Mike Mearls
Just as you can peg your tastes in D&D to the chart, you can also map the modes that a given version of D&D best supports. 2nd Edition was big on immersion and story, with little emphasis on tactics until later in the edition. 3rd Edition emphasized tactics but it did account for story; its rules also tended more toward immersion than abstraction. 4th Edition has a big focus on tactics and abstraction, while 1st Edition favored abstraction and story.
My memory of 2nd ed involves a lot of challenges of how quickly we could fast-talk the DM into believing our ideas. We were able to do anything we could imagine, so long as he took us at our word and didn't doom us with a horribly fickle die roll. I loved the shift in 3e of providing distinct rules for doing things that we no longer had to describe. Thinking on it today, it seemed to me that there are far fewer powers in 4e that affect the environment: things that appear on the battlefield don't appear from the battlefield, they're conjurations of spirit or energy or force that disappear once the encounter is over at the latest. Now of course creative players and generous DMs can bend the rules any way they like, but that doesn't describe the system itself. Terrain Powers go a long way to fixing problems like I'm describing, but it's a short list to describe the infinite.
I love dynamic battles and out-of-the-box solutions, and maybe they just require more DM setup. What do you think?
