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Sunseeker
Guest
I could probably find more if I kept looking. 5E takes its broad shape from 3E, there's certainly no question about that; but it adopted a slew of 4E's mechanical innovations.
- Death saves.
- Tightly controlled attack and defense values.
- At-will cantrips.
- Ritual spellcasting.
- Recharging monster abilities.
- Binary skills ("trained/untrained" rather than skill points).
- Dragonborn and "devil pact" tieflings.
- Full healing with a night's rest, and a nonmagical "self-healing" resource.
- Warlock pacts and a lot of the warlock spells.
- Passive skills.
- Legendary/solo monsters.
- Floating stat bonus for humans.
- The Feywild, the Shadowfell, and the Elemental Chaos.
- Dex bonus to damage on ranged and finesse weapons.
- Str bonus to hit on thrown weapons.
- Two types of rests (short and long).
- Option to knock creatures unconscious at 0 rather than killing.
Yeah but only a few of these things are expressly 4E innovations. Even fewer of them are things people would look at and go "Oh! That's a 4E thing." But as the rest of my post goes on to note, that's exactly what I found as well. The 4E takes are largely mathematical, systemic fixes and a few tweaks to what 3.X had played with but never really implemented as standard. It's a 3X pig roasted in a light 4E glaze, which means it's going to look and smell like 3X, and you're only going to notice the 4E-isms when you take a bite. Wizards wasn't going to turn a blind eye to good math and good game science over the dislike for 4E, but I feel that largely they've made strong efforts to bury anything distinctly 4E.