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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6360068" data-attributes="member: 996">In a sense, they did.  When 3e consolidated myriad resolution mechanics into d20 vs DC; when 4e consolidated combat modifiers and conditions into Combat Advantage.  Likewise, re-rolls, or roll-take-the-highest mechanics are nothing new.  Just as bounded accuracy is like the treadmill slowed down, Adv/Dis is a lot like CA, a non-stacking combat modifier. It's just smaller (though, for a new edition, it's got a lot packed into it) and more familiar.  And, yes, perception is more important than reality in these things.   Sure, changing granularity has effects like that.  OTOH, it makes those feat decisions more critical - doubly so because you can't re-train, so it's back to planning 'builds' like in 3e.  In early 4e, there were not really must-have feats (a nice way of saying 'wow, none of these feats do much'), so you could take whatever fit your character, and not be behind the curve.  The introduction of feat-taxes was more damaging, in that sense, then the proliferation of feats. Exactly.  By falling back on familiar structures, 5e feels intuitive to folks who have dealt with the originals for decades.   Basic 5e presents a range of class complexity that exceeds even that in the 3e PH.  The Champion fighter is dead-simple compared even to the 3e Barbarian, while the Wizard and Cleric are complex even compared to their tier-1 counterparts.  I'm not sure if that's the point you were making, though.  You really have to see new players trying 4e to believe how well it worked for them, and for casual play.  It was deceptive, because it changed so much that, to an oldtimer, it felt almost impenetrable, but to new players, it was an open book - clear and consistent.And, while it was, like 3e, hard to master, the rewards for system mastery were intentionally minimized, so you didn't have these balance issues with new players entering established groups or power-players bombing casual play.3e and 5e, though, share a similar flavor of complexity, so it's easy to go from one to the other without so much effort.  5e's impressive achievement is that it's also pretty natural to go from AD&D to 5e Basic.  AD&Ders somehow so out of touch that they've never been exposed to 3e MCing might blow a gasket when /that's/ introduced, but that's about the only obstacle.</blockquote>

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