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Originally Posted by Anthony
The main thing that makes it appear less user friendly is the incorporation of powers into the main body of the text. The text box for a powered character can rapidly become overwhelming in size. It did the same thing in 3rd edition, but fewer powered characters were described, and thus it wasn't as obvious.
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Conceded. The main reason for it, of course, was to bring 4e into the '00s. The top-selling RPGs right now feature powered characters. In fact, one of the strongest recurring criticisms in the 13+ years of fan mail that we reviewed before the 4e revision was that 3e was too grounded in low-powered, realistic gaming and didn't support "epic" fantasy adventurers, supers, vampires, and
wuxia warriors very well at all. While 3e had an established audience for historical gaming and low-powered realism by virtue of its biases, sales figures didn't support the assertion that historical, low-powered gaming was our bread-and-butter. Books like
Psionics and even the much-maligned
Supers far and away outsold books like
Old West and
Espionage. Had
GURPS Traveller and
GURPS WWII fans been more numerous and bigger spenders, I can assure you that 4e would have looked quite different.