I could see that. If, for instance, you were playing a 1e fighter carrying nothing but a longsword. You've got one thing you can do - attack. 2e might let you have a non-weapon proficiency as well, C&T some combat option, and 3e might give you another such option (or make you better at one) for completing a feat tree. 4e gave you combat options, two at-wills, an encounter & a daily at 1st, and you steadily gained more - and, there was page 42 if you wanted to further improvise.
Characterizing all that as '1 card in your hand' is, well, it's a /very/ poor analogy, let's put it that way.
Fully agreed. I've not played much beyond the early levels of 4e (much to my lament), but you never had less than three "cards in your hand" so to speak, and working with your allies means you could treat their contributions as invisible fourth/fifth/etc. "cards" as well.
You can say that having nothing felt like having something. You can say that the sky looks green to you, and the earth just feels flat. Throw in a qualifier like that and you can say whatever you want no matter how glaringly at odds with the facts it may be.
Fact is, martial characters had more options in 4e, not fewer. Encounter powers were part of that. They gave them more things to do, they did not take away options.
Ehh. You're taking a rather extreme stance here. I don't think Sadras's position is nearly that unsubtle and subjectivist.
Because, "fact is," there
is such a thing as being blinded by options. It may be no fault of the game per se, but it is entirely possible to see a sheet full of facts and
feel like those facts are the precise, delineated extent of what you can do, with zero room for interpretation, creativity, or improvisation. Of course, it is
provably untrue that 4e prevents any of these things--references in the core books, as well as Dungeon and Dragon articles, can demonstrate the designers' explicitly stated intent on that regard--but just because the books make that clear doesn't mean that people will
grok that that is clear.
An analogy I have used elsewhere is that 4e is like a toolbox of specialized tools, and you get to have fun seeing what novel uses you can come up with for them; older-style D&D, especially the earliest versions where character sheets were sparse at best, were like having few very general tools and needing to pull from the environment itself to flesh out the additional features you needed. Both can leave someone feeling "trapped." Someone used to the former feels stuck, not having enough ways to interact with the environment to start with; someone used to the latter feels stuck, like the tools they have are the only tools they're allowed to use.
It's a really frustrating problem from both ends, because for whatever reason, if you change the size of the toolset people start with, somehow the adaptive-creative process shuts down...no matter
which direction you move (larger or smaller toolsets). It's not JUST a "your conception is wrong, change" it problem, but it's also not JUST "the game needs to be different" either. It's more about presentation, communication, and what people are comfortable playing. Perhaps that, alone, is enough to explain it: people feel
uncomfortable with toolboxes that aren't the size they're used to, and that lack of comfort leads to turtling up and refusing to be creative because creativity is
dangerous when you don't know what you're doing.
Good for you, since that's not what the word means. Revolutionary change being much faster.
In general, I agree. Revolution connotes sudden or violent change; evolution connotes a slow, even imperceptible change.
Changed, certainly. Evolved, which implies change in a certain direction, not in every case. 3e->4e could be called evolutionary change, arguably revolutionary. 4e->5e is harder to characterize as evolutionary change, rather, it was atavistic, the re-emergence of past traits - still change, of course, but changing back rather than evolving. That should not be surprising, as that was a big part of its goals.
Now, unfortunately, *that* is a misuse of the term. "Evolution," despite the common perception, has no favored direction. Evolution is adaptation. Adaptation only considers the situation of the moment; it has no moral center, no higher calling, no contextual significance beyond (in a biological sense) "this contributed to not-death, or avoided death." Atavism and loss of previously-acquired adaptation is perfectly in keeping with the meaning of "evolution." For instance, cetaceans lost their limbs and cave-dwelling creatures lose their eyes or pigmentation, but both are evolution despite being "changing back" as you put it.
4e evolved in a climate where selective pressures favored (1) solving the LFQW problem, (2) addressing the unstated but clearly present "class tiers" and particularly the problem of "dead weight" (or totally overshadowed) classes, and (3) addressing the fact that play only held to typical campaign expectations for a very small range of levels (generally 1-6 or 1-8, certainly no higher than 1-10). Several of these issues were right at the forefront of the designers' minds, and we have explicit statements
from Rob Heinsoo on basically all of them--and how much he had to fight internal efforts to prevent these solutions from happening.
5e evolved in a climate of (IMO, often reactionary) interest in tradition. The OSR movement and Pathfinder both picked up steam in this period, and WotC got burned BAD for their commitment to the OGL (which I think did good things for gaming as a whole, but bad things to WotC specifically). Further, there's been an explosion of new development--13th Age, Numenera, Dungeon World, and more than a few video games or book series adapted into RPG format. The playtest period was preoccupied, almost humorously so, with getting the "feel" right and often deprecated (intentionally or not) the mathematical design.
Both games were reactions to the climate that their design began in. I just think it's unfortunate that 4e addressed the problems most people recognize apply to 3e (and, to a slightly lesser extent, PF), while 5e "addresses" the problems of 4e by simply abandoning (almost) everything 4e achieved, with token or hollow references remaining (e.g. Hit Dice are NOT Healing Surges, at-will cantrips are NOT at-will powers, etc.)
