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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Yaarel" data-source="post: 9844406" data-attributes="member: 58172">This is still 4e striving to eliminate DM adjudication. It is the player who decides who to Mark within the parameters of the Mark rules. The DM doesnt vaguely adjudicate whether a target is Markable or not. That seems the 4e ideal anyway.4e achieved game engine balance so well, even the tiniest differences in math were detectable, and all well within the need for balance during normal play. People were amazed that mathematical balance was even possible, heh, and tended to obsess about it to minutia. I agree. 4e deserves its reputation for being the best edition D&D to DM. By making the rules clear and the players largely responsible for them, the DM focused on story.4e is, by far, the most flavorful and narratively versatile edition of D&D.That said. The 4e rules mostly required minis on a grid, and stopped short of embracing theater of the mind (tho there were workarounds). The 4e stories tended toward combat, albeit in a flavorful way.Yes.When 4e arrived, many players were accustomed to the chaos of many different 3e mechanical systems. 3e was designer guesstimations.  Convoluted mechanics would require gaining useless features to qualify for a gaining powerful feature, making both broken overpowered and broken underpowered impossible to fix. All of this 3e ignorance about how a game engine ecosystem worked, made balancing impossible and even produced the theoretical Pun-Pun. But players were still habituated to convoluted mechanics and multiple systems achieving the same thing.WotC decided to kill OGL even before 4e was published. At the time, I and a few others predicted correctly that 4e would fail because of the lack of OGL. It was painful to be right. Generally, 4e DMs would rely on Dragon Magazine products and new official splatbooks, while finding it difficult to homebrew mechanics for the special needs of their own settings. The publication of the 4e official products was at a very rapid pace, but much of it was niche, thus less profitable.4e could have been evergreen, but like 5e, would have 4e 2007, 4e 2010 (Essentials), 4e 2014, 4e 2024, ... if it had OGL to keep it alive. The engine would have evolved over time. Its main needs were to make the advancement schedule more flexible, understand what D&D players wanted, and most of all have an OGL to allow indies to experiment and fill in niches. All of this was doable. 5e was aware of 4e game balance (many of the same designers, including Mearls). The 5e balance was mainly by a robust game engine. 5e is surprisingly difficult to break, and can handle alot of mechanical tweaking, which invites DMs to make it their own for their homebrew settings. 5e heavily courted the lost 3e fans, and often threw 4e fans under the bus (such as no Warlord). But many 4e-isms did continue under the 5e surface, such as nonphysical hit points, and hit dice, even if active avoiding 4e terms like "Bloodied". Also monster statblocks rules differ in kind from character sheet rules. 4e is an innovative and well designed system. Today the edition warring has relaxed, and most players are comfortable with importing the best 4e ideas into 5e. The breakthru of 5e was the unprecedented surveys to understand what D&D players wanted. Today the surveys seem to want to know how to least rock the boat. But when a decisive majority does want a certain change, the surveys can still help.</blockquote>

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