Flipping the Table: Did Removing Miniatures Save D&D?

Dungeons & Dragons is doing better than ever, thanks to a wave of nostalgia-fueled shows like Stranger Things and the Old School Renaissance, the rise of actual play video streams, and a broader player base that includes women. The reasons for this vary, but one possibility is that D&D no longer requires miniatures. Did it ever?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay​

Wait, What?​

When Vivian Kane at TheMarySue interviewed lead rules designer for D&D, Jeremy Crawford, about the increased popularity of D&D, here’s what he had to say:

It’s a really simple thing, but in 5th, that decision to not require miniatures was huge. Us doing that suddenly basically unlocked everyone from the dining room table and, in many ways, made it possible for the boom in streaming that we’re seeing now.

In short, Crawford positioned miniatures as something of a barrier of entry to getting into playing D&D. But when exactly did miniatures become a requirement?

D&D Was a Miniatures Game First (or Was It?)​

Co-cocreator of D&D Gary Gygax labeled the original boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons as “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” Gygax was a wargamer himself, which used miniature games to wage tabletop battles. His target audience for D&D were these wargamers, and so use of miniatures – leveraging Chainmail, a supplement he created for miniature wargaming – was assumed. Miniature wargaming was more than a little daunting for a new player to join. Jon Peterson explains in Playing at the World:

Whether fought on a sand table, a floor or a yard outdoors, miniature wargames eschewed boards and the resulting ease of quantifying movements between squares (or hexagons) in favor of irregular scale-model terrain and rulers to measure movement distance. Various sorts of toy soldiers— traditionally made of wood, lead or tin, but by the mid-twentieth century constructed from a variety of alloys and composites— peopled these diminutive landscapes, in various attitudes of assault and movement. While Avalon Hill sold everything you needed to play their board wargames in a handy box, miniature wargamers had the responsibility and the freedom to provide all of the components of a game: maps, game pieces and the system. Consider that even the most complicated boardgame is easily retrieved from a shelf or closet, its board unfolded and lain across a table top, its pieces sorted and arranged in a starting configuration, all within a span of some minutes— in a pinch the game could be stowed away in seconds. Not so for the miniature wargamer. Weeks might be spent in constructing the battleground alone, in which trees, manmade structures, gravel roads and so on are often selected for maximum verisimilitude. Researching a historical battle or period to determine the lay of the land, as well as the positions and equipment of the combatants, is a task which can exhaust any investment of time and energy. Determining how to model the effects of various weapons, or the relative movement rates of different vehicles, requires similar diligent investigations, especially to prevent an imbalanced and unfair game. Wargaming with miniatures consequently is not something undertaken lightly.

D&D offered human-scale combat, something that made the precision required for miniature wargaming much less of a barrier. Indeed, many of the monsters we know today were actually dollar store toys converted for that purpose. It’s clear that accurately representing fantasy on the battlefield was not a primary concern for Gygax. Peterson goes into further detail on that claim:

Despite the proclamation on the cover of Dungeons & Dragons that it is “playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures,” the role of miniature figures in Dungeons & Dragons is downplayed throughout the text. Even in the foreword, Gygax confesses that “in fact you will not even need miniature figures,” albeit he tacks onto this “although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought.” These spectacular battles defer entirely to the Chainmail rules, and thus there is no further mention of miniatures in any of the three books of Dungeons & Dragons other than a reiteration of the assertion that their use is not required. The presence of the term “miniature figures” on the cover of the woodgrain box is, consequently, a tad misleading.

James Maliszewski states that this trend continued through Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:

Even so, it's worth noting that, despite the game's subtitle, miniature figures are not listed under D&D's "recommended equipment," while "Imagination" and "1 Patient Referee" are! Elsewhere, it is stated that "miniature figures can be added if the players have them available and so desire, but miniatures are not required, only esthetically pleasing." The rulebook goes on to state that "varied and brightly painted miniature figures" add "eye-appeal." The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, though published five years later in 1979, evinces essentially the same attitude, saying "Miniature figures used to represent characters and monsters add color and life to the game. They also make the task of refereeing action, particularly combat, easier too!"

Gygax himself confirmed that miniatures weren’t required in a Q&A session on ENWorld:

I don't usually employ miniatures in my RPG play. We ceased that when we moved from CHAINMAIL Fantasy to D&D. I have nothing against the use of miniatures, but they are generally impractical for long and free-wheeling campaign play where the scene and opponents can vary wildly in the course of but an hour. The GW folks use them a lot, but they are fighting set-piece battles as is usual with miniatures gaming. I don't believe that fantasy miniatures are good or bad for FRPGs in general. If the GM sets up gaming sessions based on their use, the resulting play is great from my standpoint. It is mainly a matter of having the painted figures and a big tabletop to play on.

So if the game didn’t actually require miniatures and Gygax didn’t use them, where did the idea of miniatures as a requirement happen? For that, we have to look to later editions.

Pleading the Fifth​

Jennifer Grouling Cover explains the complicated relationship gamers had with miniatures &D in The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games:

The lack of a visual element may make spatial immersion more difficult to achieve in D&D than in more visually oriented games; however, this type of immersion is still important to the game. Without the visual component to TRPGs, players may have difficulty picturing the exact setting that the DM lays out. Wizards of the Coast's market survey shows that in 2000, 56 percent of gaming groups used miniatures to solve this dilemma…Because D& D combat rules often offer suggestions as to what you can or cannot do at certain distances, these battle maps help players visualize the scene and decide on their actions…Even though some gamers may get more interested in the visual representation of space by painting and designing scenery such as miniature castles, these tools exist more for showing spatial relationships than for immersing players visually.

In essence, Third Edition rules that involved distances seemed to encourage grid-based combat and miniature use. But the rise of Fourth Edition formalized grid-based combat, which in turn required some sort of miniature representation. Joshua Aslan Smith summed it up on StackRPGExchange:

The whole of 4th edition ruleset by and large is devoted to the balance and intricacies of tactical, grid-based combat. There are exceptions, such as rules for skill challenges and other Role Play aspects of the game (vs. roll play). To both maximize the benefits of 4th edition and actually run it correctly you need to run combats on a grid of 1" squares. Every single player attack and ability is based around this precept.

This meant players were looking at the table instead of each other, as per Crawford’s comment:

Part of that is possible because you can now play D&D and look at people’s faces. It’s people looking at each other, laughing together, storytelling together, and that’s really what we were striving for.

It wasn’t until Fifth Edition that “theater of the mind” play was reintroduced, where grids, miniatures, and terrain are unnecessary. This style of play never truly went away, but had the least emphasis and support in Fourth Edition.

Did the removal of miniatures as a requirement truly allow D&D to flourish online? Charlie Hall on Polygon explains that the ingredients for D&D to be fun to watch as well as to play have always been there:

Turns out, the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons was designed to be extremely light and easy to play. Several Polygon staff have spent time with the system, and in our experience it's been a breeze to teach, even to newbies. That's because D&D's 5th edition is all about giving control back to the Dungeon Master. If you want to play a game of D&D that doesn't require a map, that is all theater of the mind, you can do that with Skype. Or with Curse. Or with Google Hangout. Or with Facetime. Basically, if you can hear the voice of another human being you can play D&D. You don't even need dice. That's because Dungeons & Dragons, and other role-playing games that came after it, are all about storytelling. The rules are a fun way to arbitrate disputes, the maps and miniatures are awful pretty and the books are filled with amazing art and delicious lore. But Wizards of the Coast just wants you to play, that's why the latest version of the starter rules is available for free.

D&D’s always been about telling a good story. The difference is that now that our attention – and the camera or microphone – can be focused on each other instead of the table.

“What 5th edition has done the best,” according to game designer Kate Welch, “is that idea of it being the theatre of the mind and the imagination, and to put the emphasis on the story and the world that is being created by the players.” That’s the kind of “drama people want to see,” both in their own adventures and on their screens.

If the numbers are any indication, that makes D&D a lot more fun to watch.

 

[pemerton]

It's not like 1e had significantly fewer issues with respect to this than 3e. Poisons were also outside the hit point system (usually save or die, not lose hit points). The saves were no more a luck mechanic than Fortitude saves were (is anything rolled by a die not, ultimately, a luck mechanic?), they were just more highly dependent on your class and Gygax's quirky design than your Constitution.

When I say that poison saves in AD&D were a "luck mechanic", I mean that what they model is luck. Clerics don't have the best poison saves because they're tougher than anyone else, but because their gods protect them from death.

Gygax's comments on poison saves that I quoted upthread (DMG, p 81) reinforce this:

recall the justification for character hit points. That is, damage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch, and thus the saving throw. If that mere scratch managed to be venomous, then DEATH. If no such wound was delivered, then NO DAMAGE FROM THE POISON.​

There is also his more general remark (p 111-12) about the significance of improved saving throws as PCs gain levels:

[T]he accumulation of hit points and the ever-greater abilities and better saving throws of characters represents the aid supplied by supernatural forces.​

That's not to say that being tough doesn't help with poison saves (qv dwarves; UA barbarians; bonuses from high CON in DDG) - which suggest that, at least for those characters, some successful saves may involve being poisoned but shrugging it off. But that clearly isn't the mandatory, or even the default, narration of a successful poison save.

Ahh, the old two smurfs arguing about who is more blue argument. Oh, my favorite system isn't dissociated because it's "less" abstract than your system. Snort.

For this smurf, it's not so much "dissociation" (I regard that as a pseudo concept) but simply which suite of mechanics sets up both the gameplay, and the abstractions, in a way that suits my purposes.

I don't mind the AD&D approach too much, except that (i) there are too many saving throw categories, and (ii) there is no really satisfactory way of dealing with fatigue/exhaustion other then perhaps temp hp loss, which is already a part of (some versions of) the unarmed combat rules, the subdual rules and the slippers of kicking, but is a pain in the neck in all those contexts and so doesn't really warrant being expanded to other parts of the game.

Obviously I don't mind the 4e approach - everything hangs together neatly around hp/HS except for encounter powers and action points, but I'm quite happy to have these features - which in various ways feed into action economy - be separate things to play with.

As I said, my least favourite is 3E just because it anchors just enough stuff to the fiction (eg Fortitude saves clearly involve "toughing out" being poisoned; stat damage clearly represents genuine physical debilitation) the you can't ignore it, but then leaves the core mechanics - AC and hp - basically unchanged from AD&D (and so quite abstract in relation to the fiction). I find it neither fish nor fowl but an unhappy combination of each.

 

[Hussar]

Yes, well, 3e shares a fair bit of DNA from Rolemaster and it shows. Unfortunately, as you said, it doesn't actually mesh all that well. Fortunately, it's also very, very easy to ignore.

 

[Tony Vargas]

And, really, this goes right back to my original point about this just being edition warring in funny glasses. EVERY edition of D&D, regardless of E was the same. HP were never given any real meaning. The only difference is 4e made that up front and apparent and suddenly forced people to realize that the way they were playing wasn't actually supported by the mechanics.

4e's take on hps wasn't any more up-front than other eds, they were abstract, the abstraction was not pasted to every weapon & attack like a tag or anything. The mechanics were different, but in a shell-game sort of way. In the classic game, the meaningful healing resource was the Cleric's spells, in 3e it ended up being Wands, in 4e it was surges. But it all added up to the same thing: you managed limited resources to get your party through a day of adventuring. 4e's treatment of healing via surges & surge-triggers was more consistent with the abstraction and "in the fiction" rationalizations of hit points than being dependent on spells or wands - if anything, it should have been less jarring, not more.

5e does exactly the same thing as 4e, but, suddenly all these discussions about "disassociation" go by the wayside because people LIKE 5e. If abstractions were actually the problem, then it would be a problem in every edition, but, the arguments are entirely self serving.

In concept 5e does many of the same things 4e was attacked for, sure. And the complaints were always nominally about those concepts. But, in implemenation it's entirely different, and went right back to the traditional pecking order among classes.
So 5e's fine.

 

[Hussar]

[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] - I'm going to disagree with you on this a bit. 4e was very up front about HP being just an abstraction. Unlike earlier editions, every single keyword became a damage type, including a number of pretty non-obvious ones like "Psychic Damage" and the like. Fear effects that caused damage. That sort of thing.

5e carries the same explicit damage types as well - psychic damage as a keyword, for example.

Earlier editions were not quite so explicit about their damage types, outside of weapon damage type - bludgeoning, piercing, slashing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

[MENTION=996]Tony Vargas[/MENTION] - I'm going to disagree with you on this a bit. 4e was very up front about HP being just an abstraction. Unlike earlier editions, every single keyword became a damage type, including a number of pretty non-obvious ones like "Psychic Damage" and the like. Fear effects that caused damage. That sort of thing.

5e carries the same explicit damage types as well - psychic damage as a keyword, for example.

Earlier editions were not quite so explicit about their damage types, outside of weapon damage type - bludgeoning, piercing, slashing.

I guesss you could say 4e was more up-front and explicit about a lot of things: it formalized & labeled things that had been with the game forever - Source, the game had always had fighters (martial), clerics (Divine) and magic-users (arcane); Role, likewise fighter (defender, just bad at it), leader (cleric, mainly healing), controller (magic-user), Striker (OK, a backstabbing thief is maybe stretching it, but it was only able to contribute that damage spike in combat - Rogues really came into their own in 3e); Encounters followed by 5-min Short Rests (in the classic game, exploration proceeded in 10 min turns, when interrupted by combat, the balance of the turn was spent resting & tending wounds/weapons/armor); etc.

Though, as for damage type, 3e introduced the same list 4e used, including Psychic, and 1e had oddball rules for temporary damage, subdual damage, and damage from illusions and psionic attacks - and, really, all the same damage types, just implied rather than formally so.

 

[pemerton]

4e's take on hps wasn't any more up-front than other eds, they were abstract, the abstraction was not pasted to every weapon & attack like a tag or anything.

4e was very up front about HP being just an abstraction.

4e's treatment of healing via surges & surge-triggers was more consistent with the abstraction and "in the fiction" rationalizations of hit points than being dependent on spells or wands - if anything, it should have been less jarring, not more.

I agree with Hussar, and think that the second passage quoted from Tony Vargas runs the same way: healing surges, inspriational healing, proportionate healing - these are more consistent with the rationalisation, and that is one reason why they make the abstract nature of hp more evident.

When Curing Serious Wounds requires you to pray harder and better than Curing Light Wounds, it's possible to imagine that hp resotration is the healing of wounds. And one can ignore those other parts of the system point in other direction (eg every 0-level character who isn't dead from hp loss can be cured to full health by Cure Light Wounds; for a first level character, it's virtually impossible to be alive and yet have "wounds" that cannot heal with a week of bed rest; etc). In 4e there are only those other parts!

4e was more up-front and explicit about a lot of things: it formalized & labeled things that had been with the game forever

What do keywords do? They provide a clear framework for interactions between rules elements; and they provide a clear understanding about how otherwise abstract/metagame mechanics bear upon the shared fiction.

D&D has had keywords of various sorts for ever: in AD&D you had one-handed and two-hadned weapons; S, M and L creatures; magic item categories; saving throw categories; just to name a few; and 3E was absolutely replete with them, and with arguments about them too (eg what is the difference between a weapon attack, an unarmed attack and a natural attack?).

In AD&D some of those keywords are system-to-system: a creature's size label tells us how much damage it takes form a weapon hit, which in turn tells us how much to deduct from its hp total - none of that is mediated via the fiction. Others are system-to-fiction: a creature's size label tells us (roughly) how big it is; a creature's HD tells us (roughly) how tough it is; a weapon's damage die tells us (roughly) how big it is. Off the top of my head, though, I can't think of any keywords in AD&D class ability or spell descriptions that run from system-to-fiction. (That is all mediated via "natural language" descriptions.)

In 3E many keywords are system-to-system (eg a "luck" bonus can't stack with a "sacred" bonus) and some are system-to-fiction (eg a "language dependant: ability requires its user to speak to its target).

I've never understood the suggestion that 4e uses more keywords than earlier editions, or that they are more removed from the fiction. I don't think any actual reading of the various editions will bear this out. Even the argument about layout I find hard to take seriously: 3E spells all have descriptor lists at the top of their entries, just like the keywords at the top of a 4e power entry.

5e uses keywords much as 4e does, but it just buries them in the text (so we have to read through a paragraph of text to learn that a fireball does fire damage). This creates an illusion of resemblance to AD&D, but in fact I don't think 5e uses much natural language at all to mediate between the mechanics of class abilities (including spells) and the fiction. It uses keywords in much the same way that 4e did.

 

[Hussar]

I think that the difference with 4e from earlier editions is how up front they were about the keywords. It was part of clarifying the rules that they just flat out slapped a keyword right at the top of everything instead of making you hunt through and find them.

Like I've always said, the issue with 4e has very little to do with substance and everything to do with presentation. Rewrite 4e in 5e style and suddenly the differences between 4e and 5e mechanically are very, very small.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I agree with Hussar, and think that the second passage quoted from Tony Vargas runs the same way: healing surges, inspriational healing, proportionate healing - these are more consistent with the rationalisation, and that is one reason why they make the abstract nature of hp more evident.

Sort of, I guess: 'more consistent' could mean less evident in the sense of conspicuous, but more evident, in the sense of proveable.

When I was running AD&D back in the day, I grokked EGG's hp treatise, but ran up against a serious inconsistency, the 3 Cure..Wounds spells made 0 sense in context. A scratch representing 1/10th of a high-level character's hps was surely 'light,' but the exact same 8 hps, delivered to a 1st level character might drop him, or represent 80% of is hps - that's not a 'Light Wound.' That kind of thing, when the artifacts of the abstraction /don't/ add up, makes it more conspicuous, I think, though it also calls the rationalization into question, I suppose.

Spoiler: Back in my day...

(Ironically, the solution I came up with back then, c1984, was to have Cure..Wounds spells have the option of working litterally. There were 3 of 'em, back then, Light, Serious, & Critical (plus Heal of course - which just cured all your damage). Not a big leap to call any injury up to 1/4 your total hit points a 'Light Wound,' that way it neatly worked out: up to half your hps was Serious, up to 3/4 Critical - so I let the caster either roll the usual dice, or Cure one Wound of the appropraite type - the wounded player had to track his wounds individually for that to work.)

Of course, familiarity also makes things fade into the background. After the 1e DMG defended hps, the remaining issues with it were just lived with so long they faded away - to the point that even /fixing/ them, would draw the abstraction of the system back into the limelight, again.

When Curing Serious Wounds requires you to pray harder and better than Curing Light Wounds, it's possible to imagine that hp resotration is the healing of wounds. And one can ignore those other parts of the system point in other direction (eg every 0-level character who isn't dead from hp loss can be cured to full health by Cure Light Wounds; for a first level character, it's virtually impossible to be alive and yet have "wounds" that cannot heal with a week of bed rest; etc). In 4e there are only those other parts!

OK, we're say'n about the same stuff, really.

What do keywords do? They provide a clear framework for interactions between rules elements; and they provide a clear understanding about how otherwise abstract/metagame mechanics bear upon the shared fiction.

They also make your RPG look like M:tG, because they both have the key word, 'keyword,' in the rules, and it means aproximately the same thing, in spite of the radically different the context.

D&D has had keywords of various sorts for ever: in AD&D you had one-handed and two-hadned weapons; S, M and L creatures; magic item categories; saving throw categories; just to name a few; and 3E was absolutely replete with them, and with arguments about them too (eg what is the difference between a weapon attack, an unarmed attack and a natural attack?).

Sure, they just weren't called that, weren't differentiated from words used only for their natural language meanings, and weren't used consistently. So weren't keywords, really, nor even good examples of jargon. But, the game did have the kind of concepts that keywords would have been a more efficient way of handling, FWIW.

I've never understood the suggestion that 4e uses more keywords than earlier editions, or that they are more removed from the fiction. I don't think any actual reading of the various editions will bear this out. Even the argument about layout I find hard to take seriously: 3E spells all have descriptor lists at the top of their entries, just like the keywords at the top of a 4e power entry.

Essentials put back the spell-school keywords, for that matter.
Again, the only plausible explanation that doesn't paint the complainer as blowing smoke while working some nefarious agenda, is the power of familiarity. When the keywords weren't labeled as such and faded into the baroque mosaic of Gygaxian prose, they were just an unexamined part of broader understanding of the whole game.

In another thread, I think, someone mentioned that 4e had so many more conditions than 3e or 5e and that was one of the things that slowed it down. 4e had 18 conditions. 3e has 40, 5e has 15.

5e uses keywords much as 4e does, but it just buries them in the text (so we have to read through a paragraph of text to learn that a fireball does fire damage). This creates an illusion of resemblance to AD&D, but in fact I don't think 5e uses much natural language at all to mediate between the mechanics of class abilities (including spells) and the fiction. It uses keywords in much the same way that 4e did.

A 3.x phrase like "deprived of dexterity bonus to AC" works like a keyword, in that it conveys the same information each time it's used and is important to some other rules, sure. And 5e has a lotta phrases like that. But they don't feel like keywords, so if you felt the need to project your hatred of 4e upon it's use of keywords, you can feel immediately comfortable in not hating 5e, rather than having to fume over it for a while before relenting, as you do if you settled on hating Surges, then were confronted with HD.

Like I've always said, the issue with 4e has very little to do with substance and everything to do with presentation. Rewrite 4e in 5e style and suddenly the differences between 4e and 5e mechanically are very, very small.

The voiced complaints often revolved around cosmetic differences that could be attirbuted to 'presentation,' sure, but 4e, however differently-presented, would still have a non-trivial degree of class balance baked in, that's robust to variations in pacing - and 5e would still actually be D&D. If it were sufficiently baroque and impenetrable in it's presentation - if copy-edited by EGG's Ghost, as it were - though, it might also make the DMing experience more like that of 5e (or even 1e - Gary's Ghost, and all).

 

[Ratskinner]

On the question of "did the Troll bite me"? Let's unpack that a little shall we? And, let's keep this a 5e example.

In 5e, a troll does 1d6+4 points of piercing damage. Now, I have an 8th level cleric in a 5e game with 50 (ish) HP. So, Mr. Troll crits my character who is unhurt beforehand, and deals maximum damage. 20 points. Now, in 5e, no damage that doesn't drop me below half shows on my character other than minor bumps and bruises and the like. Nothing you wouldn't get from a hard day of exercise. So, that troll bites me as hard as it possibly can and I show nothing more than a bruise and maybe not even that.

So, how do you narrate it? You could narrate it as scraping off my armor. Or you could narrate it as snapping closed just inches from my nose, causing my life to flash before my eyes and leaving me somewhat shaken. Both narrations are perfectly fine as far as the mechanics go.

It seems to me, that insisting that every hit MUST be some sort of physical hit is far more limiting to people's narrations. You flat out cannot narrate that attack as dealing any real impact, by the rules. So, why the insistince that every "hit" must be some sort of impact? It's not like HP actually mean anything. They mean whatever you want them to mean whenever you want them to mean that.

For really creative people, I find gamers very stuck in some serious ruts when it comes to creativity.

QFT
The HP mechanic only works at all because people are so familiar with it. Once you get people to skip all their completely rational objections when they first play an rpg, it sticks forever. A sort of mass willful delusion.

What I don't understand is why so many games stick with it as a system when so many other systems have been devised that serve any particular purpose much better.

And, really, this goes right back to my original point about this just being edition warring in funny glasses. EVERY edition of D&D, regardless of E was the same. HP were never given any real meaning. The only difference is 4e made that up front and apparent and suddenly forced people to realize that the way they were playing wasn't actually supported by the mechanics. 5e does exactly the same thing as 4e, but, suddenly all these discussions about "disassociation" go by the wayside because people LIKE 5e. If abstractions were actually the problem, then it would be a problem in every edition, but, the arguments are entirely self serving.

That's true enough, too. Although I find it more odd in the reverse direction. OSR folks talking like 1e was some sort of physics engine with no meta-mechanics or abstractions just baffles me. 5e "runs" a lot like early editions, so that return-to-form counts as a psychological victory for the "disassociation" hounds.

 

[Ratskinner]

Like I've always said, the issue with 4e has very little to do with substance and everything to do with presentation. Rewrite 4e in 5e style and suddenly the differences between 4e and 5e mechanically are very, very small.

I'll disagree a little bit here.* Not that there isn't a point here, 4e is mechanically much less of a mechanical outlier than is commonly presumed, IMO. Personally, I never quite understood the objection to AEDU powers, recharging, etc. But I would highlight one substantive difference as important to the impression the game made. Its hard to put a name on it, but the specificity-ness and number of powers was an important change. It had many people I know looking at their characters more like a deck of cards. While that's not a tremendous structural difference in the core functional conceits of the game, it ends up being a pretty big deal at the table.


*as I presume everyone who gripes about how you can't do a Warlord in 5e cause blah blah action economy blah blah other stuff must agree as well.