D&D 5E L&L: Subclasses

[pemerton]

Ahh, but if a single level of a class may also be a smallish bundle of mechanical element what distinguishes feats from self-contained single-level class features?

Thanks for the reply. And on the bit I've quoted, you're right that I didn't have 3E multi-classing in mind.

if you describe something as exciting and then make it act dull, then the description becomes meaningless. You can make as flowery a description as you like of a magical sword, telling me it's history and describing the seven different materials used in it's construction, but if it turns out that what it does is give me +1 to hit and damage, it's going on my character sheet as a +1 Longsword and I'm never going to think about the rest of it.

By contrast, The Staff of Wind Among the Flowers 9w is a magic item that one of my characters has in a Heroquest II campaign. It has a name and an ability rating. It's an interesting item because of what it does rather than because there's any particular fluff attached to it.

That's really a matter of taste.

I agree it's a matter of taste. On this issue my taste is closer to Bluenose's. I personally find that 4e pushes things closer to the direction Bluenose describes, mostly because of the way page 42 makes it fairly easy to build action resolution around keywords and fairly loose descriptors. (That said, 4e obviously is not as freeform in descriptors, and as descriptor-driven in resolution, as is HeroWars/Quest.)