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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6516234" data-attributes="member: 87792">Magic trumps non-magic is ancient. What changed was that magic trumps non-magic wasn't mixed much with protagonists being wizards. The protagonist in such stories prior to D&D used to be the plucky fighter or tricksy rogue.It's worse than that. Real world marathon recovery times involve resting for about a month. D&D has always been larger than life cinematic. And hit points were designed specifically to be unrealistic.And what you fail to acknowledge is that for many others 4e does a vastly superior job of that. In 3.5 you can almost always say "It ain't balanced. Unload the wizard." (Or cleric, druid, or artificer). In 4e you can not say this. There is no class you just unload to deal with situations you shouldn't be able to tackle head on - the very imbalance of 3.5 meaning that supposedly imbalanced challenges are manageable. This is because 4e both has the best generalist out of combat D&D mechanics of any edition (an admittedly very low bar) and pays attention to balance so you can't just solve things by throwing spells at them.D&D, with its unrealistic damage system, its pretty high complexity, and all its quirks, and its design as a gamist system does a pretty bad job of supporting immersive roleplaying. I find the untiring robots that are non-4e fighters to wreck my immersion. But really, praising a version of D&D for being immersive is like praising a pickup truck for its speed.Because balance is objective. Immersion comes with a number of factors:1: What you are used to2: How often you need to stop and look up the rules, shattering the flow of the game3: How close it is to 'natural' free form.4: Mechanics/fluff connection. Can you back up what you believe you should be able to do.All versions of D&D fail 3 fairly spectacularly. 4e fails a lot of people on 1 - but not everyone. 2 is a spectacular fail for 3.X even after almost 15 years. And for 4 I find that 4e and BECMI are the two D&D winners (this is actually where 5e fails compared to other editions - bounded accuracy de-powers dragons et al).Oh, it can exist. It's just straining at gnats while swallowing camels. What I have never once seen acknowledgement from you of is just how unintuitive and anti-immersive a wide swathe of D&D mechanics (especially in 3.X) are. Hit points are almost pure metagame outside 4e. Hit rolls are weird abstractions (and don't get me started on archery). The 4e and 5e skill systems in play stand head and shoulders above 3.X's fiddly detail and 2e's weirdness. Every version of D&D is swamped in math (even 5e isn't great). D&D is not and has never been about immersion.5e's main virtue so far as I can tell is to largely get out of the way while offering evocative choices and giving people familiar with AD&D and 3.X something close to what they were familiar with. This is useful. And I'd go so far as to say that 5e is right there with BECMI as having the least that gets in the way of immersion so far as I can tell.</blockquote>

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