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A short comment on D&D 4e (c.
2009)
Bleah. While 4e can be a lot of fun - and a
lot of people enjoy it very much - 4e and I will never be
friends. I consider 4e to be a great miniatures
game. Really. If you look at it like a minis game
with RPG elements bolted on, it is a huge success. Very
streamlined, very well balanced (to the point of cookie-cutter) and
relatively easy to play. Even the "role-playing" part is
reduced to "skill challenges" (read: dice rolling). It's as if
the entire evolution that was 3e never happened and someone simply
figured out what the revised Chainmail was supposed to have
been. I have found peace with my local RPGA groups by playing
Dead
Thom (mostly because I am having too much fun with the paradigm
- and great players - to care about the rules.)
Bleah.
A short comment on D&D 3e/3.5e (c. 2001,
revised 2006)
I've played AD&D since
1981. I love the game, but AD&D and D&D have been different
games since the 1970s and they still are. The flavor of both is very
different.
I think D&D 3.5e (which uses the
d20 rules) is an excellent game, and frankly a better game than
2e. However the slight but significant differences in game
mechanic create a very different feel to the game and thus I conside
the games to be different beasts despite the similarity in names and
the conversion rules published by Wizards of the Coast.
For a long time, I felt that 3e's
surrender of the "meta-classes" (Priest, Rogue, Warrior, Wizard) and
the resultant loss of specialty priests was a Bad Idea. But,
I've been won over by the the introduction of prestige
classes, the model of
classpaths and the ease of adapting the
core classes to fit specific
goals. | 
