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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9790362" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Wanted to come back to this.4e did not "strip them out for the most part". A lot of the things folks want are in there. They've just been rebuilt to fit into the paradigm of a combat system where "combat" means "set-piece" and attritional stuff is handled in other ways.It's sort of like how a lot of folks claim that 4e removed most utility spells. If you look at rituals...most of the utility spells are in there! And a whole bunch of others were added too! They just now cost attritional resources, rather than being an inherent X-per-day use get-out-of-problem card. Which goes to show another side of the attrition-tension thing [USER=2067]@I'm A Banana[/USER] spoke about: D&D players don't actually have a self-consistent, rational stance on whether they want attrition or not. They want both "fight the dungeon" things and "fight the boss" things. But they don't want any of their own abilities to be on the scale of "fight the dungeon" things--they want those abilities to be available on demand with rapid deployment, precisely the opposite of "fight the dungeon" play. But they want "fight the dungeon" to be just as important as "fight the boss".That thing, right there, is a self-contradictory desire. You cannot have all three of those. It's like asking for a shape with three sides, and three right angles, that exists in a flat, Euclidean plane. You can have any two of those things! But you cannot have all three. Each one individually sounds reasonable (because it is), but collectively they add up to a request for something impossible.I find a significant number of things where folks demand "tradition" despite wanting modern gameplay often move in this direction. E.g. Zardnaar's argument for why a mix of both saves and attacks should be used. Allegedly, we want simplicity and accessibility, but then "players like throwing dice" and this bizarre assertion that saving throws create player agency while attack rolls don't...even though whether the boss attacks you or you roll a saving throw makes no difference in terms of your agency, at all, whatsoever.</blockquote>

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