No.
It just manifests in a different way.
In 0-1-2-3e and to some extent 5e what's magic vs what's mundane is almost always fairly obvious. Anyone in the game can see or read or play through something and (with rare exceptions) say about any given element "that's magic" or "that's not magic".
4e very much blurred this distinction by adding and codifying so-called "supernatural" powers for martials, monsters, etc. These powers, to some including me, appear to be simply magical (as in non-mundane) abilities put under a different label; meaning that magic becomes if anything more pervasive - if also more subtle - through 4e than any other version of D&D.
Which means yes, the primacy of magic is a (not the, but a) core essence of D&D across all versions.
Yeah, I think
@Oofta hit upon what
@Tony Vargas was aiming toward a few pages back.
The magic classes need, for some segment of the player base, to be playing a different game from the mundane classes. They need to run on a different chassis, approach the game differently, and that needs to pervade all major facets of the game, from presentation, to gameplay, to how the narrative interacts with player decisions, for the game to feel like dnd.
I definitely don’t need that specific split, but because I do need something like that split between individual classes (which is why I’ve never viewed fighter as a worthwhile class on any level before 4e) and different ways of building each class, I can sympathize.
I need to be able to make two rogues and have them play differently, which only 4e and 5e have ever done, IMO. The class table looking the same doesn’t matter at all to me, because a Swashbuckler and a Thief simply do different things in nearly any scene in the game, and even why they do the same they approach differently. Same deal means that a melee pure DPR rogue and a ranged secondary control rogue in 4e might as well be two different classes for me. Because the formatting is just dressing, to me. It doesn’t matter. It’s wholly irrelevant the second I’ve printed my character sheet out.
If someone needs rogues and wizards to be build using different tools and run on different chassis with different engines, 4e ain’t gonna work no matter how different the actual gameplay outcomes of two different powers are. Flaming Sphere isn’t anything like Come and Get It in terms of what happens in the narrative or the mechanics of the game, but because they’re formatted the same, they fail the above test. I’m perfectly happy to argue about the accuracy of terminology in order to get closer to what point someone is trying to make, but since it offends others here apparently, I give up.
