WarlockLord
First Post
I'm going to start by quoting the "Bounded Accuracy" article.
I think this quote helps illustrate why 5e is not going to be able to unify both sides of the edition war.
In the thread NeonChameleon started about bringing 5e players to 4e, he pointed out that one of the editions's strengths was making it so that wizard spells don't obviate skills. But I think this is part of the problem. The fact that in 4e, things you do don't really change. A 1st level band of noobs runs into a wall. They need to climb it to cross it. A 30th level band of an epic archmage, a badass warrior dude who can randomly walk out of the afterlife, another dude who is a living divine avatar, and a demigod, faced with a wall, are going to climb it. It doesn't make it that much more epic when the 30th level guys are climbing a wall of space force or whatever, they're still stuck on the same basic challenge: can we climb a wall? And the answer is usually going to be some sort of climb check. And that's a problem a lot of 3.X players have with the system. In 3.X you could do all sorts of crazy crap, like burrow under the wall, smash it, fly over it, phase through it, and whatnot.
And to be fair to 4e, some similar measures exist. The cleric could roll up in his cloud chariot and tell all the climbing and jumping people they are officially obsolete because he has a pimp car. The wizard could phase himself through the wall with various utilities, or burn mass fly or fly. They can both laugh at the martial characters, because even if those guys took ritual caster they still had to set 2 feats on fire and are probably going to be worse at rituals due to lower stats. And of course, rituals kinda suck, and you can't attack the wall if the DM refuses to assign it hit points. I excluded these in my initial analysis because a lot of people don't want "Bob the Climber" to be invalidated for some reason.
On the other hand, a lot of 3.X players think that climbing, jumping, and not flying around are low-level concepts that deserve to be phased out eventually. In 3.X, after a certain point, you don't care how big the bear is because you can fly over it and throw tiny rocks at it until it dies. 4e, on the other hand, seems to fetishize standing in melee and stabbing things in the face. These are two pretty different viewpoints I don't see one game reconciling.
Now none of this should be taken to mean that fighters need to suck. I personally believe Tome of Battle didn't go nearly far enough in buffing the fighter types. But they need real, out of combat interesting abilities. If the wizard is flying, they should be able to walk on the wind because they're awesome. They should be able to smash mountains, run really fast, dance on the tips of spears, lasso tornados, and straight up not die. If Pecos Bill, Cucuhlainn, Roland, or Benkei could do it, so can the fighter. I suspect I will get many comments about the terrible anime fighter and how real fighters are totally mundane warriors who are somehow worthy of respect by guys who can fly around, teleport, turn invisible, and conjure armies of minions, but quite frankly the "mundane only" fighter is a joke which falls apart the first time your fighter deals enough damage to wreck a main battle tank or survives being sat on by a dragon. But again, people don't agree on this, and this is why unification is not possible.
TL;DR: The 3e and 4e max power levels are vastly different from each other and that's why unification is impossible.
Mearls said:
I think this quote helps illustrate why 5e is not going to be able to unify both sides of the edition war.
In the thread NeonChameleon started about bringing 5e players to 4e, he pointed out that one of the editions's strengths was making it so that wizard spells don't obviate skills. But I think this is part of the problem. The fact that in 4e, things you do don't really change. A 1st level band of noobs runs into a wall. They need to climb it to cross it. A 30th level band of an epic archmage, a badass warrior dude who can randomly walk out of the afterlife, another dude who is a living divine avatar, and a demigod, faced with a wall, are going to climb it. It doesn't make it that much more epic when the 30th level guys are climbing a wall of space force or whatever, they're still stuck on the same basic challenge: can we climb a wall? And the answer is usually going to be some sort of climb check. And that's a problem a lot of 3.X players have with the system. In 3.X you could do all sorts of crazy crap, like burrow under the wall, smash it, fly over it, phase through it, and whatnot.
And to be fair to 4e, some similar measures exist. The cleric could roll up in his cloud chariot and tell all the climbing and jumping people they are officially obsolete because he has a pimp car. The wizard could phase himself through the wall with various utilities, or burn mass fly or fly. They can both laugh at the martial characters, because even if those guys took ritual caster they still had to set 2 feats on fire and are probably going to be worse at rituals due to lower stats. And of course, rituals kinda suck, and you can't attack the wall if the DM refuses to assign it hit points. I excluded these in my initial analysis because a lot of people don't want "Bob the Climber" to be invalidated for some reason.
On the other hand, a lot of 3.X players think that climbing, jumping, and not flying around are low-level concepts that deserve to be phased out eventually. In 3.X, after a certain point, you don't care how big the bear is because you can fly over it and throw tiny rocks at it until it dies. 4e, on the other hand, seems to fetishize standing in melee and stabbing things in the face. These are two pretty different viewpoints I don't see one game reconciling.
Now none of this should be taken to mean that fighters need to suck. I personally believe Tome of Battle didn't go nearly far enough in buffing the fighter types. But they need real, out of combat interesting abilities. If the wizard is flying, they should be able to walk on the wind because they're awesome. They should be able to smash mountains, run really fast, dance on the tips of spears, lasso tornados, and straight up not die. If Pecos Bill, Cucuhlainn, Roland, or Benkei could do it, so can the fighter. I suspect I will get many comments about the terrible anime fighter and how real fighters are totally mundane warriors who are somehow worthy of respect by guys who can fly around, teleport, turn invisible, and conjure armies of minions, but quite frankly the "mundane only" fighter is a joke which falls apart the first time your fighter deals enough damage to wreck a main battle tank or survives being sat on by a dragon. But again, people don't agree on this, and this is why unification is not possible.
TL;DR: The 3e and 4e max power levels are vastly different from each other and that's why unification is impossible.
