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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8396207" data-attributes="member: 82106">I guess what I'm saying is that in 4e you sort of constantly garden your build. Like, you can never just make a choice that is effectively "OK, I'm vanilla Axe Dwarf, that's it, no more choices to make." In fact you pretty much have to make a large number of choices in 4e to not only enact 'Vanilla Axe Dwarf' on day one, but you have to keep gardening it to make it continue to 'just work'! You have to take the right feats, and get the right equipment, and the right neck gear, and the right armor, and the right gauntlets, and the right belt, etc. etc. etc. You have to pick the right 'Axe Dwarf' thematic powers, and to get things REALLY right, you probably want to explore the rules interactions of charging and weapon attacks, and what things can count as a BA and how and when, and decide if you want to go crit fishing, or charging, or lockdown flavor, etc. Those are good choices to HAVE, but each one requires the acquisition of several feats/powers/items in a certain combination to pull off. You gotta know these things! 5e, I choose dwarf, put lots into STR, pick Axe, single weapon fighting style, at 3rd level Champion, that's it! I probably never have to make another choice except ASI vs feat and ASI is never a WRONG choice there. I actually agree that the E-classes weren't a good fit for 4e and were a waste of time and resources by WotC. The Slayer, for example, is not BAD. It is a pretty decent 'Axe Dwarf' (or whatever) though you STILL have to pick up the right proficiency, and you're still stuck with feat choices. Inevitably the Slayer also loses a lot of tactical elements of the basic fighter and doesn't hold up super well at high levels. If you take 4e's PHB1 (and lets say it was written a bit less hastily because a lot of its feats in particular are junk) by itself, its pretty good. The flaw in the design is there are so many categories of elements out there, feats, powers, MCing, PPs, EDs, races, classes, and items just in PHB1. It creates a high-dimensionality decision space that players need to navigate. What they need is THEMATIC CHOICE. The ability pick the thematics, and tweak them some if they want, and maybe to invent some new ones. Gardening isn't really what most players want.The most common issue I have running 4e is simply that players are kind of taken aback by all the options they have to wade through. I ran two long campaigns for one group, and the ENTIRE time, several years, they completely relied on one player to do all their builds and leveling. These are not newb RPG or D&D people either. They are people that mostly played D&D since the 80's and I know they play games like Changeling, and CoC, and the new Star Wars, etc. and have played a lot of other stuff. They can deal with rules. The density of 4e player facing rules was just daunting. While 5e is not orders of magnitude simpler, it does present itself in a gentler way to the players on that score. Why you take any given 5e option is usually pretty clear. A lot of 4e ones are just "glue", you have to dig down in the rules to know why you'd even want it.</blockquote>

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