I finally had a chance to hear/read all of the noise made at GenCon about the unveiling of 4th Edition D&D. I'm somewhat excited about the things they mentioned – all but one.

Things I liked were streamlining of combat. Their focus on removing (or at least reducing) interruption in the flow. They also mentioned re-organizing the information in the books making things easier to find for the novice. That was the one thing I disliked most about the new books. If they were going to treat combat as a seperate "tactical" game they should have structured the rules as if it were a tactical game. There was no initial overview. Show a diagram of how combat will go. List the phases and what can happen in each phase, making a full round. ...