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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8355015" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Of similar importance: personal optimization was almost always less important than team optimization. That is: ruthlessly optimizing your own numbers and action economy was likely to do poorly, while ruthlessly optimizing the team's numbers and action economy was likely to produce stunning success. This is exactly the opposite of 3e, where I have been explicitly told by multiple optimizers that it is absolutely a game about highly optimizing your own stuff, and any team dynamics that result are an emergent perk, not a design goal. 5e appears to have gone back to that side of things, albeit slightly more reservedly since "ruthless optimization" doesn't earn as much as it did back in 3e.This is a seriously under-appreciated Big Issue with 3e. D&D is, and for quite some time has consistently been, a cooperative game. Yes, you can make a competitive game out of it, but that's very clearly not what it's designed for. Character classes are given weak points that are partly or completely compensated for by the strengths of other classes; even people who dunked on 4e's explicit class roles admitted that D&D had implicit class roles all the way back at the beginning. The game's design is implicitly cooperative, but (prior to 4e) it really did almost nothing to encourage actually behaving cooperatively. In-combat healing (outside of 4e) is almost always less efficient than just doing damage; a dead monster has 100% of its damage mitigated, and (prior to 4e) out-of-combat healing was best done through resources rather than spells. In-combat buffing (outside of 4e) is usually less efficient than battlefield control/save-or-suck/save-or-lose/save-or-die, and out-of-combat buffing (even in 4e) rarely lasts long enough to matter for the next combat (unless you're doing scry-and-fry, which is its own ball of wax).These are all reasons why 4e fans didn't take it well when a bunch of straightforward 4e mechanics (like minor actions, at-wills, bloodied) got a kludgy or half-baked remake in 5e ("bonus actions," cantrips, literally doing the same thing but dancing around it without a name). These things didn't exist just to exist; they all served clear, identifiable functions, and specifically did so to foster a team-centric approach to play. Minor-action healing existed to make support characters more enjoyable, because you could provide support and do your Special Things, but then 5e took that away (can't cast a Bonus Action spell and a regular Action spell in the same turn unless the latter is a cantrip). At-wills existed to give you solid fallback options with meaningful effects when you didn't want to (or weren't sure whether to) deploy the big guns, but 5e took that away (only casters get cantrips, the "cantrip" for a 5e non-caster is...making more attacks, or maybe shoving instead of doing damage rather than on top of doing damage.) Bloodied...well, I mean, they literally just kept the mechanic but pretended it wasn't related by dropping the name, so I guess that's a clear "5e kept it." But seriously, dancing around it without naming it is clearly "we can't LOOK like 4e even if we're USING 4e," which isn't going to endear 5e to someone who liked 4e.Edit: It's worth noting, 4e's specific way of achieving "support party-based play and reasoning" is NOT the only way to do it. (I know you know this, Neonchameleon, but I think you can guess this post is more using yours as a jumping-off point rather than talking to you personally). The problem, for many 4e fans, is that 5e didn't seem to care about "support party-based play and reasoning," instead, as noted, going back to the 3e "optimize yourself, that's the best possible contribution you can make" mentality. The problem isn't "5e did something different, so it sucks"; instead, it's "5e didn't get the point of the mechanics, so it kept things (seemingly) without keeping their purpose and dropped things (seemingly) without knowing why they were present."You see similar things in other 4e mechanics as well. My poster-child example for this is the Lay on Hands mechanic, because it's existed in (AFAIK) every edition of D&D, but only 4e made it one where the mechanics ARE the story and the story IS the mechanic.In every other edition of D&D, including Pathfinder, Lay on Hands is just a bonus pool of points you can spend. It's a special healing bank account that your deity refills once a day. Honestly, pretty boring, but since it was all I knew for a long time, I liked it.Then 4e comes along and says, "We can do better." In 4e, for those unfamiliar, Lay on Hands is a daily power that can be used more than once (specifically, Wis mod times per day, but only once per round), on an adjacent ally (you have to be able to touch them!) When used, the Paladin spends one Healing Surge, but the target heals as if they had spent one. It is, very literally, "I give of myself, to replenish you." That's insanely flavorful! The Paladin is literally sacrificing some of her own (enhanced) vitality in order to heal others. And you can make it better--you can invest resources to let it do other things, or to use your surge value rather than the target's (being a defender, you usually have more HP, so this is a good deal), or give extra healing if used on other people (because you can use it on yourself).THAT is the kind of thing 4e mechanics strive for. Not everything succeeds at doing so. But the core idea is there, and it succeeds more often than it fails: the mechanics don't just imply a story, they are the story.</blockquote>

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