Starting to wonder what's the difference between 4e and 5e rules.
Where 1st, 2nd and 5th were designed to be pen and paper editions first and electronic versions second, 5th was inspired by video games and was pretty clearly intended to made into a video game. Like in romantic life, sometimes trying to hard to get the attention of others is counter productive. 5th is probably the hardest edition to make into a video game but has proven to be the most popular. Go figure.
4th --
was combat oriented. Many of the social skills checks that we are seeing in BG3 were demphasized or eliminated.
The standard party roles were hardcoded while at the same time the importance of class was diminished. Instead of thinking of class you thought about role -- Controller, Defender, Leader, or Striker The classes were balanced to the point that they were nearly indistinguishable. This is what caused so many to defect to pathfinder. While 4th was saying "any class can fill this role" 3.75 was saying "you can make you character the way you like, even if it offends the gods of balance".
4th was all about positioning -- to the point that characters became super hero like. Nearly everyone could teleport to different places on the field. Your standard issue eldarin (elf) could bend time and space to show up on the other side of the room. Any differences between teleportation abilities were really cosmetic -- when you teleport do you pass through the realm of shadow or the feywild?
Likewise some "positioning" rules were relaxed to the point that they no longer made sense -- everyone got healing surges for some reason that was never explained very well. Mechanics came first, lore second.
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Healing_surgeMonsters were greatly simplified. Weird wacko powers were reduced to a handful of core powers to be used in combat (please, please make a video game about us)
Also, they blew up the realms and killed everyone's favorite gods. The tone was even darker than greyhawk -- even bending towards dystopian -- but for some reason the game was based in Faerun.
In 5th, the warlock is the most "4th ed" class. Easy teleportation, largely combat oriented and only a handful of available actions. (it's eldritch blast in the morning and eldritch blast in the evening. If you are doing something other than Hex + EB you might be doing it rong)
