Pedantic
Legend
You're giving me flashbacks to the whole discussion around "racial rarity" that we spent so much time on during the 5e playtest. Updating to modern parlance, that was the idea of tagging ancestries with "Common, Uncommon or Rare" in the PHB. This would have no mechanical impact, but there'd be a sidebar explaining this was an unusual choice for a PC, might not be present in all game worlds, talk to your DM, etc.And I get that. And I have so much respect for the OSR movement. They've clearly declared that continuity and legacy is important and are proudly standing on that hill.
But, then you have 5e. Take the recent example of alignment. 4e is decried because it changes alignment. Fair enough. That's factually true. They changed alignment.
Then 5e comes along and says, "Hold my beer." In 5e, alignment has been totally removed from the mechanics. You could take a black marker to every example of where alignment is written in 5e and nothing would change. It's entirely vestigial. But, they used those magic 9 words, so, they must be respecting continuity right? But, hang on, none of the classes are restricted by alignment (something that 4e brought to the table), none of the spells have anything to do with alignment. Heck, Paladins can't even Detect Evil anymore.
And that's perfectly fine. Totally respecting continuity?
Like I said, I can totally respect wanting legacy and continuity. It might not be important to me, but, I get that it's important. But, it seems like continuity or legacy is only important if someone doesn't like something. If someone likes Change X, then continuity is totally unimportant. We can change things all we like (5e alignment as an example). But, if we don't like something, whoa Nelly. We MUST respect legacy.It's so obviously self serving.
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And, speaking of self serving. A point that hasn't really been raised here is the biases of Ben Rigg's himself. I mean, he's selling a book. He's not about to tell a significant portion of his potential audience anything they don't already want to hear. Not if he wants to keep selling books after all. It's hardly surprising that he's taking the position that he is. And, to be fair, it's an easy position to take. The run up to 4e was horrible. Absolutely a master class in what not to do when marketing a new product. Plus all the other crap that went on - the GSL, the murder/suicide, Hasbro's unrealistic goals, etc - it's not a surprise that 4e thudded into the ground hard.
To me, the true beauty of all of this is how WotC has managed to get ahead of all of the failures of 4e and manage the fandom so well for the past decade. They've managed to institute a system where they can make all these changes, which were absolutely rejected in 4e, and make them applauded in 5e.
This caused no small amount of controversy, because it was obviously a sop to a particular kind of OSR fan that hated the expansion of PC characters beyond Human, Elf, Dwarf and Halfling, especially once you started getting to Dragonborn and your less "human, but stretched into a slightly different shape and present in Lord of the Rings" options. On one side you had people decrying this as making the rare ancestries out to be alien, other and discouraging DMs from allowing them into their games...and on the other side you had people saying exactly the same thing, but nodding enthusiastically and encouragingly about it.
The whole point of the tag was the get those two groups to a point that was close enough together to both by 5e, and that principle continued to be the guiding light inside all of 5e's design, and while that particular example didn't come through, the underlying principle worked perfectly! The thing is, the group complaining about dragonborn is pretty marginalized now. No significant amount of voices are seriously arguing they should be removed from the PHB, and we're getting more ancestries, not less in the 2024 version.
Alignment is back because it's an established cultural touchstone and it was one of those things that upset people about 4e, and it's all but removed from mechanical impact, because that was the driving force behind the change in 4e in the first place. You could probably get away with removing it today, or marginalizing it down further to a footnote on inspiring NPC/monster personalities. I don't particularly think 4e's take was good (we can live with out CG, but LE is iconic), but its real mistake was moving too quickly. You'd have a much easier time selling the alignment change (and presumably many of the other "watered down 4e" elements you're talking about) if 5e had somehow come first.
