D&D Edition Wars and Self-Indulgent Axe Grinding

I don’t know how many of you were around for the 3.5/4e/Pathfinder edition war, but one thing that’s now incredibly funny in hindsight is how mad people got about the paring down of the skill list from 3.5 to 4th edition.

The default character sheet for 3.5 had 44 skills with 3 blank skill slots for campaign specific things. Of this 44, there are 3 craft, 5 knowledge, 3 perform, and 2 profession, so that actually leaves us with 35 skills, if we roll each of those duplicates into a single one.

Compare this to 4th edition which had 17 skills.

People freaked the FUCK out over this.

Sure, there was some outrage over Wizards not clearly outclassing martial characters (a real gripe people have! A wizard should be able to break reality in this fantasy game but any non magic character must be confined to the human experience), and the new focus on positional combat and battlefield control was not received well (It’s TOO Video Game-y! [no video games were made using the 4e system, while older editions of D&D have things like Baldur’s Gate series, Neverwinter Nights series, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, etc, and Pathfinder has 3 games]), and the classes are too similar (This one’s more fair, but I also think for a group of people who claim 3.5 allowed them roleplay more couldn’t see the differences and accentuate them is weird.

A lot of it, as someone who was, at the time of 4e’s release, sounded like noise and “old game good, new game bad” hatred of change.

Anyways, the reason why I brought up skill lists is because of the weakest argument that was tied to it: It hinders roleplay. This was often paired with the cry that the rules as written don’t have a lot of rules for roleplaying and that it’s all dedicated to combat!!!

That sounds like LANCER from the now-times.

It’s still so bonkers to me that 4e was like “OK, here are rules for the complicated part, we trust the GM to know how to use these skills we’ve outlined and here’s our rules for our new Skill Challenge System (which is a really cool way to handle scenes)”, but man, the stuff I was seeing at the time needed a section of the rulebook dedicated to social rules more.

Here’s the fun part, to me though. Gonna post the skill lists for the two games, and then a nice little bonus one.

You’ll note that 5e has 18 skills. Animal Handling was restored, as was Performance from 3.5, Thievery was removed from 4e and replaced with Slight of Hand, Streetwise and Dungeoneering were also removed (sadly, I felt that they covered a really good range of checks from finding information in town, to knowing things about caves/dungeons/etc)

Here’s a bonus, for fun. Pathfinder 1e skill list.

It’s so fascinating to see what sorts of points get latched on to and what sort of things people will apply to it as evidence. As it stands, D&D 4e is one of my favorite TTRPGs, just because it felt fun to play, I didn’t feel miserable playing a martial character, and it gave me cool shit to do, even outside of combat. The tier system was dope as hell (tier 1-10, Heroic tier, then 11-20 was Paragon where you picked your first like, Prestige class, then 21-30 was like God tier, where you pick your Epic Destiny prestige class), and the big thing is I didn’t have to keep track of whether the bonus from Spell A stacked with spell like ability B, and Feat Ability C and aura D, and whoops, A and D don’t stack because they’re the same type of thing, so you need to keep that straight…

I’m just here to gripe about something I remember reading a lot about back in the day. It was over and done with, but the Hasbro OGL nonsense has drug this old edition war back out.