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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7811801" data-attributes="member: 996">5e design failed, at points, to catch onto the reverse of that.  Just look at the 'tactical combat' module.  "There you go 4e fans: square counting and complexity, we even gave you back facing! y'all love facing, right?"  Or the Battlemaster "you wanted a complex fighter right?" & PDK "shouty healing! What more do you want?"Overstating it a bit, there.  Though there were folks that felt that way - 'betrayal' being a by-word of the edition war for how some 3.x fans felt about the premature end of that ed's run - or at least knowingly recycled the word.  Essentials was a clear reversal of direction from the original 4e, and was very much pointed at long-time & returning players (Red Box campaign, massive update to bring thing back into line with the classic game).  New players were even /more/ confused by the 10 essentials products, only a couple of which they even theoretically needed to play, and none labeled anything as intuitive as 'Player's Handbook,' then they had been by the shelf-collidascope of everything-is-core. I know I have a 4venger rep, but the fact is, I've defended every ed of D&D from 1e through 5e - when they were unfairly attacked.  4e was just attacked a lot more. Not about the commercial failure, which, as you point out, had a veritable 'perfect storm' of contributing factors.  The loss of the Primacy of Magic in 4e, and it's restoration in 5e (and 'too little/too late' movement in that direction in Essentials) corresponds with that failure, just as it does the edition war, but blaming one of those for either or both of the others is ignoring a lot of other factors.  It's the correlation of the loss of Primacy with the sense of the ed "not really being D&D," something noted even by those who liked and adopted it, as well as hammered pretty hard by those who hated/feared/rejected and 'warred' against it. It might have contributed to a conversation, if the Edition War shouting match hadn't been so loud.  I do find your idea of continuity an emotionally appealing one, and, had 5e come through with certain of it's goals more successfully, there might be more of a reason to indulge it.  But, the Edition War stands as a dreadful discontinuity, and, though 'healed' in the sense that no one is so offended (or 'betrayed') by 5e as to war against it like they did 4e, it is not erased from history.I believe that was Hussar. That, OTOH, sounds like me. You may have seen Maxperson repeating the edition war zinger about "non-traditional magic!"  (And going so far as to repeat it /in context/ - something 4vengers usually had to type out.  That really was pretty cool of you, Max.)  It actually illustrates a good point:  whether you remove the gap in power & importance between Magic & mundane by reducing magic in power and balancing it with non-magical alternatives - or, by literally removing or willfully-misinterpreting-as-magic those alternatives, the result is the same.  Magic ceases to be special and of prime importance in play.  While 4e balanced magic with martial in the realm of classes, it is that ubiquitous fungibility that it inflicted on magic items that eroded the Primacy of Magic on that end.5e, of course, restored both the superiority of casters /and/ the rare/wonderous impact of magic items. There's a difference between 'didn't work' and 'didn't succeed commercially.'  The 4e approach was mechanically sound - more so than any other edition, really - and succeeded admirably to a number of objective measure as a game.  In doing so, it lost that sense of really being D&D, though. My supposition is that the loss of the Primacy of Magic was the key thing that it lost - making said Primacy a very viable candidate for the Essence of D&D.I guess, for this last post, that it's not really that supposition which has so disrupted the intent of your thread, as the foundation it rests on:  that the Edition War, both in it's rhetoric, but mainly just in it's existence, represents a gap in the continuity of D&D's history & conversation.   It's an ugly thing, I agree, but it's an ugly truth.</blockquote>

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