I made a direct comparison of my opinion of the custom warlord classes to the AD&D era custom ninja classes that were all popping up at the time. How am I picking on 4e when the comparison I made was to 1e?
Because the comparison is unwarranted and--to myself, at least--somewhat offensive?
WELCOME TO THE PARTY! Seriously, fans of literally every edition have been told those things. Am I to expect that 4e fans are somehow special and deserve extra treatment or something? If you take anything said about 4e that doesn't praise it as attacking it, then that's a you issue. Sorry to say, but it's true. People talk about my favorite editions (TSR era) all the time, but I don't take any non-praising opinion about it as some sort of personal affront.
People also don't--generally--discuss TSR era D&D by explicitly saying that it
isn't D&D, that 110% of its failure can be blamed on it having the name "D&D" rather than some other name, etc. There really are some differences here.
A lot of those things do exist in 5e. Pushing/pulling/teleporting/postitioning etc all exist in 5e. And are all important. So when you say they don't, and promises were made that were broken, that was untrue. What seems to be the case is that they don't emulate 4e enough for you. Guess what? 5e doesn't have save or die, or level drains, or % based skills, or THAC0, or individual XP tables, but you don't see me complaining that "5e promised to pull things from every edition but they lied and nothing from TSR D&D is there!"
If you expected 5e to be 4.5e, then I don't know what to tell you. There is no way that would be the case, and nothing the devs said implied that. There are A LOT of things pulled from 4e. Just because it wasn't enough or emulated 4e near exactly to your tastes doesn't make that untrue.
And this would be why I said what I said--the question is almost impossible to answer because the guideline
is almost impossible to meet. If I don't change the core meaningfully, well then the core is good enough already and I don't need anything new! If I
do change the core meaningfully, I've violated your restriction, and therefore don't deserve what I asked for.
The long and short of it, though, is that WotC did
explicitly talk about having a "tactical combat module," which they
explicitly said was being delayed/held back for additional testing, and one of their employees even
personally tweeted to me that it was something with a more "specific" taste that they wanted to address individually. This has since failed to happen. All your assertions that the core is good enough as-is cannot do a single thing to demonstrate that WotC hasn't,
self-admittedly, failed to produce the thing they specifically talked up early on.
There's also just, y'know, the
near-constant litany I hear, when I ask around about ways to do 4e things, whether I ask explicitly or indirectly, that 5e is "not that kind of game," that its theater-of-the-mind combat isn't "built" for a 4e experience, etc. I gave you the requested tweaks which I feel would make the difference. If you don't like them, or don't think they're necessary to achieve
the experience *I* want to achieve, perhaps the issue is that you don't actually know what would create that experience *for me*, and not that the game itself already has it and I'm just too stupid, or too stubborn, to see it? Particularly since, at least as far as I was aware, you really didn't play 4e much or even know much about it until others informed you? (Please correct me if I'm wrong there.)
