Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9851010" data-attributes="member: 7006">At at the very beginning of the lifecycle of 4E... many classes were indeed different in the powers they had access to and how they used them.  I remember my first 4E campaign, which used all 8 original classes, felt really good and the characters all felt different (granting that with my manner of playstyle, character differentiation comes mainly from the personalities the players bring to their PCs via roleplay and not the mechanics themselves.)  But what ended up ultimately being the problem (in my opinion) is that as time went on... every single splatbook or online Dragon issue that created more and more powers for the classes-- in order for those powers to be different from the ones the classes already had-- many new ones began treading on the toes of the ones other classes had.  So duplication (especially for the 8 classes in the first PHB) began to water down the walls between them.Now this wasn't necessarily a terrible thing, because unless you were using the D&D Insider Character Builder you just could choose to not read or use those products when letting players make characters (as much as DMs are normally able to stop their players from wanting to use splatbooks).  But those using the Character Builder had a harder time of it, because all new powers written for Dragon and the splatbooks got put into the DDI CB automatically, so anyone using DDI and letting their players use it couldn't filter out powers they didn't want to be used.  And as a result, even just looking at something like the Fighter-- a class that ended up having like five times the number of powers they had started with in the PHB-- pretty much resulted in them having powers that pushed, pulled, slid, marked, close'd, bursted, etc. exactly like many of the other classes did because it was the only way to give the Fighter new powers they didn't already have.  Which meant ultimately that the poers themselves were no longer the thing that differentiated the classes... it was the flavor of them that would make them different... and unfortunately more often than not flavor got relegated to a single line of italicized text.Now this in and of itself was not insurmountable... considering that 5E has more than enough abilities and features that get duplicated across all the classes-- access to specific spells being one of the most obvious.  The bigger difference though I think (not that my opinion means a whole lot) is that 5E uses different formats of acquisition that are flavored differently... whereas every 4E duplication of power came from the AEDU format, where flavor could feel like it took a backseat (depending no the person playing).  So I suspect that it might be easier for a player to suspend disbelief of how a 5E Wizard's Fireball gained via study in their spellbook, would be different than a Cleric who gained Fireball because their god's Domain gave it to them.  Granted... those flavor differences for some people won't seem like differences at all (just because they are both spells called 'Fireball' if nothing else)... but 5E does have the advantage over 4E in that it's format is more reminiscent of all the other editions in the past, meaning that more players are more likely to have already already done the heavy lifting in that suspension in all the decades previous.  4E was only given the one shot at it unfortunately.</blockquote>

Verification