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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7762862" data-attributes="member: 6873517">One could certainly not use them, but they were very much the default assumption, just like the use of minis and a gridded map were. I didn't know him in the pre-4E days, so I can't say. He plays a 5E cleric fine, though it took him a while to get in the swing of how casting worked so you're probably right. The reason it bears on the fiction and the mechanics is that many prior D&D characters totally didn't work as pseudo-Vancian casters before. Only casters did and pseudo-Vancian casting always worked poorly with fiction (except in Vance). Read how in, say, Dragonlance, Raistlin is described as being fatigued by casting, but spell casting does no such thing in actual D&D rules. In 4E, however, everybody had the same structure of Daily/Encounter/At Will, which was very jarring for a lot of players, my friend being a good example. In prior editions of D&D, if you didn't want to play a character that didn't function like a caster, there were numerous choices. In 4E everybody functioned in a similar manner. This was good for game balance but problematic for many in other ways and I think it was often jarring for the fiction, hence my "Why can I only do 'Come and Get It' once a day?" Cooldown on discrete powers works well mechanically, but it's weird to a lot of people. Folks might rationalize it away for casters but when it gets applied to everyone it starts to become a problem, even if, like I said, from a game mechanical standpoint it works well. Other folks gakked at the map. I personally like and continue to use 4E's square counting rule, but plenty of times I saw people just freak out at how non-intuitive Chebyshev norm is due to diagonals being as long as verticals or horizontals. They would cope on a 2D map and then lose their minds when figuring out vertical distances even though it's all the same. Yet other folks gakked at other changes to the fiction: The alignment system, the world, etc. The reason I use the "uncanny valley" term is that it's fairly rare one can point to exactly one thing that is definitive when something drifts into the uncanny valley. It's a cumulation of many small things any one of which wouldn't be that big of a deal. Many of the changes could even be things that are acclaimed! So whatever will be one person's last straw will often not be someone else's. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke" target="_blank">New Coke</a> is a potentially illustrative experience. Coke executives had noticed that Diet Coke sales had gotten strong and their market share had slipped next to Pepsi. "New Coke" was the diet formula with sugar instead of artificial sweetener, more or less. They did a bunch of blind taste testing and found that the "new" formula tested better. Of course, all research methods books tell you testing should be blind! However, consumption turns out not to be, especially when nostalgia is a big part of your brand identity. I wonder if 4E was D&D's New Coke?</blockquote>

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