Tony Vargas
Legend
Not really, no. A lot is made of 4e 'tactics,' but it's mostly just that the combat happens at that immediate, tactical level, and remains dynamic. It's one of those easy to learn (focus fire!) hard to master things. The spread in effectiveness between the not-particularly-powergamed striker who just spams a decent at-will, the masterful 'build' that exploits some system weakness, and the 'tactical master' whose warlord sets them both up is pretty minor (really, microscopic) compared to the spread between an optimized tier 1 class and a not-optimized-at-all tier 6.But in 4E part of the problem, or challenge really, was tactical mastery. For players that think tactically, 4E combat is a blast, while for those that don't it is difficult, even demoralizing as you end up seeming ineffective compared to the Tactical Masters
You absolutely can jockey for Advantage. There's really two positive steps I see with Adv/Dis vs CA. Both are functionally just non-stacking situational bonuses. But, Adv uses a mechanic - the re-roll - that proved /very/ popular in 4e (the elven accuracy racial was one of the most lauded, and the Avenger's roll-twice-take-the-highest feature was also something players seemed to love). And, Dis applies the same non-stacking situational modifier concept on the negative side, consolidating penalties.maybe one difference is that A/D is almost more like a DM boon, while CA was something a PC could position for. Anyhow, A/D seems more flexible somehow, less specific - which I like, but some might find too indistinct.
That's a revisionist-history fiction I just don't understand. There is no 'harkenning back to theatre of the mind.' D&D was a wargame, in the ensuing 20 years, it never distanced itself much from that mindset. 1e gave everything in freak'n scale inches. Playing without minis or tokens of some sort and a surface was something you did if it was logistically impossible to use a playsurface.The strength and weakness of 4E combat is that it was so tactical, so abstract - combat was a game within the game, and you played your character like he was your avatar in a combat environment. 5E harkens back to theater of mind, where "I swing my sword" rather than "my character uses an encounter power."
Whether you approach your character in 1st person or 3rd is a matter of style. The mechanics have basically no bearing on it. Pretending that there was some golden age of RP when everyone played TotM, and it was 'real RP' and that age ended with 3.0 or 4e is just an artifact of the edition war. A lie repeated so often that some people seem to think it's true.
That seeming is an illusion created by the familiar way 5e presents it's complexity.Well yes, that's part of it. It seems that 5E doesn't require nearly as much complexity as 3E and 4E did
I certainly feel like that's the case. 3e was right on time. 4e was too early, 5e ridiculously so. It's hard to set aside the sense that we've been deprived of two or four years (respectively) of those editions.Maybe there's a sub-conscious, perhaps even natural, life-cycle to an edition? 3E came out after 11 years of 2E, while 4E came out after 8 years of 2E. Maybe there's something about that decade mark that is "right"? I don't know, just a thought.
For me, half-eds push the same button. 3.5 and Essentials each after barely two years were travesties of timing.
Just because you slipped through the wide net doesn't mean it wasn't a wide net.Sorry, I'm a results based kinda guy.
You will meet people who rave over how great something is, /just/ because it's new, no matter how bad it is. Just like you will meet those who rant about how terrible something is, just because it's new no matter how good it actually is. It's a phenomenon so common as to be cliche.I don't often meet people who praise things saying " this is so much worse than it used to be, but thank god it didn't stay the same."
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