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Greywulf had an excellent post up at his Lair today. He offers up some of his thoughts on 4E, and how he sees some of the emerging trends.

Here are a some of the main points he makes:

• Game balance should be secondary to enjoyment of the game.
• 4E is combat-heavy, and has little to offer in the way of role playing.
• Because 4E is combat heavy, the classes have all been adjusted to be balanced in combat.

I agree completely that game balance is secondary. I’d even go as far as to say that game balance is, in some ways, an illusion. D&D isn’t a perfect system, mathematically, and it never will be. In my group especially, I don’t worry about game balance because we’re all friends. No one is going to be jealous of another player because of character abilities.

I don’t, however, agree with the other two points. On the first point, I’ll offer you the comment I left over a the lair:

I’m intrigued by what you’re saying here about 4E being so heavy on combat. To me, Keep on the Shadowfell was impressive the way that it handled the NPC interactions during the “interlude” stages. For the first time in a while, I felt like I really knew the NPCs, and could role-play them effectively without having to re-create them in my own head.

True, Shadowfell was a bit encounter-heavy, but no more so than Demonweb Pits.

So, my experience was totally different that Greywulf’s. Which one of us is right, or most reflects how 4E will be? Hell if I know. Time will tell. But here’s the thing: I believe, firmly, that a rule set can’t encourage good role-playing. That’s up to the people playing the game. A complex ruleset can get in the way of good roleplaying, as can one with social “skill checks” like in 3E. But, like with 3E, there are ways around that.

As to the question of the classes being more closely matched in combat ability, I think what Greywulf and others are seeing is simply rules convergence. This is the idea, very present in 4E, that the classes ought to play in a similar fashion, even if their abilities are vastly different. In other words, differences in classes matter most in flavor, not in mechanics.

I like this. In fact, here’s the other part of what I said at the Lair:

In fact, I’m of a mind that the rules convergence may well prove to be the smartest thing D&D ever did. Think about it: my friend who’s only ever played a paladin because he understands the mechanic can now play anything he wants. That’s a boon to many folks, especially newcomers to the game.

So, what do you all think? Really, there are 2 questions here. First, how important is game balance, if at all? Second, is rules convergence a good thing?