Any 5e character can do Commander's Strike with a feat, and it's even strictly martial.
Your assertion was that everything a 4e martial character could do could be done by a character in a /prior/ edition. I mentioned Commander's Strike because it's something you couldn't do in the classic game nor (AFAIK - there's been a lot created for it - 3.5)
As retro as 5e may feel, it did not precede 4e. Sure, 5e has something called Commander's Strike. It's closer to Hammer & Anvil, but it has it.
Now, my 5e fighter can't C&GI or Blinding Barrage.
Nor several hundred other things.
What can we do though? He can taunt. Any character can taunt, in any edition.
Ding! Something anyone can do is not character- nor class-defining. It's not an ability, it's a baseline from which actual abilities are defined.
Granted, only the 4e fighter can deal damage with that taunt
C&GI dealt damage with the weapon, and was not a taunt in the usual sense (the enemy didn't need to be able to hear you, you didn't need to speak their language).
Again, the 4e Fighter or Rogue fairly explicitly can't do those things if they don't have the power on their character sheet.
That's what options are. If you take them, you can do them, if you don't, you can't. If you don't have them in the first place, you can't do them, either. You can just do what everyone can do.
Now, in 4e, anyone could improvise, and there were the famed 'pg 42' guidelines for that, and they could be pretty effective (about on par with an encounter power).
The 5e Fighter or Rogue (or AD&D Fighter or Thief) do not need a power to tell them they can do these things.
They can't do 'em, we've already covered that. That can declare actions that anyone could declare, that will work about as well as they would for anyone else. That's not an ability, that's a baseline. That's the calibration of 0 on the 0-to-hero-o-meter.
I actually agree with you here. "Martial" characters should be allowed to do supernatural (superhuman? Are these terms not interchangeable?
They are not. To understand the difference consider /how/ a thing is accomplished. In the natural course of things, you can pick up an object and throw it if you're strong enough. That's a natural ability. You can not cause a heavy object to move just by concentrating on it. That's a supernatural ability. If you can pick up and throw an object much heavier than any human being ever could, that's super-human, but not super-natural.
Got it? Good.
Game balance rather depends on it.
Game balance, in 5e, depends on the DM.
No seriously, why is this still an argument then? If you can just change the flavor text
You could just change the flavor text in 4e, and re-skin away, but the supposed 'dissociation' between that flavor text (that you had complete effing control over) and the 'mechanics' was an unforgivable flaw. Crazy, I know. Your join date's 2007, unless you wandered off (I wouldn't blame you for that) you'd've seen it.
why is taking a feat to learn healing word and re-flavoring it as a non-magical inspiring word not acceptable? I am struggling heavily the dissociation (no pun intended!) here.
Even in 4e, that wouldn't've worked, because keywords, including Source, were a mechanical aspect and couldn't just be re-skinned.
It also wasn't necessary, since you just plain had inspiring word. Most classes had enough powers that they didn't need to poach & re-skin eachother's.
5e just doesn't work that way, healing word is an actual spell, you must know it, prep it, and cast it, the rules for spells are designed to make them distinct from everything that's not a spell.
You can pretend it's something else, but you're only fooling yourself.
AD&D had measurements in feet and precise geometric shapes. So did 3.X. I never felt compelled to use miniatures and game mats to track precise positioning until 4e.
A lot of people, when 3e was the current ed, said they never felt that same need until 3e. The groused that 3e was so terribly, horribly, wrongbadfun 'grid dependent.' They said they never had to do that in 2e. 3e's treatment of the grid was all but lifted from 2e C&T. Plenty of folks used minis the whole time. One DM I gamed with for years in the early 80's brought 40 lbs of lead minis to the game very week.
Fact is, D&D started life as a wargame, you were always meant to play it on a surface, with minis. A lot of us didn't - minis were expensive! - but that's what the rules were designed for from the beginning, and they've never been re-designed to work well without /some/ way of tracking movement, area & positioning.
wrecan, back on the Wizard's board, came up with a set of tricks he called 'SARN-FU' that you could use to run 4e that way. Ironically, that's as close as D&D has ever come to TotM support, some fan-authored variant.
13th Age has been designed to work that way, or with minis, it actually delivers TotM by default, FWIW.
5e is not, it's system isn't much better suited to 'TotM' than 0e or 1e or any other wargame, let alone any other edition of D&D. ;P
The whole 'grid dependent' thing is just an easy dig. It's always been true, it's always been fairly easily ignored, so ignore it selectively and point the finger at the ed you don't like.
Sad.
Should we talk about damage on a miss now?
There's a thread about whether the game really needs saves. That'd be a good place.
