Thanks for all your help :D I've found out a friend DM's (but for 3.5) so I might get him to smooth over the finer points of 4e :D So I'll try and get his help... but yeah. (not end of topic... just a thanks )

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YOU ROLLED A 20?! WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?!
...
about one in twenty.
Roughly.
...
*cough*

So... I have all three core 4e books... and now I see the light... 3.5 is the way to go (lol, a bit late!)
so I'll have the 3 core 3.5's by the end of this week.

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YOU ROLLED A 20?! WHAT ARE THE CHANCES?!
...
about one in twenty.
Roughly.
...
*cough*

lol, thats unfortunate, every edition of D&D creates its own fans I suppose. 

I've noticed personally that after about 4 months, a few of the players who were on the fence have finally begun to comment "Oh, that magic does that, awesome!" or "yeah, my character totally rocks". 

Maybe it'll just take a few encounters with medusa (Save or out of battle unless group has specific spell ready), dryads (save or sit out the next 4-8 rounds, no spell can fix it), giants (x3 crits from a normal giant can kill many characters right off the bat), encounters regularly being overpwered or underpowered at mid to high levels, minmaxing players making the group offbalance vs the ones who like to roleplay, etc to help you see the light.  

Either way, as long as people are having fun playing D&D, its good. :)

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Richard M.
Grimfang
"Whisper"
Xaeraes

I am constantly astounded by people's preference for 3.5.  It makes my brain hurt trying to understand why.

That said, I don't understand a lot of things that people like (like professional sports), so it's probably just me.

And as Rich said, if everybody's having fun, then you're where you need to be.

(3.5?  Really?)

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"If you fudge dice rolls, your system is failing you!" -Sons of Kryos

"I genuinely think that some people measure their free will by reading how unhappy their GM is." - TonyLB

 Well, I'm going to throw a third contender into the pit and suggest Pathfinder.
Sure it's based on 3.5 which is, as our resident 4e-friends have pointed out, broken to the extreme in some cases. But now the base classes are the strong ones, and the base races have a lot to say for themselves. Characters are no longer as fragile, particularly at first level. Spells have been tweaked to be a bit more useful and class powers are now a pretty amazing thing.

For me, Pathfinder is better than 4e simply because it is a role-playing game and not just a game. 4e seems to discourage a lot of the usual character customisation and takes the whole game-play style a step towards board games.

See, now that's a false distinction.  Customization =/= roleplaying.

That said, 4e has focused on the tactical angle, because that's what the rules have pretty much been used for anyway.  Outside of combat, one almost never used the rules for anything anyway.

So Pathfinder is still a game of playing pretend until you get into combat, just like 4e, only when the combat starts, it lacks the consistency and reliable tactical challenge that 4e offers.

I guess my point is that Pathfinder still has a lot of baggage that it doesn't need and still feels as unfocused as ever (to me).  If I wasn't in the mood for the tactical fun of 4e, there are much better games out there for character exploration, drama, "roleplaying" or even good old-fashioned action-adventure than the 3.x family.

I'm not really trying to bad-mouth Pathfinder.  It's an improvement on 3.5, certainly, and the setting has some cool things and ideas in it.  But it still feels like the same old thing in the end (to me).  It's pretty much "been there, done that".  I have to wonder what I'm getting out of it that I can't get from any other RPG, you know?

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"If you fudge dice rolls, your system is failing you!" -Sons of Kryos

"I genuinely think that some people measure their free will by reading how unhappy their GM is." - TonyLB

I'll admit I actually quite like both 4.e and 3.5. I prefered 4.e for a while because it is in the end waaay easier to understand. It took me about I'd say were it in real life half an hour total to get 4.e explained to me. 3.5 I had to read a hypertext on it for about 5-6 hours and I still don't get some of it. For 3.5 though I just love the psions. I had a psion in one of the games on the forum but it died when one of the players left but I quite liked my little blue.

I enjoy 4.e jsut as much though since as anyone who has played with me can attest to, I'm either not too good at or just don't really roleplay much with my characters. I feel like I should more but in the end i still have lots of fun in the combat portion of 4.e. Still though combat in 3.5 while great my first and only fight with my blue revolved around me trying to ration my power points (spells basically for those who don't understand psions) because I only had 30 and i had to use about 4 per spell to actually be useful and unlike 4.e they didn't come back when you entered a new combat (encounter powers are amazing) but only came back after an 8 hour rest.