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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7750761" data-attributes="member: 996">3e explicitly called out some class (and monster abilities) as 'extraordinary' (EX) and others as supernatural (SU).  But, the division among Martial, Divine, and Arcane goes all the way back to Men & Magic, when the only classes were Fighter, Cleric, & Magic-user, respectively.  Likewise, the 4 Roles were just a formalization of the party-contributions of the Fighter, Cleric, Magic-user - and, eventually, in 3e, when SA replaced backstab, Rogue. It's a fair thing to be weirded out by, in either case, really.  Yes, it is. Oh, I've seen lots of long-time & returning players find the damage-by-slot level, sparse high-level spells, and, particularly, the prep & cast spontaneously of neo-Vancian a little hard to wrap their expectations around.  But, though it's a bit different, it's still a (slightly) different spells/level/day chart for each class, and traditional class imbalances are more or less intact. You don't randomly draw 'power cards.'  There's no 'deck.'  A mid-level magic-user memorizing spells is closer to 'deck building' than anything in 4e chargen, and its still not very close......now the last edition of Gamma World, it had deck-building, which, very surprisingly, didn't suck much at all.  ;P  Yeah, unfamiliar.  Though, to be accurate, the PH1 did not have a giant list of spells, each class had a rather modest list of powers (only the Wizard's & Warlock's were "spells"), organized by the level at which you gained them, so when you were picking a power you only had to read through 2-6 selections.  It was a lot simpler than reading through /all/ the spells of a given class/level in 1e, and vastly simpler than sorting through the actually giant, giant list of spells in the 3e and 5e PHs, which are just every spell in the game, thrown into a giant alphabetical list.  The 5e version doesn't even do you the favor of listing the class(es) with the spell.  And, it was far more intuitive for the level of the power to be the level at which your character could choose it, rather than approximately half the level at which you could acquire it, rounded up, except when it wasn't.It's really a perfect example of how 4e was more accessible to new players, while freaking out older ones. Yep.  3e moved stuff from the DMG to the PH, including like all the combat rules, and, via make/buy made magic items into a player build resource - but left items in the DMG.  4e items in the PH was a straight-line trend from 3e. Actually, all of those have precedents and/or roots in prior eds.  Magic items with limited usage n/day, 1/day, 1/week  or month, even, and any other sort of arbitrary proviso, were common in past eds.  The alignment system wasn't dumped, merely consolidated, the aligments new player found confusing/contradictory were folded into the more intuitive ones, 5 alignments instead of 9, but D&D had as few as 3 in the past, Blackmoor was a kinda sketched out but never realized world, skill challenges were a new mechanism but a solution to an old problem that the game had tried to tackle before, and the game had always /needed/ incentives to keep the party adventuring a 'whole day' rather than a 5MWD! Yeah, that's "factually incorrect" (as we say around here, because lying is not against the CoC, but calling someone a liar is).  In 4e, only the Wizard was in any way Vancian (and, like the 3e & 5e wizards, 'prepared' rather than 'memorized' his spells, just only his daily spells & utilities).  And only arcane classes were casting spells.  What you're really getting at is the common advancement structure - all classes had the same exp chart, as in 3e (so that was entirely precedented ) and 5e, but also the same advancement schedule in terms of bonuses, across the board (which 5e also kept, as proficiency, for some reason) and in terms of short- and long-rest-recharge resources, which was certainly rooted in the many limited-use abilities in the game's history, and had some precedent in the way 2e & 3e moved full casters to 9-level casting (formerly Clerics, Druids & Illusionist had only 7 spell levels).  What was unprecedented was what all that helped enable:  the classes were much better-balanced (to be fair, less imbalanced) than ever before, or since.   Yeah, 3e did get a few things that started to model armor protecting rather than just deflecting - Fortification, I mentioned, above, and the mithril coat could certainly have been a +X Mithral Chain Shirt of (sadly, IIRC, only 'Light') Fortification, but, sure, also crits w/confirm rolls (spears are x3, so yeah, ouch).  1e didn't, and 3e & 1e both have characters dropped below 0 on an inevitable death countdown.  5e doesn't confirm crits, but it at least has the chance of a dropped character recovering on his own... after d4 hrs... so not actually 'fatally wounded,' as it turns out.Those're all still pretty weak, though, compared to a mechanism like FATE 'consequences' which, of course, very consciously model the kind of dramatic treatment of injuries you see constantly in examples like the above, across many 'action' genres, not just fantasy, or armor that absorbs damage and separate unconsciousness & death tracking of damage, like Fantasy Hero (resistant defenses, STUN, BOD), so you can be unconscious but in no danger of death or conscious & fighting though mortally wounded (both things that don't happen in D&D without 'special abilities', but happen in fiction, and, heck, reality). I seem to remember carefully toting up encumbrance in 10th-of-a-pound 'gp' detail, back in the day.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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