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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6658286" data-attributes="member: 82106">What makes you the spokesman, or think you have an understanding of, these people? In our current group there are 7 people. Without even speculating I know that 2 of them have positively never heard of Enworld. 2 others have positively never posted online about D&D and may or may not know it exists, and have certainly never read it. 2 others conceivably might, they play some other RPGs like DW, but I'm pretty sure I've never run into them online. That leaves 2, including myself, that I know positively post about D&D, and one of those has never posted to any WotC forum and thus has had little impact on 5e.None of the people that agreed to play in my 4e games every expressed any deep criticism of 4e on this point. Many times we discussed characters and what they could do, etc. So, you really cannot say that there was some 'silent majority' that agreed with you, that's really wishful thinking and unsupported by any observation. The only thing I observed was people who were turned off by listening to some die-hard who insisted it was all crap for some reasons that most players IME didn't agree with when they actually played.Again, you have no idea that this is true. In fact the degree of complaining about 3e casters was pretty high. The same GM who now runs our 5e game refused to run anything but E6 in 3.5 due to these issues. I know that group abandoned SEVERAL campaigns and started over at low levels before settling on E6 for exactly the reason that the options available to spell casters simply made the game unappealing after a certain point (around 9th level). This is such a common complaint that a whole cottage industry of 'fixes' grew up around it.Again, IME that just isn't what happened. 99% of those people just went on playing what was on offer and were perfectly happy. A certain very vociferous and bitter segment of really active players that post a lot didn't like the changes and went rampant all over the boards. 5 of the 7 people in our group never even heard of those debates, could care less, and 4 of those 7 (plus 2 others that played 4e with me) would be perfectly happy to play in a 4e game. I have exactly one holdout, a guy that has never even read one bit of 4e, hasn't played it for even 5 minutes, and doesn't read or post anywhere. Heck, he doesn't even like 5e, but since he's married to the DM he's pretty much stuck there. I think they did a lot of research into what ORDINARY players wanted, but they failed to understand that they really needed a cadre of thought leaders, that those were highly critical people to have onboard, and they simply never considered how to do that. We will just have to agree to disagree. 5e casters are MUCH more flexible in what they can cast. My 5e wizard has 9 spell slots, and he just about uses every one of them in each adventure, unless its an exceptionally easy day or most of the session happens to be centered around something like buying supplies or research, etc. Even then he's likely to cast several of them. My old 2e wizard at level 5 would have had only 6 slots, no cantrips, no specialist feature, and no access to ritual magic. He would need to keep at least half those slots, one of each level, for the best combat spell of each level, and thus would have 2 level 1 and a level 2 slot for utilities, unless it was a truly unusual day where he could guarantee he was safe. The 5e wizard will select 2-3 combat spells still on those days, but he can cast other things instead with those slots, charms, alter self, invisibility, comp lang, etc. And yet 5e's ritual system achieves none of the color of 4e's in that it only allows for the casting of a few existing known spells, and anything created as a ritual has to work as a regular spell, severely limiting the system's flexibility. Given the much greater utility full casters get out of it there's much less reason for non-casters to participate. In 4e you could make up cool and thematic rituals, even ones that were tailored to classes that normally don't cast spells. 5e's system really just boils down to a concession to wizards so that they don't have to memorize such things as Detect Magic, Identify, and Find Familiar. Its not BAD, but it further imbalances the playing field instead of equalizing it more.The problem I had with it is it completely overshadowed any other form of cleverness. No matter which player in the game came up with an idea in our 2e group, it was my wizard or the other guy's cleric that actually put it into action. I didn't find many of these things really all that clever either. In fact after the first year or two of playing and hearing about various spell exploits it was mostly just mentally traversing the catalog of known ways to exploit one or another spell (with most 'DM creativity' engaged in making up ways to thwart it). The rest of the game withered away as you gained levels. All the henchmen, hirelings, and followers of the mighty 12th level fighter were of practically zero import compared to the mighty 6th and 7th level spells of Questioner of All Things. I think very many of those players fully recognized the reasons why a less open-ended magic system was a good thing. Some of them, like you simply refused to accept it. Many of them, like myself, were quite happy with it. I can say with some reliability that VAST numbers of DMs were quite pleased that they no longer had to play the silly "oops, you wrecked the whole story arc with one clever spell" game anymore. I think there's a bunch of lazy players out there that got their crutch taken away and didn't like it. Meanwhile my 5e wizard is totally running the show and the DM is making noises about some sort of E6 again...</blockquote>

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