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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6112538" data-attributes="member: 2067">I'm inclined to agree. While I don't think 4e had one monolithic "feel" anymore than 3e or 2e or 1e did, I think it had sort of a drift in the rules (much like those editions might've). The combat rules were a BIG part of that drift, in many ways the central pillar, but they weren't the whole thing, and there's some subtleties that wouldn't be captured with just a minis-on-a-grid rules system, some subtleties that may have been presented in the combat system but that aren't confined to it. Like, part of the "4e feel" I think is the blatant "protagonism" of the PC's. The PC's were mechanically, in the gameplay, the center of their strories, and the rules were written to assume that this was the case. Part of that is how 1st level PC's were survivable, awesomely skilled, already riddled with powers and abilities, from Level 1. Part of that is how nothing had stats unless it was a conceivable combat challenge. And while the powers and stats are all targeted at combat, the "protagonism" feel goes beyond combat.But I think one of the things WotC discovered over the course of 4e is that this "protagonism" isn't always a good thing, and 4e made it hard to turn that off because it was so intrinsic as a baseline assumption to so many elements of the game. 5e hasn't shown many signs of that yet, but I think part of that is because the feel isn't hard to achieve, even in a game that doesn't make it intrinsic. Start your characters at level 3, don't bother with stats for things that aren't challenges, and DM in a certain "style," and you can capture it. I think so much of the "4e feel" -- or the feel of any particular e, really -- boils down to a DMing style. Different e's have been more blatant about supporting different styles (4e's protagonism, 1e's Gygaxian dungeon-crawls, 2e's storytelling style), so I think the best 5e can do is make a lot of room for a lot of different styles.</blockquote>

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