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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7750598" data-attributes="member: 6873517">4E clearly drew on three types of games that were quite current at the time: MMOs, CCGs, and miniatures skirmish games. It's got a much stronger family resemblance to these types than prior editions had. So there aren't definitive features but I do think a lot of older players were bothered by them, and, of course, there were folks who really loved them. The people I know who really loved 4E were the biggest MtG, minis game, and MMO heads. I don't think this was an accident. I really don't get the connection of 4E to Moldvay Basic. The 5E playtest clearly drew on that right down to the look and feel of the layout, though they ended up backing away from that in the final version. 4E seemed to try to adjudicate nearly everything whereas Basic was much more of a "here's a really simple set of rules". If 4E, almost everything was a power of some sort and every class (until Essentials) had the same structure of At Will, Encounter, and Daily. In BESM, the only casters were wizards, elves, and clerics. There were no parallels to Encounter powers at all. Anybody but a caster made basic attacks or took relevant actions, most of which were adjudicated by the DM given the lack of any real system for that outside thief skills and a few other ad hoc systems like detecting secret doors or listening at doors. IMO, the writing aside, I can't think of too many similarities between BESM and 4E. The notion of "turn" is clearly drawn from the game's wargaming roots. I think the big difference is that it's actually a unit of time, whereas an encounter is a much more flexible unit of time that could be 5 minutes but often is much shorter. More on this below. MMOs certainly do use units of time, which make sense given the fact that they're real time games. Otherwise they have no real ability to synchronize actions across all the players. I've not played any MMOs (I know myself well enough to know that's a bad idea) but have played video games with cooldown. Often these are set up in a way so that if you're in a fight a long cooldown can only be used once per fight. The CRPG Pillars of Eternity, which has a system very clearly modeled on 4E---I have called it "what 4E would be if it could" because the computer handles all the scut work of condition tracking and so forth---there are quite clear "encounter" and "daily" powers. One of the keys to the system is gaming the fights by only peeling off a relatively small, bite-sized fight so your encounter powers constantly refresh. To manage this, the game taxes some abilities such as summons, by making it impossible or difficult to summon or buff outside of combat. The system, is, in short, pretty much 4E taken to its logical extreme. (Pillars is a game that would appeal to the 4E stalwarts, and the designers had some very interesting ideas, such as the way they handle the bard-esque chanter. And indeed they intend to release a TT version.)A turn in 1E and BESM is an actual unit of time, though: 1 turn is 10 minutes. In 1E a combat round is a minute, a fact many people found rather ludicrous and either ignored or changed. I think we used 12 seconds. In BESM I don't recall how long a round is, though I thought it was 10 seconds, so roughly similar.  I think many people accept it, but it's one of my least favorite aspects of the game. For instance, there are classes that synergize much better due to having a lot of short rest recoveries and others that basically can't be bothered with short rests. Compare a party of a monk, battlemaster fighter, and warlock to, say, a party of a barbarian, paladin, and sorcerer. The former is highly short rest dependent while the latter gets minimal to no benefit from a short rest. This often seems to set up an inherent conflict among players and between players and the DM about something that's fundamentally about rules. Another big difference between the notion of the BESM or AD&D turn and the encounter or short rest is that the turn made no pretense to being in the game world at all. It's just there and by BESM or AD&D it's not even all that relevant in terms of game play as it's just a unit of time like the square on the battlemap is of distance. The encounter or short rest, by contrast, intrude on the fiction in a way that BESM/AD&D "turn" or "square" tend not to. These units impose a certain amount of discretization on continuous space of action, but for the most part we learn to ignore them. Encounter, however, is a much more macro unit of discretization.</blockquote>

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