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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9198684" data-attributes="member: 8461">Yeah, no. 5E is more simulationist than 4E was; again, damage on a miss, to note just a single example.Honestly, this idea that 4E's flaws weren't flaws at all, "it was just too honest" is more than just complete bunk, it's revisionist history. 4E was indeed very honest about what it was, it's just that large swaths of the D&D community didn't like what it was. The changes it made were not simply cosmetic, nor were they limited to anything that could be adequately summarized as "the same as before, but more honest about it."D&D isn't the most simulationist of games, and there's merit to the idea that it never was. But the community around it had arguably reached a consensus on the degree to which it struck a balance between gamism and simulationism. It was an unhappy consensus, to be sure, but that's the mark of a good consensus nonetheless, which is a large part of the reason why it remained the dominant game in the industry it created; being the first one to get your foot in the door is all well and good, but that alone won't sustain your position over the subsequent decades.4E decided that it wasn't going to respect that consensus. We can argue about the exact manner(s) and degree(s) in which it upset the apple cart, and even argue about whether or not said cart should have been upset, but the end result was that a large swath of the D&D community was unhappy with the direction that 4E went.Hit points, in fact, remain the single best example of this. Ever since the beginning, they represented an area where simulationism gave way to gamism in a necessary compromise, and while the early iterations of the game paid lip service to the idea that hit points were a medley of measuring how severely a character was injured and simultaneously measuring a character's ability to remain combat-capable, the latter view had little-to-no support among the actually rules that delineated how things worked in the game world.Gygax may have written that hit points were a combination of stamina, luck, divine protection, and numerous other factors – largely because he couldn't countenance how a single wound for 8 points of damage could kill a commoner instantly, but could be shrugged off by a high-level character – but the spells that restored hit points were given injury-specific names such as cure light wounds and heal, not restore divine protection or renew luck. Even the non-magical methods of regaining hit points were modeled after recovering from serious injuries, requiring days if not weeks of bed rest; that's not something you did if you thought that the gods were angry with you.4E was very honest about trying to have hit points actually perform double duty, being a measure of injuries taken and how much you were still able to keep fighting. And while you can argue that those two things have a Venn diagram-esque degree of overlap, a lot of people saw how the majority of the coverage for those two concepts didn't overlap when you tied them to the same mechanic. (Something which I suspect wouldn't have been the case if they'd used the wound/vitality point system from the Star Wars d20 RPG and the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana, though I also suspect that the designers knew that would have taken 4E even further away from the popular conception of what D&D was.)There's nothing wrong with wanting to model a fatigue system alongside an injury system, but you can't have the same pool of points model both things at once. At least, not without creating a burden on the imagination that many people didn't want to have to deal with.4E was very honest about what it was, but that wasn't a "failing" unless you think it should have tried to trick people into thinking it was something it wasn't, and it's to its credit that it didn't go that route (not that I think it would have worked anyway). It was forthright about what it wanted to be, but to a lot of people, what it wanted to be wasn't D&D, and talking about why that was is not "doing donuts on its grave."</blockquote>

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