Harlekin said:
CS dice are equivalent to a penalty to the damage roll. This is an important difference, as damage penalties are easier to scale and have a much lower effect on the swinginess of the combat.
I think it's a smart move. Bounded accuracy doesn't play nice with a lot of attack roll mods, and even in 3e deciding whether or not to Power Attack was a bit of a non-question much of the time. This way, by applying it to damage, it is something you can't "waste." Psychologically, it takes out the loss-aversion factor. Which is better. You might not kill the thing this round, but you're still gonna hurt it somehow.
Harlekin said:
I would argue, the CS dice rules as presented here actually have much more in common with 4ed stances than with any 3ed feat.
I'm not sure that I agree (stances, for one, were daily powers rather than at-will options), but even if you're right, the question then becomes: how much different is a 4e stance, really, than a 3e feat? In what important ways?
Mengu said:
Yeah, and another magic trick they deployed is providing 4e powers without saying as much. You can use Brash Strike for +X damage, or you can use Riposte Strike for immediate action attack with a condition, or you can use Aegis of Shielding to reduce the damage an ally takes.
Again, not sure I quite agree (it's hardly
Come and Get It). It's kind of similar to 4e at-wills, but 4e at-wills were already very similar to any number of fighter options from 3e or even 2e. But again, like above, even if I agreed, the question would be: how different is
Brash Strike really, from systems like
Weapons of Legacy? What's the key difference?
Sometimes, I think the key difference is mostly just whether the book you got the rule out of was laid out like 3e or laid out like 4e.
Mengu said:
In my opinion, one of 4e's biggest pit falls is presentation. The 25th level monk with a dozen pages of powers just makes me want to throw up. You could make a few tweaks to 4e's presentation and character progression, and the psychological effect would be staggering.
I'll have to agree with you there. It seems from the outside a bit like they assumed the "Your character's abilities are like cards in a deck!" thing would take off like a shot rather than alienate a tremendous chunk of the customer base. And once you release an edition like that, any attempt to revise or update it comes off as ".5-ing" it (*cough*Essentials*cough*), gaining few new adherents and still loosing those folks who thought that abilities = cards in a deck WAS crazy awesome.
That's not to mention some of the OTHER questionable presentation choices (cartoony early art, "1 PHB Per Year!", and others). I think 5e's modularity helps this, too: they may not feel so pressured to use IP-special names or have a specific view of what Elves always are defined as if they approach the game from a standpoint of "everything is flexible."