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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6361266" data-attributes="member: 996">We can't really say that some mechanics lead to this or that subjective experience 'more often' without some sort of exhaustive survey, and, really, it wouldn't help in the case of 'dissociative mechanics,' as it would just map precisely to what side of the edition war the respondent was on.  It's meaningless.   At that level, yes, you just have anecdotes nullifying eachother's minimal value.  Looking at the game itself, though, how badly is being off a little on tactics vs spot-on going to skew things?  I don't think it compares to the gulf you get from poorly-balanced systems, or systems, like 3e, that intentionally reward system mastery.  For instance, one tactical blunder that's easy to make is applying a condition a creature already has.  You could, say, waste an encounter dazing something that's already dazed save ends.  You still did damage to it, though, so you still contributed, and it is still dazed so you didn't make the situation worse for your party or anything, just expended a resource inefficiently. Again, slightly different experience.  I found house rules were the norm in AD&D, rare and poorly-regarded in the RAW-is-king 3.x years, and rare but generally accepted in 4e.  In 3e, RAW was a big deal because that's the system you mastered that gave you your rewards. <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=";)" />  In 4e, the system was workable, so the /need/ to mod it was a lot less, but there were no great objections from players when a DM did so.   Nothing about AD&D was /simple/, but yes, it did invite voluminous rulings and variants, both because the rules were vague and baroque enough that their actually meaning was debateable and the DM obliged to provide frequent rulings, and because there just weren't as many alternatives if you wanted something different, you modded D&D /into/ what you wanted.  5e is, indeed, very similar.  It's core /mechanics/ are more consistent, as they're inherited from d20.  But, no, like AD&D, it's not simplicity that'll tempt one to make ruling and additions. So 5e is simple because you expect people to ignore bits of it?  Or it feels like AD&D with fiddly bits excised?  The latter's prettymuch been the case since 3.0, when things were consolidated around the d20 core system.  I find rule systems pretty interesting, actually.  But I don't get the impression you're looking for answers to that question.  If you want to put the quality of a system down to a set of imponderables and subjective opinions, you can.  But, really, what do you have to talk about then.  You can state how you feel, and, if asked 'why,' you'd be obliged to explain that you have no reasons or justifications, and that's the end of it. It would be kinda awesome of people who didn't care for something on purely subjective grounds just did that.  One post "I kinda don't care for it, can't say why," and gone.  No warring. As with 'dissociative mechanics' that just maps to which edition war trench you're in.  When you try to identify the qualities that make this or that mechanic immersion-shattering, it becomes contradictory.  A mechanic that shatters immersion on one edition is no barrier to it in another.   I'm sure they didn't think they were doing it for no reason.  It turned out that reason had a lot to do with unrealistic revenue goals and the implosion of on-line tools, but that doesn't matter.  I'm not sure we've heard an explanation for dropping 3e early, but, presumably, again, they probably thought that launching 4e in 2008 instead of a more decorous 2011 or 12 (maybe right after the Mayan callendar ended would've been a good time) was something they believed (just as strongly as they do now) would be best for the game.  Point is, whatever the reasons, 8 years is a shorter run than 10 or 12, and 4-6 is a /lot/ shorter.And, for the fan, the rapid cycle can be discouraging. They were summarily hidden away when the site changed, so I suspect they lost a lot of folks right there, so, no probably not for long.  Not produced legally, no, and not cloned like Pathfinder did for 3.5, again, not legally.  So, no, no ongoing support, much like the 2e>3e changeover.  Really, like all of them but 3e>4e, when ongoing support in perpetuity was on the table and the game could be legally cloned. Conversion guides - official and otherwise - are nothing new, no. ''Whining" hardly captures the full scope of the edition war.     Pragmatic, perhaps.  The early-stated spin on the goal - to create a "D&D for everyone who ever loved D&D" and to have erstwhile edition warriors able to play characters embodying the things they loved about their respective edition at the same table - that was pretty noble.  Far-fetched, but noble.It's very easy to look at 5e and see the things you hate from another edition, and conclude that it's just that other edition and not for you.  That's unfortunate, but if you look past it (or if you don't hate specific things from specific editions too much), you get a clearer view:  it's a d20 game.    Clear, balanced and playable would be quite adequate.  That D&D had to change so much to achieve those fairly simple things that it seemed innovative, revolutionary or exotic is just a testament to how stodgy it had been for so long.  Funny.  I've got some folks telling me that 4e is homogenous and blah, and you're painting it as a unique specialty item.  It's just a version of D&D that was better-balanced than before.  Better balanced games just give you more meaningful/viable choices, and remain workable over a wider range of applications.  That doesn't map to a flavor of ice cream.  A better analogy might be that the balanced RPG is like the ice cream bar where you can select from a lot of flavors and toppings.  While the imbalanced one may have more or fewer flavors and toppings - but some of them are contaminated with salmonella.</blockquote>

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