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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8247427" data-attributes="member: 87792">And here I'm going to tell you that you've contradicted yourself. If you read Lord of the Rings there are almost no "world shattering powerful magic spells". Indeed there are almost no magic spells period cast by Gandalf (there are reasons he's notoriously <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/was-gandalf-just-a-5th-level-magic-user.663672/" target="_blank">a fifth level magic user</a>)World shattering powers in the hands of PCs belong in some genres - if you want to play Dragonball Zeta or Marvel Superheroes (and I'm not calling either a bad thing) then world-shattering powers are part of the genre. But I'm struggling to think of a single work of high fantasy that's not D&D-derived fiction where world-shattering powers are the norm. Even if we go to Harry Potter levels of ubiquitous magic there isn't that much they do that's world shattering.Lord of the Rings in particular is right there as a 4e game. It's a game where eight of the nine members of the Fellowship are not spellcasters (or in Aragorn's case is possibly a ritual caster) but you can actually distinguish how they fight mechanically rather than giving them interchangeable character sheets - it's especially the case for the films rather than the books.Meanwhile if I want to give everyone a generic, non-iconic feel I make them TSR-era fighters where there is almost no difference in the combat abilities. Rather than have fighters with Come And Get It and rangers able to blacken the air with arrows.Dailies and at wills are pure D&D. You recover your spells on a short rest and melee attacks are at will.The thing 4e changed was to become a game that better models both real life and fantasy fiction by having fighters who paced themselves rather than were untiring robots who always used the same attack numbers irrespective of how long the fight had been going on for and how many previous fights they'd been. And that it became a game that better models high fantasy by allowing the casters to cast minor attack spells all day - unless they were one of the few sword & spell classes.If you want high fantasy as ever 4e models it better than all previous D&Ds. And it does it in part by sharing the iconic parts. 5e to its credit kept this structure although it made short rests too long.Which is one of the many, many things which makes 4e the D&D that does high fantasy. And previous editions of D&D only really suitable for "D&D Fantasy". Magical rituals are a thing - you don't have all wizards casting almost all spells at combat speed. 5e keeps rituals - and a damn good thing too.This I'll give you. 4e monsters aren't just bags of hit points that are more or less mechanically interchangeable, behave like wizards with prosthetic foreheads, or make incredibly tedious claw/claw/bite/wing buffet/wing buffet/tail slap attack combinations.I think that literally every edition of D&D except 5e has introduced new classes like Thief, Ranger, Assassin, Illusionist, Cavalier, Warlock, Artificer, etc. This is neither more nor less than a claim that 4e is weird because it does what all previous editions of D&D did.Again this is part of what makes 4e better at high fantasy than other editions.So what you're saying is that 4e changed D&D by being very much more suited to high fantasy settings like Lord of the Rings where you can have large battles against dozens of orcs and don't need to track the hit points of each one.And literally every single change you've mentioned is something that makes 4e better at modelling high fantasy and common works of fantasy fiction than other forms of D&D.And as demonstrated above a lot of your examples are completely risible. I'm pretty sure that if I were to search in the right places I could find more than 10 years of arguments for a flat earth. Now your position has more merit than a flat earth - but just saying "I have threads where this was asserted" is not an argument.On a sidenote here's something you can thank 4e for. The warlock class was technically introduced in 3.X - but the warlock was supposed to inherit those abilities. By talking about warlock patrons you are injecting pure undiluted 4e fluff into your game. This is yet another reason 4e is far, far better at high fantasy than all previous editions of D&D. For that matter the vastly superior 5e approach to Paladins over previous editions where paladins hold to an ideal and don't fall (but can be fallen) rather than legalistic codes of conduct based on alignment is also both pure 4e and much more in line with high fantasy than all previous editions. I suppose 4e really did change things by bringing that sort of interaction front and center.In my experience there's significant survivor bias.I encourage this - and DMs to work out what Matt Mercer doesn't do so well. He may be the world's best at what he does but isn't great at absolutely everything.Where? But what's disparaged is saying "My house rules do it therefore it's part of the game" - no it isn't; it's part of your vision of the game.Oh hey! You're trying to reintroduce things that were only done well in 4e <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=";)" /> (Removing Dex bonus from AC!)And once more you're trying to introduce elements of 4e into your game. Monsters that aren't in any book? That's why 4e monster design makes it so easy to create effective and balanced monsters that are actually mechanically distinctive. Spells they've never seen? 4e is the only edition not to rely extremely heavily on cookie cutter spells.Once more you seem to want to do things 4e leaves all other editions in the dust for. Again 4e leaves all other editions in the dust here. Monster roles and monster powers aren't anything like as cookie cutter or even made up of either their number of hit dice and AC or a network of feats.Again, welcome to something 4e does better than any other edition.If you want similar and cookie cutter then how about a game where all melee combatants make their basic attacks using exactly the same mechanics. Rather than the sword and board fighter using Tide of Iron to drive the enemies back as one of their At Will attacks while the rogue gets to slip round the edges of the combat. 5e does a little of this - but where you say "so many abilities were incredibly similar" this compares to previous editions where combat abilities were literally identical except what you added to the dice.For that matter let's look at specialist wizards. In editions prior to 4e (with a couple of honourable but dead end exceptions like the Illusionist from 1e and the Dread Necromancer from 3.5) a specialist wizard would cast the exact same spells the exact same way as a different specialist except with maybe a small bonus to a saving throw and maybe some spells you couldn't prepare that they didn't prepare.In 4e, and 5e following in its footsteps a specialist wizard is literally better at casting spells they specialise in and gets bonuses to those spells. Yes a fireball cast by a 5e evoker is incredibly similar to a fireball cast by a 5e illusionist, with the only difference being that the evoker has better control and can protect allies in that fireball. This is the sort of change introduced by 4e. And if you want to call this cookie cutter be my guest. But in editions before 4e rather than the two fireballs being similar and, in your words cookie cutter, the fireballs would have been literally identical. With the only difference being that the evoker had the chance to prepare a single extra fireball per day.You are taking changes from literally identical to similar but meaningfully different and somehow claiming that similar but meaningfully different is more cookie cutter than literally identical.</blockquote>

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