I just much preferred the way in which these abilities were all expressed in a common format within 4e's system. ...It made it pretty easy to both reflavor as well as easy to simply graft powers onto characters.
This is what lead me to basically discarding the notion that what you can do should be dictated by class at all per-se. Instead I've taken my inspiration from the DMG2's concept of generalizing 'items' to be things like training, god-given benefits, etc. I was pretty disappointed that 5e didn't carry on this design concept and extend it.
When 5e/Next was still just speculation, there was a little speculation that the 'directions' suggested by 4e would lead to putting class, race, background and other descriptors on the same level as a Theme: that each would open up a selection of powers, and you'd just pick the ones you wanted. So you could be a Dwarf, Cleric, Soldier, and choose to take mostly Cleric powers, or mostly Dwarf & Soldier powers, or whatever mix appealed to you.
5e, of course, could never have gone that way, since WotC, even then, had realized that it was far more important to sales (and peace on their forums) for D&D to be familiar than for it to be innovative.
Looks to me like 5th edition does all this much much easier.
All you have to do is look at your stats and then do improvisation? What's the difference in a designer coming up with a power and a player coming up with something they want to do while getting the DM's okay followed by an appropriate roll.
There are several quite significant differences:
One, of course, is that the designer saves a lot of space and does a lot less work with such a 'rules lite' approach. That's why you see it a lot in micro and indie games done on a shoestring by a lone enthusiast.
Another is that the player, especially a new player, is left with little idea of what his character can do. Some players will see that as a license to try anything (which gets really old for the DM), and others an inability to do anything (equally frustrating for the DM in a different way).
Similarly, the player doesn't know how anything he might be able to do stacks up. He can't be sure how a stated action will play out, either in fiction or mechanically. What kind of action will it use, how likely will it be to succeed, how will it interact with what other characters (and enemies) are doing?
Which brings us to the DM. The DM is left to do all the work the designer saved himself, he also doesn't really know what the characters can do, but he does have the luxury of deciding that on the fly, as they try to do things. A DM can use that keep a party railroaded on his 'story,' keep them entertained, keep himself entertained, try to maintain genre fidelity, try to maintain realism, or whatever is important to him at the moment he rules.
So, really, the 'oh just improvise and the DM will figure something out' no-rule is pretty awful. Because RPGs are ultimately run by the DM, who can always rule as he likes, it is always a model any DM can fall back on any time. And, because no rule set can cover everything, it's a model that every DM probably will fall back on from time to time. In other words, that rule is already implicit in every RPG, and, in the no-rules-at-all Freestyle mode of play that declines to use any game at all.
It is nice when an otherwise detailed game acknowledges that reality, though. Games that pretend they've handled everything (and I can't think of an example - certainly no version of D&D has done that - even 3.5, the most voluminous and detailed edition had Rule 0, and 4e, the most balanced and consistent, had p42) can blow up when the players eventually try to do something they can't.
I don't agree with 4th edition doing it any better because you would then need to go through each and every power and see if there was one that fit and since you were limited to the amount and types of powers you could have, you could be stuck doing basically the same thing over and over again until you finally gained a level and swapped out "one" power.
Powers gave you a nice, consistent, set of signature (encounter) and dramatic (daily) things you could count on your character being able to do. In addition, you had skills, and, just as in 5e, ability checks, and a set of guidelines for improvisation in the DMG.
These are the many reasons why I hate it when people try and model works of fiction into a D&D, or any RPG game.
It is often problematic. RPGs set out to model a genre, or even license a work of fiction. But, RPGs have existed for 40 years now, while people have been writing fiction in forms like the novel for centuries, and telling stories since the dawn of the human race. RPGs haven't yet done a fantastic job modeling genres and works of fiction. Early RPGs, like classic D&D (and thus, 5e, which emulates the classic game so devotedly), in particular have been truly awful at it.
So not even trying is an understandable impulse. Afterall, there are other ways to approach an RPG. It's a game. You make decisions, deploy resources, roll dice and win or lose. A story can emerge from that. It might be a pretty boring story, or a 'you kinda had to be there' story, but it can happen.
Comics, novels, and movies are written with a specific story in mind that is planned from the beginning to the end without anything changing.
Comics are probably the worst because you can have a single city like New York that has many many comic heroes and villains that will not run into each other in the comics or you have instances where one is super powerful while another is not but through the action of the author, the lesser powerful finds a way, or circumstances come into play that allow him, to overcome the more powerful character and win the day.[/quote] Comics, serial as the are in nature, often /don't/ have specific story planned from beginning to end that actually unfolds, unchanged. Editors can decide a story has to change in the middle because of fan outrage or censorship, an artist or writer can leave the book, etc... They can be a pretty unstable medium.
D&D doesn't work this way because dice are involved and it is a living game. Even in D&D legendary heroes die and evil can win the day and end up ruling the world.
Ironically, the more you 'Empower' the DM - by, for instance, taking away players' control over their characters' abilities and effectiveness, the more easily a DM could conceive a story, and railroad his players through it...
He drives the team crazy but pulls his weight nonetheless. And he rarely "buddies up" because no one wants to be alone with him because he tends to get that other person in a lot of trouble that is difficult to recover from. And he has a tendency to do solo hijinx to help the team out while the other two buddy up and do normal Avenger-ey stuff.
)... that's a weakness in the writer which should have never happened... but then is a game better at characterizing both Silver Surfer and Black Panther better because that can be replicated, again IMO, not a good thing, YMMV of course...
