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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7808448" data-attributes="member: 996">There was a lot of outright nonsense spewed throughout the edition war, I'm not going to refute years of it in detail.  If there's a particular bit of outright nonsense you'd like to hitch your wagon too, though, I'd go ahead and refute it for the nth time.  I'm a sucker that way.But you haven't actually presented /anything/ to refute,  just blasted away with baseless personal attacks.You could point that out, but you'd be absolutely wrong.  Presentation, inverting numeric mechanics, and martial/overnight healing were /all/ examples I gave of professed conceptual issues that don't hold up because they've been done in other editions before and/or since.   Again, you're focusing on the commercial failure of the odd-edition out, when the issue is the perception of it as "not D&D" - the gap in the 'continuity' that the OP posited as a quality of the line.  Relative commercial success or popularity simply isn't relevant. There were many factors contributing to that failure, said perception being only one of them, and not necessarily the most critical.  Had those other factors been different, it's market performance might even have been satisfactory, and 5e have been delayed - but that discontinuity would still have been there.  Heck, had 4e been a wild success, we'd be looking for the differences to determine what contributed to that success - but we'd be looking at the same differences.  And, if we look at the qualities of the various editions, the main difference that stands out as uniquely correlated to that perception is the reduced importance of magic as such.  The martial classes were more closely balanced with the magic-using ones than every before or since, even having a rough resource parity with them.  Magic items were routine, expected, fungible, equally available to all classes (the notorious 'wish list' concept), and less significant than they had been before or since (leading to the frequent complaint that they didn't 'feel magical').  Throughout the rest of D&D history, magic items have been critically important, especially to those classes that didn't have magic of their own to draw upon, and at the same time, it was those classes that had the least control over what items they might acquire.  Similarly, the power and versatility of spells and other supernatural abilities /far/ outstripped those of mundane classes.  It seems like a very legitimate, significant difference, and one that correlates to and was intimately involved in that "Not D&D" perception.On the flip side, consider the perception & role of magic in the other, more orthodox, editions:  5e's rapt introduction to the critical importance & wonder of magic I have already quoted, above.  In 3.x, of course, the community shook out the classes into Tiers with those having the most potent/versatile magical abilities rising to Tier 1.  In 1e, Gygax opined that experienced players would naturally gravitate to magic-users.</blockquote>

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