I felt the opposite after 3rd. In that game if you wanted a classic D&D monster to have its classic powers you had to try to figure out how it worked in the rules system & engineer it appropriately.
In 4th you simply gave it the abilities you wanted it to have. Out of combat ones could just be narrated while in combat ones were clearly templated & work the way you want them to.
This reflects my experience of 4E, too, but I have to say, I have some sympathy with Danny's position that 4E was in some ways an amazing FRPG system that had it's wings clipped by trying to conform to D&D tropes specifically. I think I'm far from alone in feeling that, had 4E not had "D&D" printed on the front, it would be absolutely the biggest name in FRPGs
after D&D (eclipsing Pathfinder), and virtually all discussion about D&D would involve it, and we wouldn't have so much "It ruined my life!" kind of talk. Of course, had D&D just tried to go on a Pathfinder-ish path from 3.5E (i.e. incremental, not revolutionary change), I'm pretty sure that'd have gone down very poorly indeed with most players (and Pathfinder would have been an even more effective competitor against that).
Oddly enough, I really felt like, in a lot of ways, 4E was what I had been expecting with 3E. An awful lot of stuff we'd discussed right here on Eric Noah's Black Boards (which predated this site), before much was known about 3E, came true not in 3E, which instead seemed to me to have a sort of "What would 1E look like in 2000" vibe, but rather in 4E. Particularly interesting to me is that the RPG that 4E probably most resembles is 1993's Earthdawn, which was essentially an attempt to improve upon D&D (and shares a huge amount of 4E's traits, not least that everyone gets powers, everyone is roughly equal in power (rather than LFQW being a thing), rituals are a big deal and most people can learn them, and so on.
5E seems more like what I would have expected to follow 3E. I'm not saying WotC haven't learnt anything from 4E - they seem to have. But 5E's design seems far more a reaction to issues with 3E, and far more an evolution from 3E, than from 4E. It has something of a 2E vibe, too, but doesn't really react to some of the issues of 2E in the way that 4E and Earthdawn did.
One of the things I hated about the old D&D was the way my character was defined (mechanically) by the magic items my DM deigned to give me. And also for wizards by their spells. This is very much the permission DM is god type of game I though I had seen the back of.
Indeed, and as a DM, I hated defining PCs this way, once I realized I was doing it (which didn't take very long). Our Thief, for example, in 2E, would have been at a small fraction of his level of effectiveness (which wasn't even super-high) had I not had a Ring of Invisibility in one of my adventures, which he gained. I could go on all day with a lot of other examples. Wizards were limited by the spells they could find (specialists less so - the one "choice" spell per spell level was a surprisingly big boon), but they (and to a lesser extent other casters) were the only people who could really say to the DM "this is what happens", because everyone else had to petition the DM for effects, by and large, and hope that he was amenable. Late 2E tried to give non-casters a little more control over what happened with stuff like Combat & Tactics, but it was so bound up in penalties and limitations that it didn't do a whole lot (and the largely reasonable Combat & Tactics was unfortunately associated with "OMFG NO!" Skills & Powers stuff).
That's fine though - it's like multilateral disarmament!
