Well, 5E has the same support for TotM that previous editions had
To be honest, I don't see the difference from 4e. A 5' push is a 5' push whethere delivered by a 4e or 5e character, and the question of whether it moves the character out of the radius of the fireball spell doesn't change.
Nothing about 5e seems to make TotM straightforward in a fashion that is different from 4e.
walls of abilities written in gamey jargon just don't float my boat.
I do actually read the spell descriptions for fun; there's good stuff in there!
Speaking for myself, again I don't see the difference. When I think of spell descriptions I think of AD&D, which is full of jargon (
segments,
rounds and
turns as measures of time;
inches (as in gameboard inches) as measures of distance;
levels as measures of spell power;
damage dice as measures of attack potency; etc); and I don't find 5e to be all that different (casting times are measured in actions; damage is still measured in dice; spell power is still measure in levels; etc).
It was indeed a mechanical departure on most levels and in some of them, massively so. There is little useful purpose served by getting into counterpoint with this I think - it is in my opinion entirely self evident.
Not remotely.
PCs are defined by the same 6 stats, with the same bonus/penalty chart as 3E; they have feats and skills, like 3E; the feats, like those in 3E, provide various modest tweaks; the skills, like in 5e, provide a flat bonus; the skill list is very similar to 5e's which makes it also pretty similar to 3.5 but for not having craft, perform or profession, and fewer knowledge skills.
The presentation of races is almost identical to 3E and 5e - stat mod, other mechanical abilities inlcuding skill benefits and vision.
Combat is based around rolling a d20 and adding bonuses to hit AC (or another similar defence), with damage being determined via polyhedral dice rolls and many attacks also inflicting debuffs.
The text for fireball in 4e is very similar to that for fireball in Moldvay Basic. That's not a coincidence.
Well, my groups style was not helped, and hampered at the time; 4E could be used, in theory, for less tactics focused styles, but not easily or with much help from the books. We were not big optimizers, to say the least
An interesting thing about 4e is that optimising is not that important, because the number of trap/dud choices is pretty modest.
The 4E MM was an abomination on every level, due to choices made by its lead designer.
This is one thing in respect of which I think I'm an outlier - I really like the MM! (Yes, the damage needs scaling up for non-Heroic tier monsters, but that's normally pretty straightforward maths.) I've had a lot of good encounters using its undead, its goblins, its young black dragon, its gnomes.
Of course it's not the only 4e monster book I've used, but I've used it a lot.
Another consideration to the "feels" of 4E versus other editions: the books were set up as reference manuals without a lot of fun reading potential. See the 4E MM versus the 5E one, more stats, less flavor. That focus on everything feeding into tactical, systematically complete systems was a somewhat new take, that did not fit everyone's tastes.
Maybe it's all the years I spent with Rolemaster, which favours one line spell descriptions (like Moldvay Basic but more concise) and one-paragraph monster descriptions (ditto), that have made me prefer the "less is more" approach to flavour text. I tend to find it stodgy and off-putting, especially - as too often seems to be the case - it contains self-contradictions or sits oddly with the stats of the game element in question.
When I read the 4e MM, it makes me imagine events in play. Which encourages me to use its monsters in my game. I think that's a good thing in a Monster Manual, and I like the way it orients me towards
play rather than
backstory.
(A similar sort of view is expressed by [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] in post 42 upthread.)
