Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gradine" data-source="post: 7073565" data-attributes="member: 57112">Now who's being pedantic? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />That's a fair point. It's also why several Battlemaster maneuvers can do things every other character can do, but also better. This conversation has mostly run its course, but I do have a question. Say you're DMing 5e and I, playing a rogue am fighting a goblin in the desert. I say that I scoop up some sand and throw it in the goblin's face. How do you, as the DM, adjudicate that action? I swear I'm not trying to prove a point by asking this; I think that ship has quite frankly sailed. I'm just honestly curious.Pg 42! I had forgotten about that... now that brings me back...Basically everything in this quote reads to me like you're showing me two apples and telling me one of them is an orange. Since that is probably the exact same thing you're probably thinking I'm doing, it's pretty obvious we're just going end up talking past each other if we continue down this road. Suffice to say, I completely disagree, but you gotta run with what you believe. And you're right about the join date; I actually signed up for the forums here because of how excited I was about 4e. And I 4venged with the best of them. I think I bowed out before "dissociated mechanics" became a buzzword, because it was new to me until recently; my point in bringing up the term again is that there are specific, aesthetic-based reasons why people identified so strongly with it in explaining their distaste for 4e. They were people who not only deeply cared about immersion (Fantasy-aesthetic) but also had very specific ideas about what martial characters could or could not do (and also what HPs were supposed to model). The results explain like... at least 70% of the 4e edition war.And the other reason I bring it up because all of this "caster supremacy" "5e hates martials" "where's my warlord" is basically a rehash of that exact same edition war, only in reverse. 4e and 5e cater towards different aesthetics, different ideas regarding immersion. Different, dare I say it, play styles. Which sucks, because that's not what 5e was originally billed as. WotC obviously thought the Battlemaster was enough to entice the martial 4venger. They were obviously wrong. And that sucks. I get that. And I apologize for exacerbating that; I can empathize with that position, but I was playing devil's advocate, which is kind of a dick-ish thing to do.But my point is that all of this relates to the aesthetics of play, which are personal and subjective. And so every call that 5e is "broken" and needs to be "fixed" is a wrong now as it was when people were slinging those accusations at 4e a decade ago.I'm aware of the origins and history of D&D. Fact is you could run pretty much every edition pre-4e with TotM combat pretty much seamlessly. It's also a fact that 4e placed a much greater emphasis on tactical positioning than any other edition, which is what made it so hard to run gridlessly. So hard, that it required a fan-made hack (with a name!) to implement. And we can still name the fan who created it. Did we need any of that to run gridless combat pre-4e? Or in 5e?You can ignore it all you want, but the fact is that 4e required grids for combat in a way no other edition really did. That's not to say other editions couldn't be run with grids, or even that they weren't easier with grids. But 4e codified grids in every inch of its system. To insist that it was no more or less grid dependent than any other edition is simply not true.I'm not down on grids and minis; I've DMed 3.5 with and without minis and I think I preferred it with. But they're also an investment, which takes time and money, and they're related to only a single core aesthetic (Sensory Pleasure), and if that's an aesthetic somebody doesn't care about, they're probably going to both a) prefer TotM combat and b) have something to say about 4e's reliance on grids and minis.The edition wars (for both 4e and 5e) are all based in personal aesthetics. 5e is a good edition. Great. The best edition. It has the best rules, really good, solid rules. The greatest.I'm pretty sure that was all triggered by that Angry DM article where he was talking about how most rolls represent actions but saving throws are weird because they're passive (he's wrong about his premises here, but that's another thing altogether). What other old nits are there to pick? Martial dailies? My immersion! <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/cry.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":.-(" title="Cry    :.-(" data-shortname=":.-(" /></blockquote>

Verification