Overreaction Wednesday

I'm taking it easy this week but there is one thing I got a chuckle out of. Mike Mearls has a post on "design elegance" here.

Now this article is fine, the funny part is the comments. One commenter posted what I was thinking:

"Great article on Design, followed by bad comments from readers."

Yep, but it is funny to see the newer generation freaking out about saving throws - apparently now the "old way" of doing them is the fort/reflex/will of the d20 era, and the move to using ability checks (like most of the rest of Next and a lot of other games over the years) is somehow more complex than adding a separate sub-system to the game in addition to ability checks. I was fine with F/R/W but just rolling this into stat checks is simpler overall. What would have happened if they had been around before 3E?