Using just one die roll size for most all game actions?User experience improvements like ascending armor classes, simplified initiatives, casting times, and actions, unified XP tables, unified stat bonus tables.
User experience improvements like ascending armor classes, simplified initiatives, casting times, and actions, unified XP tables, unified stat bonus tables.
All of those have been excoriated by at least someone complaining about the designers "dumbing down" the game. Yet here we are with most of them pretty routinely accepted. There are occasional holdouts who will wave a standard for a more... esoteric... design, but they are largely ignored by designers looking to keep the game accessible.
1e had attacks of opportunity and flanking. They didnt call the AOO but I do not think it got into the detail level of standing up causing them.Attacks of opportunity in D&D 3e spring to mind for my group. For us, it felt very restrictive, stifling creativity. Heck, years later, when playing Pathfinder, I remember a session at a con where most of the PCs finished a fight with a boss while prone because none of us wanted to trigger the AOO from standing up.
I personally differentiate cantrips from at-will battle magic...
Some of the later at-will magics in 4e became more dramatic... technically one of those was like the effect of a very good intimidate attack. ( a DM might allow it )I'm mostly fine with that distinction.
It turns out that the least disruptive at will form of magic is one that replicates a basic attack (preferably requiring a focus of some sort that is effectively a weapon). And I'm not really bothered by the 'pew pew'.
Faerie water tastes nice convinces someones body for a moment or two to get up when they are dying of dehydration but lasts only a short bit (rather granting a few temp hit points against heat damage).Where at-will magic becomes a problem is when it can repeatedly at no cost do something that "muggles" can't do repeatedly at no cost. In most games "muggles" can go stabby stabby all day long, so the fact that you can let lose with a roman candle or a cloud of sparks isn't a big deal. But if you can, for example, create water or light or any other valuable resource at will, that's a big deal and it changes what sort of challenges are meaningful.
I think the 4e writers were pretty careful in most cases ... rituals with long term effect like food creation cost money to do for instance.How much this is a problem was really brought home when we switched from my 3.25e D&D homebrew system, to Pathfinder to give me a break from GMing, and the novice GM running Pathfinder is continually cursing both how the cantrips work in practice, and how inelegantly the writers for the system deal with the existence of limitless magic.
1e had attacks of opportunity and flanking. They didnt call the AOO but I do not think it got into the detail level of standing up causing them.
Major difference I think what made it nebulous was little of it was written as player facing rules or clearly for that matter.That it did, though it was mostly semi-nebulous stuff like "if your opponent turns their back and flees rather than cautiously withdrawing, you get a free attack." I recall it only coming up when an opponent failed a Morale check.