WTF! 4th Edition

D&D 4th edition promises to do alot to take away from the d&d experience; for one thing, they have eliminated 2 key classes, the bard, some people like playing as a Tom Bombadil loook alike, or manipulating the class to be more like an Olmsford with the wish song(me), and the barbarian, I mean c'mon it's a classic, who doesn't like going 'Conan' on your foes *ss*s and leaving a trail of severed body part were ever you go. Then there is their self-righteous 'improvement of combat' by leveling monsters down to improve 'flexibility', or 'redesigning' the mechanics of certain monsters act more like themselves, WTF! 4th ed. do you think that DM's are idiots or do you want to make the 'throne' of the DM accessible to the average nitwit, if it is the later your a bunch of greedy bastard wizards (of the coast), and if it's the former I'll fire bomb your new head quarters! so were was I; ah the race changes: The addition of the Teifling was just a poor choice by wizard, due primarily to the fact that Teiflings are an uncommon race and the player races should represent the most common 'civilized' races in the d&d universe, and Teiflings should not be common unless 'fornicating' with extra-planar evil beings is a common thing, which it hopefully is not. Then there is the addition of Dragon born, which my only objection to it is the same as the former (not common enough) unless you adjust your campaign setting accordingly, and that I have already created a similar looking race and acting race of endothermic humanoid reptiles for my campaign setting. but in a totally different direction along the line of races I am 'Incredibly' happy that they finally did away with gnomes a player race (though I did that months ago for my games). Another thing that I have to say 'finaly' on is the Halfling background being changed to peaceable river folk, rather that clans of midget gypsies, though I hope they correct their horrible mistake on a Halfling's looks Halflings are short plump folk with overly large and hairy feet (think hobbits, since that is what they are) not perfectly statuesque ethnic midgets. They also are removing all the sub-races in many cases considering them mere social differentiations of the same race, wow! WTF! Has 4th Edition gone completely liberal forsaking that races have different innate abilities, c'mon think for a second an elf that has been raised in a High Elven city is going to have different abilities than an elf that was raised in the nomadic life style of a Wood Elf, even if they are genetically identical (which i doubt they are), they are going to be different, and these differences are represented through the stat and ability changes. Finaly I am nearing the end of my complaints, The 4th Edition has decided that it will change it's cosmology 'Again' to a 'sea' instead of a 'wheel', yet another example of liberalism; here what seems to be going on they decided they didn't like that alot of plane where classified as minor planes so with this 'sea' all the planes are going to be like crappy little islands floating in the the astral plane, see no difference they are all equal, Bah! My belief is that the wheel is how they chose to represent it because it shows the players perspective on the planes (their plane is the most important and the center of their personal universe) in comparisons to other planes, or maybe I'm insane and they think their players where too 'Neanderthal-esque' to figure out the principle of a wheel. So thats it, 'you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here'.