The fiction supports the game throughout, but its also intentionally unreliable and expressed mostly through rules and tables.

This looks familiar! @gregorius21778.bsky.social

I was just talking about this, and it still boggles the mind -- the major criticism points of 5e rules are almost entirely issues 4e tried to fix. Namely, keywords, monster roles, encounter balancing tools, character roles, caster and martial parity, class balance.

My appreciation is growing by leaps and bounds, now to find some players who feel the same way ;)

I'm not opposed to the divergent direction 5e took at all, but its confusing why they threw out all these pieces of progressive game tech from 4e. Makes me wonder if the 5e designers understood what 4e was doing under the hood.

Compared to 5e, for instance, you can really see how 4e was designed from the ground up with careful attention to the themes both in the mechanics and in the fiction. It was built to solve a particular set of problems and provide a specific type of playstyle. It's clarity is refreshing!

Pathfinder 2e seemingly circled back to a lot of 4e design principles. Fixing caster/ martial disparity, class balance, and encounter design being among them.

It's still a polarising game, almost a decade after it lost the edition wars, but I love 4th ed D&D, aka '4E'. For me it excelled at being an enjoyable *game*, first and foremost, that you could use to create and underpin fun, action-packed fantasy stories.