Of course my first post in forever would be of only marginal interestingness.
I was scanning
EN World for news on 4th Edition D&D, and scrolling down that main page I noticed a little tidbit that really, really made me sad. Some guy spoke to a Dave Noonan, one of the big developers, and gleaned this: "Certain spells are gone, period (wish for sure)."
You know, I was intially very optimistic when 4th Edition was announced. I have a host of quibbles with the current D&D game, and I looked forward to a new edition as an upgrade, a chance to fix the things that weren't working and make even better-er the things that were. In particular, some of the talk I heard early addressed specifically things that I gripe about all the damn time; the way magic items are a necessity for a character's effectiveness to appropriately scale, the ever-waning effectives of straight-classed melee types, weirdly unbalanced monster challenges, an overhaul of the magic system, and the dead zone you hit when you get to high level play.
But it was easy to get excited when all the news consisted of vague allusions that I could contextualize however I wanted in my head. As more specific rules changes have been released and hinted at, I have grown more and more dispirited.
Of course, I understand that there's no hand forcing me to change. My group can play 3.5 forever, just like the dinosaurs today who still roll and compare to thac0 and wouldn't touch a feat with a ten-foot pole.
But it feels different this time. Without going into too much nerdy detail, I feel like more of the stuff that is really the heart of the game is being changed for the worse. And I'm not just saying all this stuff out of some sense of tradition or something, it's more that there are fundamental things about the game that notify you're brain that this is it, the good stuff, the old timey D&D.
And one of those things is Wish. The spell that alters the very fabric of the universe itself. Wish is the best and most important spell in D&D for several reasons, but probably the most relevant one is that Wish is not really quantifiable in rules terms. It's a spell that is all fluff and no crunch. Basically, when you cast wish, you state your wish outloud, and then DM decides whether or not it's too much, and whether or not the literal words of the wish can be twisted to screw you - a time honored practice with a long and glorious tradition.
See, wishing is like a game in and of itself. You have to learn your DM, you have to know how much is too much to ask for, how much you can get away with, and how much fun your wish can be. And this is a game the DM plays, too. When the wish is made, it's really the DMs time to shine, to show the players just how mean/funny/hilarious/patronizing/vengeful/benevolent or whatever else she can be.
In short, it is a system that is controlled by forces outside of the numbers game, so they axed it. Everything is being axed for the numbers game. The classes are now going to be crafted exclusively for their niche. It's a score for those that value consistancy, but also for monotony. It's a blow to the improvisational fun that pen and paper has that can't be duplicated in games like WoW (which, deny this as they might, the developers seem to be carving D&D ever closer to) or on your Nintendo.
There is hope I suppose. Rules are, after all, made to be broken.