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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7720926" data-attributes="member: 996">It's always been a major focus.  The CaW/CaS analogy, itself, implies - wrongly - that it's the only focus that matters.   Another arbitrary way of attacking an RPG you don't like, pretend it's not an RPG.   The kind of 'preparation' you had in 3.5 had been added in by WotC, to begin with, so taking it back out hardly seems preposterous.3.x added spells, made them more plentiful, and had a very permissive, player-driven make/buy system for consumable items.  So push-button resources that could be piled on ahead of time were in unprecedented abundance.  For the most egregious instance, a self-buffing CoDzilla could arguably become a better fighter than the fighter.  That was broken in terms of class balance, and undermined the traditionally attrition-based design of the game.  5e also put a lid on such shenanigans with the Concentration mechanic, and casters hadn't had the slots nor the wealth of buff spells to pull such shenanigans in the classic game, either, which was what I asked my rhetorical question about (and, in the way of rhetorical questions, immediately answered, of course).But cutting down that excess of opportunities to abuse the system didn't remove preparation or strategy.  You could use strategy and preparation to make a future encounter easier (or, if you screwed up, harder), in just the way I outlined in my examples, of CaW vs CaS, above.  There was even, briefly, a workable structure for it, the Skill Challenge.  Want to ambush an enemy instead of walk up and challenge him to a fair fight?  Enough successes before 3 failures and the PCs could set that up.  The PCs, using their abilities, not just the players wheedling the DM, or leveraging a surfeit of broken rules, and broken spells from the platform of a Tier 1 class.   D&D was a game, afterall, and a game where one stupid player trick is overwhelmingly overpowered is simply a badly balanced game.  Taking advantage of something like that isn't 'strategy,' it's exploiting a flaw in the system.  Meta-gaming, system mastery, even 'cheating' would be more accurate labels.A lot of other broken things were fixed, too. SoDs became (save ends) duration.  Stackable durations were replaced with more limiting 'Sustain' actions.   This is what I mean about the CaW/CaS rant being a way of acknowledging the superiority of a system while simultaneously talking it down.  A better game isn't as casually exploitable, so you say you "can't play CaW" - actually, you can, it's just a real challenge to do so, and engages the abilities of the characters.   In contrast, in a broken game CaS-style play is problematic, while in a functional one, it is also supported.  The better game supports both styles, but because it doesn't over-reward one with wildly broken holes in the system, it's deplored as 'CaS-only.'  It's not, it's just not CaW-privileged.  That kind of rock-paper-scissors thing was reduced from 3.0 to 3.5 and from 3.5 to 4e & 5e - but not to the point it wasn't still a very good idea to know your enemy and bring the right resources to bear against it.  Just so that player-knowledge wasn't the only thing that mattered.  Instead, knowledge skills of the characters increasingly came into it. Actually, attrition of healing resources remained:  surges were a finite daily resource, and non-surge healing was daily or very limited.  You couldn't just have bushels of WoCLW in your bag of holding anymore.   There was no 'effort to make combats more sports like' that analogy was coined for the edition war.  The effort was to make a better game, that was less radically imbalanced and offered more & more meaningful choices in play.  Games are analogous to Sports, so yeah, a better game will be more like a sport - fun, fair for all involved, challenging yet comparatively safe, something people will willingly engage in as a pastime - while a deplorable game be more like a War - nasty, horrifying, ruthless, pure hell - something rational people will do almost anything to avoid.  ;P  (Not that there aren't plenty of people willing to go to War every day...) In a typical D&D 'day,' in any edition, the party chews through resources as they go.  They don't actually lose much power in the process - the casters can bring their greatest power to bear as long as they have a top-level slot left, being wounded doesn't reduce the DPR of the heavy-hitters - they just lose staying power.  Their enemies, OTOH, are usually fresh at the start of a fight, and dead at the end of it.  Encounter guidelines and monster & class designs that work with that dynamic can be simplified /and/ still work better.  Instead of designing monsters like PCs with many spells, for instance, that they'll never have a chance to use, monster designs went back to being streamlined and focusing on what was needed given the monster's role in the game.  Thus, monsters with only encounter rather than daily attacks, because there's no meaningful difference between the two for an antagonist whose role in the story is to either kill or be killed, most likely, in one go.  While PCs have such resources, in detail, since they're supposed to have a story arc.The result was an improvement, of course, but it didn't actually get in the way of playing in the CaW style, if you wanted to.  Even a sneaky trick like engineering a conflict and taking on the hurting 'winner' could work, you just for greatest effect, don't give them time for a short rest before springing the trap.... <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=";)" /> Actually, they were just moved to Rituals, consuming components (gp) instead of slots.</blockquote>

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