OD&D and early-era 1e used a mechanic where the player rolled d20 to hit, sorted out their character's bonuses, and gave the DM a number. The DM, after checking the PC's combat matrix and the target's AC, determined if the attack hit.
The only difference between that and today is the combat matrix has been moved player-side, as BAB in 3e and something similar in later versions. And I'm not at all sure this is an advancement or a backstep; all it does it move work from the DM to the players, breaking immersion in two ways: one, more out-of-character thinking is needed, and two, it makes it far easier for players to quickly work out information they shouldn't know, that being the AC of the opponent.
But also, think of the crux of my argument. Retaining mechanics that worked, and cutting or revising those that did not, is the kind of advancement that I am arguing has been happening.
The problem is that over the years they've thrown too many babies out with the bathwater, usually in a quest to unify mechanics that work better if left unique.
As a minor example: Clerics turning undead worked just fine in 1e and 2e, for example, and hasn't worked nearly as well since.
Another not-so-minor example: in 3e they threw out most of the restraints that kept casters sort-of in check in 0-1-2e (mostly by making spells so much harder to interrupt), and casters got out of hand. But instead of making spells easier to interrupt in 4e-5e they just nerfed many of the spells, so now you've got a boring system that doesn't work as opposed to a more interesting system that didn't work.
And a current example: is 5e's advantage-disadvantage a good mechanic? Yes - in the right situations. There's many other times where a flat bonus or penalty is the better and more variable option (variable as in a +1 bonus isn't as big as a +5 bonus) but 5e design shoehorns all of that into the one somewhat-limited mechanic. It's unified, sure, but if it's not doing the job, who cares?
True, and I am certainly not suggesting that the tipping point will be in the same place for every table. What I am - firmly - suggesting is that contemporary game designers have been able to enhance their game mechanics based on decades of innovation and testing.
Depends what one defines as an enhancement, perhaps.
People are going to be as divided on this as they were when Nine Swords first came out, so we need to break out the arguments a bit.
On the one hand, we have available some hard-won mechanics that do a good job of giving martials more options... if you want those options!
Which would be fine if they were just that: options. But they're not; since 3e they've been baked in to the rules in one form or another, and stripping them out even in 5e has all sorts of knock-on effects around class balance, encounter planning, character damage output (if one cares about such), and so forth.
These are mainly found in battle master, and come from Nine Swords via 4th edition. (And Mearls' Iron Heroes, I believe.) If you look at the unifying ideas and the specific mechanical instancing, you can see the evolution of the design space. All of the relevant artifacts and even some of the discussion are preserved for us.
So my point there is that here is a set of game mechanics that became available at a certain point in time and were visibly refined right up to today.
Fair enough, though it's an open question whether those mechanics were really necessary in the first place.
Probably they were based on predecessors (most game mechanics turn out to be based on inklings somewhere) but those are more obscure. They have opened up space for a certain kind of play. Not to everyone's taste.
That is where we have your criticism, which is tangential to my argument. I'm not saying martial rules are good for you or what you want, I am saying they are an example of mechanics that once did not exist, and do now, and do now in a refined form over earlier versions. Evidencing evolution. The fact that you want your martials to be simpler, does not impinge that.
Sure the mechanics didn't exist at one point, and do now; but in the end that can be said for pretty much anything.
What would be useful here is if the 5e designers had really followed up on their ideas during playtest that the system would be truly modular, with a very vasic framework and lots of pluggable rules options that each table could choose to use or not. This way, all the martial maneuvers etc. could have been a rules module, and left optional.
