Argyle King
Legend
I wasn't even aware of the new issues. The thoughts I had came from how terms like "natural attacks" and "unarmed..." function in inconsistent ways in D&D.See, I agree with you. But many who have spoken in 5e's defense on this subject insist that the "natural language" concept, which the designers did reference while the game was being designed, is alive, well, and unequivocally good for the game.
My real argument on this specific subject (a narrow application of the overall topic) is that people have pursued a meta-aesthetic--"natural language"--by using language that sounded natural to them at the time. But what is natural in one context may be highly unnatural in another*...or may sound natural to one person and unnatural to another. That's why we develop precise terms: because naturalness is a constantly-moving target, as it should be, while clarity and specificity are far less so. But because it's so compelling to conceive of a game that you can just understand because everything is written and described with natural, common-use words, people were willing to throw most other considerations out the window. And we are now left with melee spell attacks with a target of "self" and "melee weapon attacks need not actually have any weapons, and are different from melee-weapon attacks," or the confusion over whether you have an Action and a Bonus Action or simply can take an Action and a Bonus Action, etc.
*Consider that saying, "I love all people" is a heartwarming and affirmative message when said in a conversation about, say, politics and religion, but an incredibly hurtful thing to say when your spouse asks you in a distraught voice, "Do you love me?"
I do not believe that using "natural language" is inherently bad (and would personally lead toward it being somewhat good). However, even a "natural language" set of rules would need to define common terms so as to facilitate a common understanding between author and audience. I would posit that (in some way) even terms such as "elf" and "dwarf" have a common understanding in D&D and are part of why the brand persists. (I would additionally posit that too many changes to the game which fundamentally undercut the shared understanding of what those established terms mean have a net negative influence on the shared experience.)
I think that, overall, I agree with your general view. However, I am of the impression that part of D&D's "natural language" issue is two part: 1) the game is written in a way which does not consistently use natural language, and 2) there is (in my view) something of a disconnect between how the people designing the game see the game versus how the people playing the game see the game.
For what it's worth, I felt that 4th Edition's design was very aesthetically pleasing. I have a lot of complaints about 4E, but the ease of understanding the rules is/was never one of them. Though, I might argue that 4E sometimes went too heavy in the direction of defining things through keywords and doing so often came full circle back around to creating broken parts of a game born of language being used in strange ways.
I think there are a lot of commonalities between issues with 4th's rules and 5th's rules, in regards to terms being used in inconsistent or ambiguous ways; the two editions simply present the terms in different formats.