Mearls is being a nitwit on this. I don’t get it. Bonus actions are a good thing. There are a few rough spots but mostly they work fine and cut down on a lot of bullpuckey and pointlessly long language.

This is one reason I like a more fleshed out economy, particularly if said economy works “in game.” It can really reinforce the game world and provide a reason to make use of those items you don’t really want but can trade to get things you do. Yeah you might not be too excited to have that Cloak of the Manta Ray, but someone out there probably is and you may be able to buy or trade something for it.

This extends nicely, too. You could adventure to find potion ingredients, say hunting for critters that make up healing potions or other more common things you want to craft or sell to alchemists. Or you might have to travel to a new city to get to a better magic item market, and thus brave the journey and ultimately find out you need to do some services to be allowed in to trade. Of course things like this don’t really line up with the “on rails” of most APs.

While I agree that both 3X and 4E’s item economies were trouble, 5E’s essentially thoughtless lack of a system isn’t really a solution, it’s just DM fiat. I am capable of doing things myself but it’s nice to have some scaffolding, especially when I have to do something quickly.

This was part of the reason that the group I played in back in the 3.5 era used a home-brewed Crafting system that let the characters essentially “move” enchantments and such out of “lesser weapons” and into their chosen weapon. There were Craft rolls required, so there was a chance of failure and destroying the things, but it was pretty neat.

In my first few years of writing here, I picked a series and stuck with it until it was done. By the time I got to the mystic, I was feeling some danger of burnout on the whole idea of the History of the Classes. Jumping around more in topics and shifting from analysis to new invention and back helps me keep caring about the topic in the first place, as well as giving my subconscious a little more time to work on stringing ideas together. =)

That second point was one reason* I was so thrilled by 3.5 Unearthed Arcana’s weapon group feats and alternate weapon proficiencies (which anticipated 4th edition somewhat, in retrospect). Specializing in forms of weapons rather than individual weapons felt a lot more freeing.

But yeah, I like 5e’s version now, though it took me some time to come around.

* Another reason being it allowed exotic weapons to be used without a racial proficiency or feat tax.

Never forgotten! It just seems awfully rude and entitled to ask, so I just check every Thursday.

Re: the Ritual Warrior…I never made the connection that Heron Wading in the Rushes and Robilar’s Gambit were the same thing.

I know some DMs like to tailor their loot in the party’s favor in order to avoid disappointment (for example, if they roll a “Weapon +1” on a random treasure table, they choose a weapon type which a player character already uses as their primary weapon). That’s fine, but I think there’s a fine line between players being disappointed by mountains of subpar loot (“Dammit, not another cloak of the manta ray; we’re in the middle of a desert!”) and players who are disappointed because they’re spoiled brats.

That’s dedication! I’ll be honest; I have never and would never drive 6 hours to be part of a regular RPG group.

I think there were a lot of things that weren’t a “thing” until 3.0 took a look at them and codified them into some semblance of game rules (for better or worse). I know that in 2e, some of the Players Options books (Combat and Tactics perhaps?) started putting more structural focus on what one could accomplish on their turn in the initiative sequence. When I started playing with that group in ’95, it was my first exposure to a rigorous use of a tactical battle map with miniatures. I had used minis in the past, but never “counted squares” or anything like that. And I immediately fell in love with that. I have always enjoyed the tactical aspect of combat encounters, so to have a well-defined (well, mostly) system of who could do what, and when they could do it, and at what range, that was consistent for all of the participants in the encounter was very appealing to me.

Monthly…ish. I lived a 6-hour drive away for seven of those years. =)

Action economy wasn’t a thing until 3.0, where actions got broken into move, standard, and full-round. The introduction of swift actions changed everything as time went on, and finished building the framework of 4e and 5e action economy.

I’ve talked about it here and there over the course of this series, but the quick version is that:
1. Passive adds to attack and damage are too good to pass up
2. Because you’re now feat-invested in that one weapon, the whole spread of weapon loot narrows for you down to that one weapon. Once you’re 2 feats into your longsword or 3 feats into your spiked chain, a weapon has to be completely over-the-top good for you to even consider it.

I think that anytime you make characters uninterested in huge categories of loot that their class “should” otherwise be interested in (so I’m not talking about wizards and longswords or fighters and spellbooks here), you’re breaking a fundamental emotional hook of D&D. Sure, 3.x sort of solved this with making it possible to sell magic weapons and turn that cash into better gear, but that’s a lot weaker of an emotional hook for adventuring than actually winning the cool thing. I think that’s a big part of why 5e handles loot the way it does, and why specialization is gone.

Sure, you can still find places where classes or archetypes get corralled into one weapon – longbows spring to mind here – so I could be full of fertilizer. Callin’ it like I see it, though.