You can always do that, you just have to adapt 3E or earlier FR material.
I must say, Coro sums up how 4E came about quite nicely. 4E was largely a product of internet discussion of theoretical problems under 3E that could happen - if the DM and the people you played with were willing to put up with a lot of cheese and an incredible amount of rules-lawyering. The problems, however, of what a 17th-level wizard might theoretically be able to do with access to every spell in the game and extensive preparation based on heavy use of divination spells (for example) weren't what most, or even more than a small minority of campaigns dealt with. We played at 16th-17th level in Coro's campaign and we never felt we could just curbstomp all comers, (not even Talya and I, playing full casters) mainly because no one was a cheesed-out *******, and Coro imposed reasonable limits as DM.
As to FR, I long for the days of the 1E boxed set. The FR world was far more, for lack of a better term, misty back then. The book left a great deal unclear. That's part of why my current campaign is in the South; it's never been as developed as anywhere else. It's got enough resources that I'm not relying only on my own creativity for new and different ideas, but its vague enough that I can do my own thing, and if it violates whats written on some FR wiki somewhere, so be it.
One thing Coro doesn't touch on (and may not be old enough to remember) is another type of baggage associated with the D&D/AD&D brand, and I think is obscured by the "MMO" effect he touches on: D&D is the founder and big kid on the block of RPGs. It's the original, the name people associate first with the concept of an RPG and the game that probably the vast majority of us still first get introduced to RPGs with.
Because of this, there's a certain elitism towards D&D in the "nerd community" that's been around a long time. It was pervasive when I was in college. Back at that time, TSR was first starting to struggle, and 2E was getting more and more encumbered with books of wildly varying quality. If you have access to them, compare the Complete Thief's Handbook to the Complete Cleric's Handbook.. you'll see what I mean.
At any rate, in the community of RPG and wargamers at Virginia Tech (and I have no reason to think they were unique in this respect) TSR-bashing was simply expected. Discussing D&D was very much like the worst of the WOW community forums - you couldn't say anything productive, but like WOW, everyone still played it. You'd hear constant raving about the wonders of Earthdawn, Vampire, Werewolf, Shadowrun, and a few others (never mind that only one of the above is a fantasy RPG) and people would play those.. but D&D was still the staple at the yearly convention and the weekly gaming meetings - well, except for Magic and WH40K, but they aren't RPGs.
The point is, knocking D&D is what people do becuase in the back of a lot of people's minds, it's the "beginner" game, and they're "advanced" players that play.. well, anything else, that's better, better meaning not available in Barnes and Noble. 4E is the product of a lot of that; the internet meant the bashing happened where the publishers could see it. They took it seriously, produced a game based on it.. and got one the community doesn't universally get behind as they did the previous times because a lot of it is really just the product of people ***** on the internet to sound cool. The sort of people that actually take GNS seriously and play things like Dogs in the Vinyard, or at least own a copy (I find it very hard to believe anyone has ever actually assembled a group to play a game about enforcing Mormon moral codes) and have a lot of time to sit there, optimize characters, and "hack" the system as Coro put it.
Most players aren't in that category, and if they acted that way at a real gaming table would get punched in the face, just like the players that would really try to render the rest of the party irrelevant by trying to rules-lawyer the monk's gauntlets away. The unfortunate fact, however, is that a sufficiently vocal minority can appear to be the community quite often.
_________________ "Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."
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