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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6594523" data-attributes="member: 996">It doesn't take any special talent or l33tness to appreciate a clear/balanced game.  Heck, that's part of the point of writing it clearly in the first place, that just anyone can appreciate it - accessibility. That probably contributed to the edition war, with some folks being worried that their hobby might become less exclusive. It was a hold-over from 3.x - as presented in the PH1, 'builds' (along with the comically obvious frostcheese) prettymuch undercut the 3.x style optimization/system-mastery obsession.  The meta-game is no fun if they just walk you to the finish line, so you go back to the actual game.   Not idiotic so much as disingenuous.  They were defined into being strictly for use in the edition war, yet, when you go back and apply the definition to earlier eds (or other games), they're absolutely everywhere.  Even worse, the poster boys for dissociation in the original article that spawned the term were not dissociative, as presented in the game, only as re-interpreted by some fans obsessing over realism... Most classes did have secondary roles and you could emphasize them to the point of being adequate in them.  Battlerager and Greatweapon fighters could rival strikers, for instance.  Paladins could do some fine leader stuff.  Really emphasizing it meant sacrificing your primary role a little, but that's only to be expected.  But, where the flexibility around roles really came in was in classes & sources.  If you wanted to play an archanist, you didn't have to play a controller, you could play a striker or leader, or even defender.  To the extent that the designers came through with complete role coverage for each source, that is... A fighter couldn't be most of those things in most editions.  In 4e, though, a martial character could be any of them.  The 'fighter' class covered fewer archetypes, because it was no longer alone in covering martial archetypes (the rogue was more combat-capable, the ranger no longer cast spells, and the warlord was added to the game).  The rogue covered more than it could before, the Ranger was no longer the stereotypical woodsy-caster Grizzly Adams, and the Warlord finally delivered on archetypes that D&D had never been able to successfully model before.   It's often easier to cope with a familiar problem than to cope with an unfamiliar solution, no matter how good that solution may theoretically be.   That's an interesting way of putting it.  I too really appreciate 5e's retro feel.  I can run it very much like I did AD&D, free-wheeling, improvised - tossing, overriding and changing rules secure in the knowledge there's no delicate balance to upset - all in the service of the campaign I'm creating.  And, yes, it is because many of the old flaws are back...  Back but 'polished.'  I like it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification