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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8708793" data-attributes="member: 18">This seems like some fairly silly edition-war nonsense, given the sales on 4E. It's more like "4E was highly divisive and split the community".Sure, but it's a cheap meme that that doesn't have any meaning or critical bite. It was very clear from discussions at the time that an awful lot of people using it hadn't actually played WoW and weren't even passingly familiar with it, for example. It's one of those things people say to express a general feeling of dislike, rather than an informed criticism or complaint.Thinking as 5E purely "fix to 4E" is shows precisely the lack of perspective that we've been discussing. 5E is interesting, because it definitely was an "Apology Edition" in that it wanted to get back people lost to PF1 in the 4E era, but it also wanted to give people who didn't like 3.XE/PF or who had tired of certain aspects of those systems reasons to play it. This is something people - including me - often forget or skip over, but it's absolutely vital.It's notable that it ditched a lot of the 4E approaches, but also ditched most of what 3.XE/PF1 did, all that huge rules complexity, the literally hundreds of Feats, the built-in expectation that Feats were a major part of character power and customization (which interrelated with the rules complexity). Prestige Classes and Exotic Weapons and the assumption from 3E and 4E that you WOULD have magic items all went on the pyre. It tried to drag LFQW into a swamp and drown it, and whilst LFQW is still twitching a bit, it's certainly mostly dead. Further, 5E did something very 4E-esque, which is that it tried extremely hard to make every class about equally powerful - and largely succeeded (assuming at least 3-4 encounters/day)!And as well as trying to both please people who had been burned by 4E's approach, and people burned by 3.XE/PF's approach, one thing 5E excelled in, probably more 1E/2E as well as obviously more than 3E/4E, was accessibility. And that's what really allowed 5E to reach the heights of success it has now. That accessibility wasn't an accident - I feel certain WotC felt like they'd lost a lot of potential players over the years due to the complexity of 3E and 4E (4E was less complex and more exception-based than 3E, but like, 20-30% less, which was still way too much). I don't think they anticipated how big they could go, but I think WotC had a sense they could go bigger with a more accessible game.So anyway, I think it's important to understand how 5E actually rejected and embraced elements for 3E and 4E, and really of 2E and Basic or RC D&D even, rather than being solely aimed at one thing. I remember when I first read it, I felt like it was almost an alternate-reality 3rd edition because it felt more like something that came after 2E than 3E or 4E, to me.(I note that over time elements of both 3E and 4E have crept back into 5E, so that's interesting, too.)</blockquote>

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