I mostly skipped 4e so going to walk around that Nothing I'm writing here is intended to have anything to do with 4e & any relation is
probably just coincidence
.
Everything you said is true & I mostly or entirely agree with the words you wrote -
but- there are other factors that helped then and make the 5e equivalence letting it ride as is a failure. Those two factors collide in very problematic ways that very much justify 5e simply letting it ride deserving of unglamourous criticism, some of that criticism even referenced those elements of help & harm.
In the older editions up till 3.x at least players made PCs who faced a much higher bar of lethality with less easy recovery*. The GM could do things like providing cheap potions & wands of CLW or regularly handwave rest times. This alone provided mechanical pressure & a fast learning curve on the kinds of things players in the group should talk about during chargen to avoid another trainwreck like
that. Even though "Session Zero" as a term & codified thing is a much more recently elevated thing it was extremely common for players to engage in it or similar well before it went from "meet up & make characters" to "Session Zero." Resting & recovery are so utterly
trivialized in 5e while monsters are defanged from providing that pressure due to various bonkers baseline expectations (no magic item expectations no feat expectations,
wackamole healing, etc). All of that combined means that the player facing chargen text
can't just let that section on chargenride as it's always been.
The second big problem is that 5e itself made some
huge changes with an impact on chargen that is both inseparable & a thing that requires the chargen text to be better. That change was a deliberate attempt to make a core of slightly modified d20 ruleset more story driven. You can hear Mearls talking about the half that we
didn't get at about 1:21:20
here where he talks about a greedy rogue & fate style compels, but we still got the player facing half in BIFTs & background features. That half has a huge impact that for the first time (again ignore 4e) we no longer had
adventurer as a social class... Worse still the shift of making magic items
"optional" not at all supported by monster math directly conflicted with a
well documented GM tool for the GM in a way that actively made things more difficult for the GM as that linked 2e page described/outright stated.
Berift of the old mechanical pressures alongside this huge injection of problematic influences the old style of chargen text is now reprehensibly inadequate for the GM who is now pressured to teach their players how to do what once developed organically within as few sessions while the GM is expected to foresee any & all possible needs/problems to present whatever houserules limits restrictions requirements and so on during session zero. That all needs to be done without losing or overloading players causing a "You should have brough
that up in session zero" veto card to get left on the table for any player to grab should the GM need to do anything outside strict RAW simply because it
could have been raised in S0.
* Yea "Less easy" rolls off the tongue weirdly but "more difficult" isn't quite accurate
for what it was either. "Less easy" is a better fit.
