NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6360980" data-attributes="member: 996">I get that you're trying to take an agree-to-disagree approach, here, and, on a purely subjective level, that's fine.  If, however, we get to the level of actual qualities of the game, though, it's not fine.  The 'dissociative' bugaboo is one of those.  There is no working definition ever put forth for a 'dissociative mechanic' that doesn't either fail to apply to the 4e mechanics it's stuck to, or apply equally to many mechanics in other editions the label-appliers claim aren't dissociative.  It's just not a real quality that game mechanics have.  It may be a descriptor for a real subjective experience, but that's about it.The point I was responding to about tactics in 4e, however, had nothing to do with perspective or subjective experience of the game, though.  You claimed that 'tactical mastery' of 4e created a gulf between the masterful and casual player comparable to that created by 'system mastery' in 3e.  That is not true.  The reward for tactical mastery, like that for system mastery, is relatively small.  There is depth there to explore, in both cases, but the rewards are not disproportionate. We can't know how other people may have played the game outside our personal experience.  Maybe some others did as you suggest - IMX, it was certainly /very/ common to mod the game, even if it was mostly things like spell points or boosting 1st level hps or adopting Len Lakofka's d10 iniitiative, rather than ignoring all the rules on range/area/movement and playing without minis. That stikes me as kinda bizarre.  1e was, ultimately, I suppose, a lot of rules thrown at you, and you caught some of 'em and let others drop.  5e does seem to be consciously using a similar approach.  It keeps /saying/ it's 'modularity' but that's certainly not what the word means to me, though, while sloppy by comparison, the results could end up comparable.  :shrug: It funny how you preface a claim about what the game did, with an acknowledgement that you're not talking about what the game did, at all, but how it was perceived.  I would like to talk about what's factual, and the game is there in black & white.  If you compare say 1e & 4e, you find two games that are very much games, and very, very abstract.  Nothing about them encourages any sort of deep immersion - Mazes & Monsters hysteria notwithstanding.  If you could get a deep, immersive experience out of a version of D&D, you could as easily get it out of any version of D&D. No, that's in comparison to past edition life-cycles.  TSR continued to publish 0D&D for years after starting Basic & Advanced, so, while it was superceded fairly early, it was supported for over a decade.  AD&D 1e ran from 1977 or 79 (depending on whether you start the clock with the first or last book of the definitive core 3) through 1989, BECMI/RC from 77 through 92, and 2e from 89 to 2000.  Even treating 3.0 and 3.5 as a single edition, in only ran 8 years.  That's less than a decade or more.  Not opinion, not perspective, simple arithmetic.  "Rediculously," I'll admit is highly qualitative.  But, 4e & Essentials, together, were published for only about 4 years, and 5e came out only 6 years after 4e, giving it not even half the run of other eds.So, yes, when you made the point that 4e an 5e were early, it is a very valid, and quite factual point.  For 4e fans, the provocation presented by 5e is, if anything, more extreme than that presented in 2008.  The new rev is rolling even earlier, it is just as huge a change from the old one, the old edition is not just being disparaged with the appearance of the new, but had been for a long timeThe comparative lack of edition waring this time around says something about the differences among fans of the various editions.   It's a very safe or conservative choice. But, really, it's rather like trying to launch the renaissance in 1800.   As the oldest, sure.  As the flagship and industry leader, OTOH, progress is important - maybe not radical innovation, that can be left to the little guys, but adopting innovations as they prove themselves.   And that's just another proprietary, play D&D the OneTrueWay or get out, dismissal.  You were doing so well, too. I've seen that suggestion.  I think non-stacking is the strength of the system, but I could see a simple rule that, if you have Advantage from more sources than you have Disadvantage, you retain a net Advantage.  A little more complexity, not any more realistic, really, but still avoids the downsides of stacking.  OK, yes, I can definitely see the appeal there.  Many classes /do/ get an ever-widening breadth of choice or ability as they level, tough.  All casters, for instance, get more known spells, and more slots to cast them with.  I disagree:  MCing is a fantastic idea.  It's just hard to implement unless each individual level of each class is reasonably balanced against each level of every other class.  Between frontloading and capstones making the first and final levels of a class much better than the ones in the middle, and stuff in between not advancing consistently, it doesn't work so well.  Bu the idea is sound, the classes just have to be equal to it.  Examples?I guess by 'power' in that last sentence you mostly mean versatility, and that you're not including spell slots in 'numerical increases.</blockquote>

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