level 30 raid bosses lying in wait for those foolish enough to get near.
So for us, having the first three books and no "planar ejection seat" for high-level adventuring is when the game sang to us. It was cool. Paizo did a world like this with Golarion. They created this almost "sealed up" sandbox where all your fun, even the high-level stuff, was in one game world.
This was an epic place where epic creatures chose to live, and epic powers made their homes. There was a level 26 dragon in the mountains, with a dragon cult trying to become a considerable force in the world. Level 14 orc war bosses were serving as the leaders of temples of Orcus. The world felt like it had built-in challenges and a sense of scale.
No World Needed
We had the basic map and created the rest of the world ourselves. There were these "monster creation rules" in the DMG, which we used to develop foes, and we skipped many of the D&D standards. Need a level 5 brute and controller? Fine, just do some math and give them a few level 5 powers from a similar class, and you are done.
The D&D product identity monsters mainly were sidelined. We kept goblins as the lower-level humanoid monsters, while orcs exclusively started at level 5 - and they felt severe when they showed up, which we loved. We had this thing where orcs were never let out into the world until they trained until level 5, and most were followers of Orcus, so they were "bad dudes" whenever you saw them.
We let monsters take character class levels, leading to wild encounters. You never really knew if the encounter would go sideways when the monsters started pulling some of the same tricks the characters had, and the battles felt epic and unique.
It was a great place, full of adventure and nobody knew what was around the next corner.
More Books = Less Fun
The more books we collected, the less fun we had. The more official rulings told us we were playing the game wrong. The monster rebalances made us rely less on our imagination and more on the books. The new classes started repeating each other, shuffling powers or were so OP they became the hot thing and ruined the game for the original classes and characters.
We used the few bits of world info they provided and ignored the Greyhawk module transplants. The best stuff was the new and original content they produced for the D&D 4 world and that which captured our imagination.
And the constant focus on the planes lessened the fantastic world we had set up. Once you got to level 10, any one of the official campaign worlds felt like an MMO "starting player zone," and you left them to go flying around the multiverse. And it sucked. The incredible world we built felt like an aberration rather than an everyday thing.
Also, we saw the creep back towards the previous edition norms taking over. Orcs were a 1 HD creature, just like in AD&D! Please make things how they were! Run back into the cave allegory! We felt a little let down when we saw Essentials rolling things back to the older ways.
Our Way of Playing = More Fun
When I look back at this time, what was the most fun?
- It wasn't the world; since we ended up making that up.
- It wasn't product identity; we ignored it.
- It wasn't the adventures; we made our own.
- It wasn't the monsters; we made most of them ourselves.
- It wasn't the support for the game; too much support killed the game.
Was it the D&D 4 game? The rules were fun because they were new, and the new races were fun, but I am sure we could have fun with any sort of rules this way. The powers and leveling were okay, which had many problems where we felt characters got weaker as they leveled.
The unknown was very fun, using that monster creation system to come up with all sorts of new monsters "never seen before in D&D!" The more monster manuals we bought, the less fun we had fighting monsters. The more class books we purchased, the less joy we had playing classes. The more world books we bought, the less we enjoyed exploring.
It felt almost as if our imagination was better than the game we were playing. The more tools the game gave us to express our ideas, the better things were. The more the game tried to fill things in, the less fun we had.
I suppose all of that should be obvious.
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