as you say, i played all editions and, in the end, 4th edition gave me the foundation to develop my own system, which i've been using for 10 years to this day
Thank you for this series on 4th Edition! You helped me to see that parts of 5th Edition had their roots in 4th, and I now understand that many of the things I like in 5th would be things I could enjoy in 4th. Your effort to go into such detail is much appreciated. I'm very much looking forward to hearing your take on 5th Edition. Best wishes to you and yours for a happy, healthy 2017!
Watching this retrospective series two years after you posted it. Great videos, well thought out and executed. I think this is some of the best gaming content on UA-cam. Thank you, Draven.
One other thing that was different in 4e compared to earlier versions, is the fact that 1st level characters actually were able to survive in the World due to the higher starting hitpoint. This is one of the features from 4e I miss in 5e.
Martin Bernth Johannesson Higher starting HP along with everyone being able to heal to some degree during short rests does make 4e PCs far more viable at low level. That along with all the options at-will powers give low level characters makes 4e one of the only system I want to play a low level character. Played a level 1 fighter in 2e campaign and in combat my options were hit it with my sword, hit it with my sword, or hit it with my sword...
Wow, you are dead on about 4e, both its strengths and weaknesses. I have been saying for years if any other company released 4e, under any other name, it would have been a critical success, and everyone would have been saying, "It's like D&D, but fixed!" I also agree with your assessment that Pathfinder ultimately made D&D and the hobby as a whole better. As they say, what doesn't kill your game, makes it stronger...
So glad you made these videos. 4e is still my favorite and it's great to hear someone discuss it. You mention that part of the strong reaction was because of the D&D name and that it may have been more popular under a different name. I've wondered before if it would have been better received as a spin-off, say "D&D Tactics." It makes me sad that more isn't being done with the system. I wish Wizards would at least re-release some of the books with all the errata and extra powers and such from Dragon included.
I had been out of the game for 14 years and came back for 5th edition, having watched this 4th edition series I kind of wish I had came back sooner. I now plan to pick up some 4th edition core books!!! Thanks Draven!!!
This might be a bit late, but I would recommend sticking to Essentials and some of the lower level stuff in 4e. Once you starting getting past level 5 or so, the difficulty treadmill can make sessions very combat heavy as you can find yourself spending upwards of an hour on certain encounters. Once you hit paragon (levels 10-20) this becomes incredibly obnoxious and 4e's 'newbie friendly' design begins to look like a series of traps intended to elongate battles as much as possible. I eventually came up with an elaborate set of house rules to speed up combat but vanilla 4e really plods. Honestly, outside of monster design and some dank lore, most of the cool shit from 4e ended up in 5e. All that being said, for the first few levels of play, 4e is a blast. It's a shame the game scales so poorly.
While having more core books meant that you technically needed more books, there is one MAJOR benefit to this over what was done in 3rd edition. OFFICIAL CANON STATUS! I had so many of the 3.x splat books and so many of the classes, races, prestige classes, spells, etc, that were found in any non core book never should up again. anytime you saw a book or magazine would present new updates to classes/races they only included the core book material. I got the oriental adventure book for 3.0 that my players loved. I had a player playing a wujen and another playing a shugenja, not once did we see anything new for those classes. then 3.5 came out and revised them and again they faded away with out any new material where the other classes had many new updates for them. Not so in 4.0 when the sorcerer was introduced in ph2, that would have been the end of it in 3.x, but future books/magazines had new material for the sorcerer, druids, and all the new classes/races that came out in the core book. those were official classes. you didn't have to worry about your class becoming obsolete because it was as fully canon as the fighter, the wizard, the rogue and the cleric. That was immense for me. I can tell from your videos you didn't seem to enjoy new options, but my group and i loved it and we were happy for something beyond the "standard" when you mentioned the classes/races for the first essentials book the only thought in my mind was pass. fighter/wizard/rogue/cleric is as plain vanilla and boring as can be. the second book you mentioned however was much more interesting. But with 3.x we soon realized all the options given to us were worthless as they were going to be left to rot while the standard classes would continue to get upgrades. 4e was the first time this was solved for me and for that i am very grateful.
Stumbled upon your great retrospective, and as a diehard 4e GM, I think you missed one highly notable feature of this edition, which was its incredible ease of use & customization for GMs. I started playing tabletop with GURPS and D&D 3.5, and both systems require a ton of finicky "gut-feeling" estimates and assumptions to build an adventure. With 4e, everything from encounter-building to monster-creation is wholly transparent, and it's easy to "get under the hood" and still have a playable adventure. For one campaign, I even wrote a custom genie-type race and elementalist class - with powers! - as well as custom magic items & artifacts for players to use. I've followed along with the development of 5e, and I'm glad that media attention (vlogs, Twitch, Stranger Things) has exploded the hobby and opened it up to a broader range of people. But I keep seeing that most 5e GMs are either running mostly pre-published stuff, or are prior-edition GMs just riffing off of years of experience. I don't see that same confidence to seize the creator's pen in 5e that 4e (and arguably 2e) championed, and that makes me sad.
I have always thought that wizards should sell an alternate system dnd game based on 4e. After watching your videos i've learned they had concurrent alternate games like chainmail, the minis and the star wars, d20 modern, and gamma world. So if they did it right they could do something really good. I always figured they could call it something like dnd tactical or something. So for those who want a more dynamic battle system you could use the tactical system and those who want a more streamlined system could use the standard 5e rules, or you could mix and match. perhaps most of the dungeon might be in standard rules but the boss fight might use the tactical system. There are plenty who still like 4e, who would enjoy that.
I agree, and would love to see them do something like that. It could be as simple as releasing it as D20 Fantasy, or D&D Tactics. It will never happen, but it would be interesting
I still prefer 4E to 3.5 and Pathfinder. None of the classes are overpowered, balance is maintained through the game. It isn't you hit level 15 and the Wizard murders everything in combat on one turn, while early levels Wizards hide in a barrel while the rest of the party does everything. Skill use is the other area where it shines. Everyone is able to roll for Arcana, which makes sense. You're traveling around picking up bits of information so there's a chance that random bit of Arcane knowledge the Fighter heard at a market three months back might be useful in a situation right now.
@@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself Actually you couldn't for anything higher than DC 10. From the 3.5 SRD: "An untrained Knowledge check is simply an Intelligence check. Without actual training, you know only common knowledge (DC 10 or lower). "
I ran a 4E campaign for about 18 months. It didn't really feel like D&D to me mainly because it was obvious (and hit you over the head with the fact) that the classes and powers were designed to be of use in combat against the enemies written for the monster manual. Not that there were people (in classes) that had various abilities and the character would then try to make use of them to face a chaotic and dangerous world. It was possible to pull out the 12 to 16 main power effects and strip the fluff text and no classes were needed if you just had the power that attacks twice, the power that moves an enemy 10 feet, the power that attacks and moves one ally, the one that did X dice damage, etc. If felt too contrived, like it was obviously a "game world" the player was driving an avatar through.
i think the reason some people likely complained that 4e made you more dependent on magic items is because they wanted to play it as a 3x style game. They carried over the 3x expectations to 4e and even 5e and to reach that expectation they felt they needed ever more magic items. So if in the 3x they needed at least a +6 weapon and they had all this gear to increase their primary character stat mode by +10 well it was much harder to do that in 4e because that wasn't the way the game was designed to be played. but if your 3x experience told you that your character would be worthless without at least a +x weapon and a +Y mod to your stats and you tried to do that with 4e you might feel there will be a huge dependence on those magic items. This is especially true if you made all all of your assumptions having only read the rules and not actually playing the game. also from what i heard from other players/parties was that they bascially houseruled wizards in such a way that they either also had spontanious casting or other similar rules so that it was easier for them, since most people probably liked the wizards larger spell access but hated the preperation requirement and didn't want to play a sorcerer because of the spell known limitation.
Just finished watching the whole series and it was very interesting and fun to watch. Thanks for taking out of you time to create this type of content.
I have been playing RPGs for roughly 30 years off and on, but it was always AD&D and even alternatives like the World of Darkness stuff and Palladium books. I actually missed 3.0 and 3.5 d&D, so when I got back into playing again I went straight to 4th. I thought it was really good and a lot of fun. I had no idea about any of the controversy until later. I somewhat recently played in a Roll20 4th edition campaign and with the map and grid available there it made the game even easier to play. I must admit that there was a lot of bloat for completionists, but for the average person I think the core books were fine. Anyhow, good series, looking forward to the 5E review--which I think is one of the best editions of the game.
I never played 2nd ed or earlier though i did have the dragonstrike box set as a kid. But i did play both 3rd, 3.5 and 4th ed. We as a group gave 4th ed many months of playing and ultimately it killed our group. As a player I've never been as unhappy with a character by level 5 only the ranger in the group was still landing hits, running base modules and WotC written villans. Every session was 2-4 hours of watching only the ranger score hits while the other 4 players struggled to acomplish anything, this was a direct consequence of the change in saving throws from chance based rolls to actual def scores. As a additional addon, I would also say the very strict typecasting of classes was also a major letdown for me. For me part of the charm of table top games is how varied the classes could be, and no 2 charactors even if having the same class had to be played the same, maybe in your groups people did play the identically, but in groups i played in, that was frowned upon heavily. I also want to qualify that I went into 4th ed without any of the predujce that you describe here, simply because I wasnt aware of any of it. I went in blind and innocent of any meta-drama surrounding its release. My opinion of it was formed only through direct playing and that it was bad enough that I still havent tried 5th ed yet, and basically convinced me to never trust WotC again.
The main problem with 4E is that in role-playing you imagine to do things and the rules as the interface between you and the World. 4E subverts this concept by presenting you a string of combats loosely called "an adventure". (the less I do speak about the "class roles" the better: this should be an emergent behaviour, not something hardcoded in the rules). Regarding the skill system, I don't see how it can be an obstacle to role-playing: it defines what your character knows and can do, nothing more. 4E was full of dire features, starting with the infamous "moving diagonally costs 1". This led to square fireballs, debates about if a gelatinous cube could, then, roll down a corridor, and non-euclidean geometry worlds. And the quality of writing in 4E was childish. A 3/3.5E book was usually a pleasure to read - even if you used only part of it or the rules were broken. It treated the players as adults without alienating the younger audience. The 4E books I read were written for primary school gamers who were interested in playing ubercool characters (just look at the average illustration, with its perspective points bleeding into next timezone). Wizards tried to be "cool" instead of striving to put out a good product. Pathfinder understood that leaving the good road would have been a mistake. What could go wrong for Wizards?
I think the main issue that people said "Magic Items were that necessary" in 4E is because of the fact the math on the monsters up until the Monster's Vault and Monster Manual 3 was severely bloated. The math they used in the third monster manual and essentials line fixed this main problem. There was also the issue of that math making "feat taxes" that they felt were an issue to keep up with the numbers needed to hit the defenses that were present. I find the easiest way to fix this is to implement the inherent bonuses from the DMG(2)/Dark Sun Campaign Setting to help alleviate it and let you distribute magic items that are based on effects vs the bonuses needed. Also I know this is years late but I came across your videos when I was reminiscing about the enjoyment i had with 4th edition, despite the flaws it had.
Thank you, that is probably the best explanation I have heard (or read) on the Magic Item issue. I didn't get many chances to run 4E sadly and when I did it was 1st-4th level so I never really experienced higher level play with the early Monster Books, by the time I could convince my friends to try it I was using the Monster Vault.
All these years later and I still have a lot of positive nostalgia for 4th. I kept all my books and have been picking up more and more over time (over 30 books now). I think I’m going to run a 4th edition game next, instead of 6th.
@ that’s great news. I like 5th edition, but I’m glad channels like yours still occasionally fly the flag for older versions of the game - like 4th! Thanks!
Dude, this was a great breakdown. I bought dice years ago before 5e was out and I definitely think the system in 4 would have confused me like crazy, but knowing what I missed out is definitely making me enjoy starting 5e now 6 years later after buying dice and forgetting I had them. Thanks man. I'm sure I'll pick up 4 for more numbers! lol
thanks for this series (and all your videos). Based on your videos and Matt Colvilles's ones, i just bought the 4e Player's Handbook and Monster Manual (they were $12.95 on amazon!). I already own 5e and Pathfinder books and really like them. What i wanna do is just take the parts that i like from each system (maybe even dungeon world) and try to mixed them freely, just like Matt Colville says. All the best from Chile!
I just want to say that I really appreciate your breakdown of the history of D&D. I have been playing D&D since 2nd Edition and you cover many of the issues that come up with D&D in a clear and balanced way. None of the editions are perfect and there were many parts of 4E that where handled poorly, but it is nowhere near as bad as the toxic branches of the gaming community make it out to be and hopefully when WotC decides to open up the licencing, we will see a true 4.5 that addresses the shortcomings of the edition while keeping with the spirit that made 4E what it is (modular character development systems, Skill Challenges that allow DMs to set up engaging and challenging scenarios for players, etc). Love the videos!!!!
Thank you very much, your kind words really mean a lot to me. I would love to see more support for 4th Edition since like you I thought it had a lot of positive concepts and ideas behind it even if the execution wasn't perfect (Calling things "Powers" rather than "Abilities" for example). I have started to see a slight shift in attitude towards 4th Edition over the past year or so, but there is still a long way to go.
Hey man, thanks for your retrospective on all the editions, well done! I got the 5e players handbook this Christmas. think I'm a bit older than you. When I was a kid some friends (or their older brothers) had the original AD&D books which I never played, but I was fascinated just reading them. I played a ranger 2e a bit with my buddy as DM and his little brothers (1 thief and 3 rangers all Drizzt clones lol). Anyways, it's been about 25 years since I've played. I really want to play again but I don't know anybody who DM's. I made my wife create a character but she's not into it (sigh, might have to try my luck as a DM) I'm rambling, sorry I don't know how to send a private message, but I wanted to say thanks. Your retrospect was great, I appreciate all the effort you put into it. The first few videos were a real trip down memory lane, and the 3-5e videos were very informative and was just what I needed to understand what's happened in the dnd world while I wasn't paying attention. Good job and thanks!!
Thank you very much for the kind words. It means a lot to me to hear someone genuinely enjoyed the series so far, I've put a lot of time into my retrospective in terms of research, writing and some times hours of recording. I don't miss THAC0 at all, but at the same time 2nd Edition is where I broke into D&D and every once in a while I'll look through my 2nd Edition PHB. I know it can be difficult to find groups some times so I recommend the RPG One Shot Facebook group. The goal for it is to get groups together for gaming usually through online through Skype, Google Hangouts etc. Here is the link if you want to check out the group: facebook.com/groups/tabletoprpgoneshot/ I hope it helps, and again thank you very much for watching
I like 4E as much as anyone, but no, it did not handle magic items well. Your characters (ALL your characters) absolutely had to have certain items by certain levels or they rapidly fell behind the power curve and threw the whole encounter system off. Everyone needed to fill their neck slot for F/R/W defenses, their armor slot for AC, and a weapon or implement of choice for accuracy and damage boosting. They simply weren't optional at all. Overlevel items were loot finds, but the ease of making weaker items made all your gear need replacing regularly as they became outmoded. It was a very MMO-inspired system, and one of the weakest elements of 4E. 3/3.5 had a lot of problems there too, but the 4E attempt at a fix was a failure. Go look at 13th Age for how to do magic items right in what's basically a 4E game engine.
Essentially (no pun intended) my view. I love 4th edition. It was my gateway to D&D, and as far as new players, the Essentials line is the best place to start. Core 4th got a little crazy with throwing around stat modifiers, shifting, marking, it got crazy. Essentials toned it down. I still believe there was a lot of potential, and I think something like 4th is actually the future of D&D. I'll be starting an Essentials game with friends from work soon, and I'm very excited about it.
this is an incredibly well researched and balanced take on 4e. this was a joy to watch and pushed me to finally fill out my 4e hardcover collection. i look forward to the rest of the series! also did you make that extend skill challenge video you spoke of yet?
Well made and said dude.. I watched Ep 6 parts 1 to 4.. I totally agree with you.. 4th suffered unfair bandwagoning basically.. It is a well balanced and smooth flowing edition.. There is far more to the game than realised.. I think a lot of people suffer a lack of imagination and unfortunately those that do have a very loud voice..
As an old-school DM, I always felt that spellcasters having to pre-select their spells was a fun-killer. They would always choose combat spells. You couldn't even present a situation where more interesting spells were useful, because they'd never have them memorized. They could never even memorize Spider Climb, because they had to memorize Burning Hands twice. It's idiotic, really.
I remember starting to run a 4th campaign starter campaign. There was an ambush woth 4 goblins. The fight took 4 hours. I played and ran 3.5 during its entire run. I tried roleplaying the goblns like I roleplayed them in 3.5. My lungs about died. Everything is too much of a health sponge. It seens to me if I were to continue playing it back then everyone would just be sitting around not roleplaying anything and just rolling dice. I don't see how 4 hour hp sponge combat encouges any type of roleplaying. Just want to rant about zombies and immunities too... Not to mention they made it possible to affect automations like zombies with fear. Though that looks like its still a problen in 5th heh. Alsohm hoe things created with magic that have no weak points can be critted is beyond me. Does that mean things like zombies have to have a weak pint like the brain? Imolying everything is a disease? If thats the case shouldn't zombies have a bite attack and the ability to inflict something that makes other cretures they bite zombies too? Or maybe you can dislodge a black onyx so you can use it (or the necomancer can use it again?). I always made thr black onyx get absorbed, but if there has to be a weak point thats the main thing that makes since. Rant over I guess.
Thank you for this great vid. I have moved on from 4th edition and would hardly revisit it for a full campaign, but I had so many good experiences with it. The "you can't roleplay" complaint I always found to be total bullshit: I played in a long running Eberron 4th edition campaign that was probably the best roleplaying experience I had in a long time because we, well, roleplayed a lot: we even roleplayed during the lenghty combat encounters (we came from two campaigns of Exalted, so we basically had elaborate descriptions of attacks and cheesy dialogue during combat burned in our DNA by that point) and it was a lot of fun. Seriously, even if Wizards made up a complex social system for 4th edition the same people would have complained that "there are too much rules, I can't roleplay properly".
Do you think with the 4e controversy that the books will become more valuable? After getting into and loving 5e I started looking into 4e to see what that was like. I am glad we are playing 5e because I feel 4e is more tactical and mechanically heavy. The group of friends I play with never thought they would play dnd. I think that’s a testament to how well 5e was done. I have started collecting the 4e books and have already noticed prices rising due to harder availability. Thank you for doing these videos!
Interesting series. I only bought the 4th ed DMG and Player's Handbook. The thing that put me off was just the volume of books and supplements. Same problem with 3rd ed tbh. Having said that we play online now, my group are all MMO players too and we like the Ravenloft series of board games. I'm playing a BECMI campaign at the moment, reigniting the RPG flame but I think I might give 4th ed a go once that finishes. Thanks for the impartial and informative review.
Thank you for watching! I was put off by the amount of books that came out for 4E as well since I started collecting it after a couple of years. Honestly all you really need are the initial Core Rulebooks and you'll have everything you need for some great games. Also when the time comes I can answer any questions you might have about 4E.
Normally I would totally agree with you, however so far 5th Edition has been handled extremely well. Everything they consider gets released as playtest material. If you are concerned about investing money (and these books are expensive) then I recommend downloading the Basic Rules from the Wizards website. It has the standard races (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling) and classes (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue and Wizard) for all of their 20 level progression. You can then download the Unearthed Arcana articles which have playtest material for several classes as well as an alternate Ranger (from level 1-20). It's all completely free.
I am a collector like yourself, so the money part is not a factor. I think it is just all those behind the scene things that WoTC did to mishandle 4e that put fear into me. Such as their promises of online tools that were killed off well before they were started, and the second straight edition with a flood of books that bloated the game. There were things about 4e that I was not a huge fan of, but I played that edition from launch to about a little over a year after and stopped when Pathfinder launched. I never looked back, but I am realizing from watching your videos and Matt Coleville's video about using 4e in 5e, that there was so much good in the edition that I should use. I guess the TLDR of it all is that 4e itself was not the issue that burnt me, it was WoTC's handling of 4e. Hearing all the good on how 5e is being handled has me leaning heavily toward getting past my fears and picking up the books.
You can play 4E in third edition settings. A setting is just the backdrop, the world. The edition is just the rule set. You can run a 4E campaign in Ravenloft if you want
That was one of the main reasons I never bothered going back to 4e. I started with ad&d 2e in the late 80s, and stuck with it until around when 5e was starting to emerge. So now I play 3.5.
4th is the only edition where players were not overpowered in my experience. I've played 3, 3.5, 4th, 5th, and pathfinder all of those others are more busted than 4th
Back in the winter I tested 1st Level Human FIghters from each Edition against a never ending line of Goblins in a series of One-on-One fights until the Fighter was defeated. I ran each test 10 times to create an average and the 4th Edition Fighter killed the fewest Goblins, only averaging slightly over two goblins, where as the 3rd Edition Fighter killed up to 14 before being defeated himself. 4th Edition characters "looked" powerful if you read the character sheet by itself, but monsters were similarly designed the goblin warrior had HP comparable to the Fighters. When compared to something like the new Pathfinder Playtest where a 1st level character can have 15-26 hit points, but a Goblin still has only 6 HP it is a huge difference in power is much greater. 4th Edition is one of the most balanced editions to have been released
@@DravenSwiftbow: That doesn't really sound like a fair test. The equivalent to the "standard" goblin of older editions should really be a minion. Just taking 3e as an example, a generic goblin with no class levels was a CR 1/3, so it takes three of them just to equal an at level threat for a 1st level fighter, plus those goblins would only have 5 HP each so a fighter with a reasonable strength score and combat focused feat selection will almost always drop them in a single hit. Pitting a 4e Fighter against non-minion goblins would be more like pitting a 3e Fighter against a Goblin that is itself also a first level fighter.
I am very surprised that many of your 3e groups' players preferred sorcerer over wizard. Intelligence is almost always better than charisma, mechanically and flexibly. Wizards received higher level spells sooner, and what really sold it for me, was that wizards were free to toy around with the fun niche spells. Stuff like mount, Tenser's disk, disguise self, whispering wind - these are nifty little toys that sorcerers need to miss out on due to their very restrictive spell lists. The wizard looked bad on paper, but in play tended to be more enjoyable for myself and most of my friends once we experimented with the less popular situational spells the wizard can afford to learn
It never seemed to work out that way for me. My players were willing to wait the extra level as long as it meant not being locked into their spell selection. During my last 3.5 Campaign I house ruled in a magic system similar to what we have now in 5th Edition, but even then the Arcane player played a Warmage.
It's definitely a difficult trade off. Either way you have a restricted spell list. I can honestly understand where someone can feel more frustration with a wizard, guessing and forming their spells every time they rest, and inevitably having spell slots wasted on something that didn't have an opportunity to be used. At the same time the spontaneous guys are missing out on the spells that are not worth learning, but are truly fun to use. Did you find that this was also the case with favored soul or any other spontaneous divine caster that I'm forgetting over the cleric/druid?
I never had anyone actually play a Favored Soul in any of my campaigns.Clerics and Druids seemed the better choice as they had access to all the spells on their spell lists, and Clerics in particular were more versatile as they could swap spells for cure spells
3.5 wizards also more easily got item creation and metamagic feats. Sorcerers are great at low levels with a good handful of spells, but as they advance, they don't do anything else. They can get a familiar, but a wizard gets summon familiar, scribe scroll, spell research, school specialization, and bonus feats for more item creation or metamagic like I mentioned earlier. At higher levels, wizards are far more magical.
So this retrospective series isn't done yet? You gonna make a video on the 5th edition any time soon? This was a fantastic journey and I'd love to see it locked with the current edition which I know nothing about.
No it isn't done. I'm still trying to find information on the Playtest Packets. I'll also be occupied with personal matters for the next few weeks. I'm hoping to have the 5th Edition video or videos completed some time in March
Honestly the answer changes pretty regularly. I enjoy every edition of D&D for what it is. That said as of right now my top three are: 3) D&D BECMI 2) D&D 3.5 and 1) 4th Edition But ask me again next month and it will likely be different.
It sounds as if management tied the hands of designers to make them have it lock into an online D&D experience that mostly never materialised. I wonder if they had the freedom of past D&D designers, not hobbled that way, if it would have looked so like World of Warcraft etc. I never played WoW but my younger friends said it was very like MMOs. Still, that might not have been the fault of the designers.
I think it could be, so long as they have an NPC with them. For Solo play I would recommend using more Minions and not going above an Elite Monster. Solo Monsters were designed to take on a party of 5 PC's.
I never agreed with any of the complaints. 1. "Changed spells and classes." Yeah, for the better in all ways. Finally, one fighter is not the same as the other, and wizards don't go from useless to overpowered. Every class has a wide array of abilities, rather than a single focus with limited pathways to customization. At-will powers are the best thing to ever happen to D&D. 2. "Too combat heavy." The fuck? What version of D&D doesn't have tons of combat? Where does it say in the rules that all, or even any encounters need to be combat encounters? The strategic system, monster types, and powers introduced in 4th ed made the combat more fun and detailed than ever. Fight as much or as little as you want. "Too combat focused" is on the group and their goals, not the rules. 3. "It killed the role-playing aspect." If you think it did that, you never knew a thing about role-playing in the first place. Like combat, this element is entirely on the players and the DM. This complaint makes no sense to me at all. 4th ed doesn't limit role-playing in any way. Lamebrains do that, and then blame the rules. Learn how to actually role-play. The skill system in 4th ed is the best in any edition. 4. "They turned in into an MMO." MMO's evolved from D&D. Not only is nothing lost from the added MMO style elements, the addition is purely beneficial. D&D is a pen and paper MMO. It always has been. It's a huge positive, with no negative impact at all.
"MMOs evolved from D&D". Not really. MMOs evolved from MUDs which, while there were a few that used D&D or D&D-like systems the most popular and influential ones had their own unique rulesets and, at most, borrowed some class elements from it.
You've said in an earlier video you didn't own or use the Powers books, so where are you getting this balance issue stuff from? Online anecdotes? 4E's biggest problem was the monster stats, not the player abilities. Early monsters were often badly designed and far off the curve in terms of power level. By Essentials they'd finally gotten the formulas down pat (as proven by Monster Vault and Nentir Vale) and creatures started being real threats even to a well-coordinated party. Prior to that there were too many lousy write-ups, especially on solos and the perennially underperforming minions. Those badly built early monsters are a huge chunk of what hurt this game's popularity. They made what should have been hard encounters trivial way too often and removed all sense of threat. Which, ironically, seems to be a major issue with 5th - players don't feel a threat of death very often.
D&D 4E let players see behind the curtain too much to lose the illusion of the great and mighty Oz. If it had not let people see so much under the hood, did not handle skill difficulties in exactly the way they did and did not name feats and accomplishments as "powers" it would help. The essentials made it so fighters were a lot less weirdly presented. People were right to wonder why the fighter had "powers" but it was just the name. An anaemic layout and look was just an added problem.
If _"seeing behind the curtain"_ was really so detrimental to the experience, then no one who has ever been a DM in one game would be able to also enjoy being a player another. As someone whose old group rotated between at least three DMs, I can safely say that none of us ever had any issues with the illusion being broken, regardless of which edition we were playing.
@@EmeralBookwise Perhaps I was not communicating the idea of the curtain very well. The idea was that in such a huge paradigm shift in design, they would have benefitted from less transparency regarding seeing "how the sausage was made" by the game designers. That led to, among many other things, a sense of how levelling up made task difficulty shift up with skills so players felt levelling did not matter etc. It has been several years now so I am having trouble recalling details but I remember we did have these discussions at the time.
My dispute on your arguments on casters only being spontaneous, for better or worse, sorcerer and warmage were not as optimal as the wizard, same with the favored soul as compared to the cleric, my group universally considers the spontaneous caster classes as less powerful and our experience bears it out, we have no problem preparing spells before hand, but that said, we are a group that optimizes practical usable builds that are much stronger than you would find in most handbooks, though a tad under theoretical stuff like pun pun. My issue with 4th Ed, and 5th Ed, the classes and characters are a too homogenized, it made it feel like a video game in the sense that there is very little mechanical difference in how the classes function, the differences depend more on fluff and actual mechanics, take the proficiency system for 5th, everyone is basically at the same level of proficiency on a pre determined set of skills and weapons and technically a wizard is just as skilled with any weapon or skill overlap that he might have with a fighter or rogue class, which are supposed to be weapon and skill specialists respectively.
I remember getting my hands on the core books on day 1 of release. I tried to devour the PHB but there was just so much that was foreign to me that it was a slow-go at best. After giving it more time and attention, I realized that, with this particular PHB as it stood right then, a ranger could not fire a bow! Ranged weaponry wasn't among the class's powers at that point in time. And I had to dig fairly deeply just to find some semblance of a tracking skill.
Benjamin Brunson What are you talking about? I've got a PHB first run from 08 out in front of me and it clearly has simple and military ranged weapons in the rangers weapon proficiency. Not to mention the next page gives suggestions for an Archer Ranger. Also the Perception skill states that it can be for following tracks. Granted it doesn't say it, but I've never seen a DM who wouldn't allow a nature check to follow tracks in a natural setting.
Benjamin Brunson What are you talking about? I've got a PHB first run from 08 out in front of me and it clearly has simple and military ranged weapons in the rangers weapon proficiency. Not to mention the next page gives suggestions for an Archer Ranger. Also the Perception skill states that it can be for following tracks. Granted it doesn't say it, but I've never seen a DM who wouldn't allow a nature check to follow tracks in a natural setting.
It does receive some unfair criticism and there are things it did well. But it is NOT a good edition of D&D, let alone 'the most important edition of D&D'. I didn't think too much about making an essay length rebuttal to this but the more I listening the more I felt inclined to. This retrospective series has been my introduction to you, just saying this in the interest of full disclosure so you know I am not a subscriber or super familiar with what you normally do. Just someone really opinionated who stumbled across your channel. I am also going to be nice seeing as you have legitimate criticisms of all editions of D&D and assume you aren't just being a fanboy, at least a full blown one. But you are either misunderstanding people's issues with 4th or have had some people explain those issues really poorly to you. Maybe a little bit of both. Though I think this is one of those cases where everyone is just laying into something zealously and that is making you feel sorry for it. Sometimes the mob with the pitchforks and torches have a point, all I am saying. I'll tackle points you made or I want to make in order of importance, with importance determined by just how angry I am over it and which bits contributed the most to 4th being my most despised edition of the game. First, you say that WotC is just a company trying to turn a profit and that you can't blame them for that. As a fellow capitalist I understand the sentiment, but I can and will blame them when their business practices border on the unethical or when they actively harm their own bottom line! Their business decisions with 4th are- as you yourself said in a previous video AND in this one- wretched and it is due not just to their poor marketing decisions. They already annoyed me with the constant conga line of splat books for 3.5, but splitting the core books up the way they did was asinine. Keeping fan favorite races and classes out of their first release to try to force people into buying additional material was worse than any supplement they released for 3.5 as most of those could at least be safely ignored. Not to mention if you were playing one of the classes or races that were core in 3.5 and your group wanted to move on to 4th... you couldn't for about a year without house rules because they didn't release all the core books at once. Not that transferring a character to 4th was very easy to begin with. In fact, it was rather tedious (where as moving my 3.5 character to 5th in the one case where I've done it was comparatively much more simple) Then the grid system. All editions of D&D were helped with minis and maps, but 4th really DID make it almost mandatory. I tried playing a 4th game over an internet forum and the lack of a map at certain points caused massive contention amoung the players and DM. It was a clusterfuck. The DM ended up having to draw a grid map in paint and put dots on it. That's the bigger problem isn't it? By putting so much emphasis on the grid system people uninterested in buying their minis would go for cheaper or even free alternatives. I recall using chess pieces at one point for a 3.5 game. All they did was make it more frustrating for players who DIDN'T want to use minis. This is an idiotic business model, a massive misstep on their part, and they deserve all the criticism lobbed at them. It made me honestly grind my teeth and wish WotC would have went the way of TSR, though that would be a disaster as there's no telling what Hasbro would replace them with. Pathfinder capitalized on that in more ways than you are letting on. Aside from only needing two core books for Pathfinder, I bought a bunch of cardboard pawns from Paizo... and I don't even run Pathfinder (will talk about that more later). The tackle boxes and sowing kits I bought to house them in costed almost as much as they did. I think part of the disconnect here, why this is so much more serious of a breech of conduct for me than you, is that you seem to have more money to spend than I do. I wasn't even one of those houses that got to choose between a Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, we had a Nintendo and that had to do. While that was when I was a child, I still absolutely have a budget to follow. How many core books did you say there were? "That is a lot to expect players to have" indeed. ;p But we are more or less in agreement that it was a bad decision, you just seem way more forgiving of it than I am and are trying to find a positive in it. 4th edition killed my interest in 5th as well and made me highly cynical of WotC as a company, I am only just now warming up to trying 5th and that speaks volumes. Their shenanigans hounded 4th into extinction and even if it helped influence 5th it's reputation has also hurt them. They absolutely brought it on themselves and absolutely deserve the consequences of their actions. Secondly, and finally getting into the actual mechanics of the game, is... the everything! If I wanted to play a videogame I would play a videogame. I can't begin to express just how much I despise the power set up. It clutters and over complicates an already pretty complicated game. When I and a friend first looked at 4th we didn't think you COULD make a standard physical attack and that they were completely replaced with at-will powers. We were wrong, but we missed that because you were kind of expected to and all the books emphasis was on the new powers. Fine, casting magic missile infinitely wasn't a bad idea, but it completely obsoletes the idea of the wizard pulling out a bow. I find it funny you say you had a ladyfriend who did better in 4th. For most players I was introducing to 3.5 at the time 4th was the more confusing for them. I think the problem was having her play a wizard. You mentioned before that you like helping new players? It is a bit too late for this advice, seeing as 3rd has came and gone, but it is true for all editions of the game really- except 4th. New players should pick the warrior classes. Fighter is best, but Barbarian, Paladin and Ranger are all solid too. Simply put, there is less to keep up with. Paladin and Ranger eventually get spells, but in limited quantities. Paladins also have smite evil and lay on hands, but that isn't too hard to wrap your head around compared to a hefty spell list. There are feats, but feats are basically the same for all classes and much easier to keep up with. Power attack and cleave work the same for everyone who takes them and what's more? Many of them are purely optional. If I forget I have power attack and never use it? It isn't the end of the world. For spell casters- especially wizards- there is so much they have to keep track of. But in 4th everyone has the same problem, it may have simplified the casters over all, but for other classes keeping track of all your powers became more of a head ache. I just want to be a fighter, take a few feats that make me more accurate and hit harder, and swing my sword at the bad guys. I don't need your feints, or bullrushes, or sunders. Let alone all these weeb animu World of Warcraft Final Fantasy powers that you were EXPECTED to use, when all I want to do is hit the goblin with my sword, I only need two rolls- one to hit and one for damage and sometimes I frankly think that is one too many. The character classes might be balanced, but they all play too similar to each other. Yeah yeah, you have tanks and damage deals and healers, just like in third. There was a difference. But I barely felt it. I will admit a bias, seeing as Tome of Battle Book of Nineswords was kind of a precursor to 4th and several people in my groups were going nuts over it. It was some seriously OP crap that completely obsoleted the core 3rd edition classes. What's more is when I made it clear "Play the classes in the PHB and the DMG only" I was told "Core is boring" more than a few times. See, I don't mind you wanting to do more than swing your sword at the goblin, but I want that option open to me and especially new players so they don't feel overwhelmed. This is also why I didn't actually jump over to Pathfinder either. I have the book, I will play it if people prefer, and I get why people like all the new shiny bells and whistles Pathfinder brings. I like options too. Until those options are being forced on me against my will, then I resent them. Pathfinder at least had the good courtesy to not lay it on quite as thickly.
It also kind of babies you and I don't like that. Sure, it is cool that they tried to take away negatives and make things net positives, but sometimes I liked it when there were drawbacks and potential hazards. That things could back fire. I always have been strict in my PCs getting health back through resting. I get that from one of my earliest DMs. It makes you feel every fight you're in and if you come out of a fight victorious but wounded and don't have a health potion or someone with a healing spell it added grit to the campaign. It made you feel more vulnerable. It made you think about what you were doing more carefully before you did it. During perhaps my first D&D game- if you don't count video games like Neverwinter Nights!- we were hunting this group of cultists that were kidnapping children as our first quest. We snuck up to an abandoned farm and saw them in the barn, they were getting ready to sacrifice a little girl. I said my character charged in. The DM did a double take and made sure I knew "There's a bunch of them, they might kill you." and I said that my character couldn't live with herself if she stood by and did nothing while that child died. My character wasn't yelling, but they heard me running. The rest of the party was behind me while I Leeroy Jenkins'd my way into the barn at full speed. The head priest saw me and sneered, stabbing the girl anyway as his allies shot me with crossbows, several hit. I ran up to him and ran him through- WITH A HALBERD. First combat roll of the game and a critical hit. Next turn the other PCs were in there fighting, but one of the cultists was still shooting at me. I ignored him and my character released her polearm that she'd pinned their leader to the wall with. Sure she got shot again, and sure she howled in pain when she was, but she was too busy using all of her lay on hands on that little girl that had been stabbed. We didn't have a healer, outside of me. The rest of the party killed or captured the remaining cultists while I had my character cradle the girl, making sure she was okay while my character was barely alive. She had 2 HP left and was bleeding REALLY badly. Only after she was sure the girl was okay (in better shape than her at this point) did she stand up, stumbled and fell to a knee, having to steady herself. The girl she healed helped her up the rest of the way. She limped and wheezed, the wizard yelled at her for being so stupid, our rogue was having a good laugh about it, and the half orc barbarian who'd been standoffish with her when we'd first met expressed his new found respect for my Paladin elf by peeling that halberd off the wall, walking to her with it and offering back to her wordlessly, stoicly. He offered to carry her, she told him to take the girl, and that she'd manage. It was a short lived campaign, but that saw a massive 180 in how the barb and paly viewed each other. He considered her a joke at first, but in his eyes that stunt made her a true warrior. He'd go on to be one of my better internet chums and a staple player in many of the games I'd run in the next decade. My paladin limped all the way back to the town, using her halberd as a walking stick to prop herself up. Her refusal for help and charging blindly into battle made the Barbarian respect her. Her bravado in the face of danger charmed the pants off the rogue. The wizard was scared to death she'd die before we made it back to civilization, or worse something else would attack us before she could get help. In the town the parents, dirt poor peasants, had nothing to offer as reward other than the ecstatic thanks, a bed and food. As there were no clerics in this tiny hamlet she had to rest the night to get her lay on hands back in order to heal herself the next morning, and several PCs and NPCs tended her bedside and bandaged her wounds. The rogue (who had the healing skill) ended up developing a crush on her. If the game had went on something may have even came of that. But you can't have a situation like that in 4th, not easily anyway, because HEALING SURGES! WOOO! Regenerating health, just like in those triple a vidyagames 360 noscope noob! On that note there is the roleplaying. Which it absolutely killed. ;p It goes above and beyond being combat heavy, as I hope I demonstrated just now. It makes the game a videogame. If I want to play a videogame I will. If people want hack and slash, that's fine. Yes, all editions of D&D are combat heavy, and there are much better table tops for roleplaying, but I feel like such a damn fool playing a non magic user who can go "Oh I was just stabbed by a spear. No problem let me use my healing surge." It rubs me wrong on so many levels and THAT is just the main thing that sticks out to me from memory. I feel like most of the utility spells, magic not meant for buffing or healing or killing things, were just thrown out the window. I am not going to assume the worse of you, and the player you mentioned doing the bluff check might have been... that way. But question? If your character has several ranks of knowledge: history but doesn't actually know much about the campaign setting's history should the DM help them out? If they had profession; sailor and don't know all their nautical terms like someone with ranks in that profession would do you just disregard it? Is this one of those "If you can't remember then your character can't remember!" moments like in that Dead Alewives skit? I mean, there are times you will play a character dumber than you or a character smarter than you. If they have a high wisdom and a high sense motive you need to fill them in on the things they are picking up on. If they have a high intelligence the same thing. You don't expect people to be as physically strong as their orc barbarian or to actually know how to magic if they are a wizard. The same goes for how charismatic you are. So when someone rolls a good bluff or diplomacy check you kind of help them out. Charisma is the raw pulchritude, the skills themselves are knowing WHAT to say to someone to get the desired result. Of course, if they don't even want to know what that thing they need to say is, let alone actually say it, then they are being... well. Some people are just there to kill monsters. That isn't why I play. So to me consolidating some of the skills annoyed me. Once I played a ranger/barbarian with an eye that'd been partially put out. Could still see out of it, but it was fuzzy and she had the scar to show for it. It was a neverwinter nights server, and she got to epic levels. Some twat had us make a spot check while roleplaying to notice something about their character, as this server was modded to allow dice roll commands. At level 30+ she had a spot check that was +12ish, though I had a maxed listen check to make up for it. This person proceeded to ridicule me for my bad spot check and started rolling their massive power gamed twinked out skills to show off (Neverwinter Nights didn't force you to spend your skill points when you leveled up, so basically you'd have wizards stock up on them until they got very high leveled then take two or three levels of rogue before hitting their maximum and spending the lot of them there). Whatever explanation I had wasn't good enough because to this doofus any reason to limit your character like that was stupid. I've also played a ditzy rogue and deliberately made them easy to sneak up on to simulate that they never payed attention. That you consider certain skills for Rogues in 3.5 to be 'predetermined' (especially UMD, I actually kind of despise that skill and in at least one campaign banned it) tells me part of why we don't see eye to eye on this is that we have very different play styles. That's fine. I can... maybe see how 4th could appeal to a hack and slash player. But try to understand why it is anathema to me. That said I am not as upset about this one. The decision was made to streamline things and there is a good argument for a perception check to exist over dividing it into spot and listen. But to me it did sort of take some of the roleplay out of it, because sometimes there was a reason behind the skills doing basically the same thing but having a different flavor that might limit their use in certain situations. Some of the utility spells going out the window annoyed me, I liked having magic that didn't buff or kill stuff but most of it was removed if I recall correctly. You already mentioned 4th's lack of play testing, but this was a big issue. In previous editions game breaking characters occurred mostly through power gamers actively looking for combinations that would twink them out. In 4th characters ended up way too powerful just by following their class structure. Absolutely a result of the hand holding and desire to make 'everything a positive' and never a negative.
Moving on, yes, I vastly prefer playing sorcerer over wizard simply because of how much easier it is to keep track of things. We already went over that, but here is the thing, in third you had the choice. You could be a sorceress, have an easier time by picking whatever spell from your spell list you wanted to cast spontaneously. But there was a trade off in that wizards had access to more spells and got higher level spells sooner. The sorcerer was always ready to go and easier to figure out, but the wizard- if they knew what they were going up against- would be more way more effective against enemies with exploitable weaknesses so long as they had prep time. Like Batman. ;p What 4th did was basically take that choice away from you. You all work like sorcerers now, only even more simplified. And to a lot of people that was very upsetting. Sure, wizards might not have been the most friendly or easy class to play, but I recall playing one and making it a personal quest IC and OOC for them to learn every spell in the game through an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. The sheer number of spells that wizard had at their disposal was uncanny and it meant that if they knew they might be fighting, say a red dragon, they could stock up on ice spells and be way more useful than the sorcerer that might not even an ice spell (bare with me, we all know that powerful cryomancy dominates higher level spell lists) and picked fireball over lightning bolt for its better utility. That was a nuance that 4th decided to just throw out the window, at least on release. Your criticism of 3.5's magic items is also a bit silly. Oh, your players expect high powered magic items to just be sold anywhere and to get to customize their own without the craft feats? Not in my campaign. But the damage resistance on some of those enemies requires all of this BS! Guess I will just have to nerf it. ;p If I recall, I had any magic weapon halve damage resistance regardless of whether it called for silver or cold iron or whatever. 15 was about what Balors and Pitfiends stood at if I remember, so 7 was a bit more manageable especially for a high strength fighter whose magic sword no doubt also did element damage. Also having items not increase stats bugged me. Oh, you hit harder. What if I wanted to use it to be able to pick up more or do something cool like move a giant boulder from in front of a cave? Well, I can hit the boulder harder anyway. ;p You are the DM. You don't have to justify shit when altering monsters for your party to fight. The minion thing also kind of annoyed me. Yeah, they die in one hit. Okay. But if you are some high level powerful warrior with a high strength wouldn't a 4 HP monster also be a one hit kill anyway? Seemed redundant to me. But whatever. It is much easier to implement the things that you like from 4th into 3.5 than vice versa. But I might be bias, as I hate 4th pretty passionately both for its actual content and the behavior of WotC at launch. But what do I like and/or agree with you about on 4th? "It's not dungeons and dragons" is an invalid one to me. In fact, while writing this I consulted with someone to make sure I was remembering certain aspects of 4th correctly as they played it more than I did and don't hate it passionately like I do. One of the things they did say negatively about it was "It just wasn't D&D". This actually baffles me. Yes, there were lots of changes, but I already pointed out how similar 4th is to the supplement book Tome of Battle Nine Swords (which I also hate) for 3.5. All the same hallmarks of D&D are there. Just... in a really unpleasant and unappealing way designed to bring in people that played video games. I think you could say that it didn't FEEL like dungeons and dragons. But feelings aren't facts. While it was perhaps one of the biggest departures, I am sure lots of people said third didn't 'feel' like D&D when it came out. I am sure people said that about second as well. People don't like change, as a general rule of thumb. They like what is familiar to them. It is how you can get people that- no kidding- hate Pathfinder and Paizo because they aren't under the D&D 'brand' despite the game being almost a carbon copy of the third edition games. Or hate WotC simply for not being TSR. Its the same concept, even if it is more cosmetic than anything else. Rose tinted glasses. I already said being able to use at-will spells wasn't an AWFUL idea. But again, there are certain cases where a mage using up all their magic and exhausting themselves can lead to opportunities to roleplay. Finding themselves a little helpless and vulnerable when a major villain approaches, being forced to run or talk them down or surrender could be fun. If the villain does capture them then the rest of the party has to rescue them. Its kind of a double edged sword, but I lean towards dislike just a hair. It feeds too much into 4ths 'always positives for the players' nonsense that took the moxy out of the game. I like how they handled skills better. But I feel like that shot themselves in the foot. I like the idea of just being proficient in a skill, in theory it means that a low level character could be more skilled than a high level character. But then they murdered the idea by having half your level added to your skill checks. ;p So all the praise I just had? Disregard it. Because a 20th level character should automatically be more knowledgeable about history because "eh I had skill proficiency left over and wanted to spend it on something niche" than a first level character wanting to specialize in it as part of their back ground. Oh man killing those orcs sure did give this flippant historian deep knowledge, didn't it? That isn't just a problem with 4th, but at least in third you had to deliberately focus on it over several levels instead of just picking it as a lark. Still the seed of an idea is there. I personally have ranks, but also have them cap out at a certain point. Like in BESM, you could only get up to six ranks at which point you are considered a grand master, and each rank adds a +2 to the skill in question. Skill challenges were something I was already doing anyway in third though, before I even saw 4th. ;p Multiple rolls instead of just one, to give kind of a back and forth, and skills being used creatively. I did that for things like say a tug of war too. It wasn't all riding on one check and when you failed you'd just be pulled closer to the mud pit. You didn't mention it, but I also liked that you had a separate starting HP and HP per level/hit die. Which while more of the hand holding wasn't a bad idea. Low starting HP and the unbelievable fragility of first level characters was one reason why most games I played started on level 2 or 3 so it was a semi-needed fix. I like grit, not being taken out in one hit because a goblin rolled a critical hit and I was playing a mage. I can't speak to D&D essentials. I dropped all interest in D&D and WotC after 4th and haven't really went back. Only recently with people insisting 5th is pretty good have I even looked back in their direction, but I've only been a player in 5th and most of my stuff was being handled for me by the DM because, and I quote myself "I can't be fucked to learn a new system everytime Wizards of the Coast wants to sell us the same product with different rules". That might be ugly and a little mean spirited, but that's where I stand.
You can call me a newb or whatever, but I didn't really get into D&D until 2012. In 2011, a lot of shitty things were happening around me and my best friend was joining the army, and we saw Chris Perkin's game with the writers of Robot Chicken. Our mutual friend mentioned he had a "similar" game called HeroQuest. We played it, loved it, and then collectively decided to try D&D 4e, which is what Perkins was playing in the video that inspired us. I knew very little about D&D going into 4e. I saw one game of it on UA-cam and listened to Perkins's commentary, too. My uncle played AD&D before I was born, so I grew up hearing about the game and seeings bits and pieces of it around the house. You could say I had a preconceived notion of what D&D was and it had nothing to do with 2e or 3e. I'm saying this because it seems like a lot of your counter-arguments in 4e's defense is that "3e does it, too." Well, I knew nothing about 3e until just a couple years ago, and yet I had all the same problems when playing 4e. It was impossible not to look at it like a video game. The books and their presentation were structured in such a way that it all felt like a menu of mechanical options and all of the lore/fluff was brushed off to the side. I also felt heavily burdened with options to the point where I wasn't picking a race/class I wanted to play, but was instead picking "what my party needed." It didn't feel like there was really a difference between playing a Deva Shaman or a Pixie Monk, I just wrote down their numbers and took it from there. My friends and I didn't really get how people got INTO roleplaying, since it seemed like there was no mechanical reason for it and our entire focus was on shifting and charging and moving minis around maps. Did it matter what my race was? I couldn't understand why. Also, putting things like magic items in the foreground - for a new player, making his character - was really confusing, because now I suddenly felt like I was supposed to have like a super cool totem or something, but I couldn't find where it said how my character got the thing or what it really was besides a +1 to a stat. What makes this even worse is that I actually roleplayed while playing HeroQuest, even though no one asked me to, because it just seemed like a fun way to keep the mood light. Playing 4e, I was always sitting there looking through cards and trying to make sure I used my abilities at the right moment, I barely paid attention to what the DM was saying and none of us could remember each other's names/races. If 3e was like this, too, I don't see how that makes it suddenly okay. Maybe 3e was also really grating for people but they were willing to ignore that stuff for the first couple years. Or maybe 3e's other features distracted them from those aspects they disliked. All I really know about 3e is that it seems to heavily be about crafting your own magic items. If people like that aspect, they'd probably forgive a few poorer parts of the game. But if all the game is is those parts you dislike, then why bother with it? The way I grew up understanding D&D was that it was a legitimate roleplaying game, not like DragonQuest or Final Fantasy where you just customize a player avatar, but a game where you have full agency over what is ostensibly supposed to be a real person. All of the descriptions of superpowers and statistics are just a reference for your benefit, so you understand the physics of how this person operates in their world. When making your character, you should be thinking about what they look like, where they're from, what they're doing at this point in time, not things like your role in your party (which 4e emphasizes) or whether your racial and class features synergize well or not (which were the only things I really noticed flipping through the books). I can earnestly say that 5e at least presents that illusion to me. When I flip through a 5e book, I see a lot of stuff about why characters would want to be certain things in-universe or why a certain class is able to perform a specific feat over someone else, and not just numbers. That shit comes afterwards. You don't need to know that until you're doing it. In 4e, all I see are stat blocks. Also, this is kind of a weak argument, but I hated 4e's artwork. At least for the races/classes. Gnomes look like Santa's little helpers got raped by some species of alien arthropods. The half-orc - resident big bad bruiser - looks like a balding middle aged man; and I mean that for both the male and female. Even when I did try to read more into the lore of races, when it came time for me to pick what my Shaman would be, I discovered that every single high WIS race was some boring asshole alien who's tied to the fucking creation of the cosmos. I didn't find out until 5e that it was possible for me to play something else. Look at which races in 5e get a bonus to WIS: feral hippie Elves, the cunning and pragmatic Lizardman, the gentle giant Firbolg, creepy Hobbits, quiet fishy Water Genasi. I think I just described a more varied cast of characters than every 4e book combined. It's so jarring to me because every now and then I'll read a small bit of text in a 5e book or see a picture of something and suddenly become inspired to play something new and I end up creating a whole character or encounter based on it. In 4e, I only ever wanted to be a Pixie Monk for the memes. At the end of the day, though, I think what it all boils down to is that you're not going to get anywhere by telling people their arguments "aren't fair." People experience things and they - without any conscious, intellectual input - like or dislike it. If you ask them why, they will try to deconstruct their own feelings for you. To then say, "Well, your feelings are wrong," won't help you or them understand where those feelings came from. You can change someone's appreciation for something conceptual, but you can't actually change their unconscious feelings for something they themselves have experienced. It's like trying to convince someone 2001 isn't boring because it's so deep and abstract. They're not mutually exclusive; they'll still think the movie's boring.
Also, I've posted a lot, but I also had a ton of very specific problems and had trouble finding anyone who could help answer my questions. I played a Deva Shaman once and really struggled with both the roleplaying aspect and the mechanical one. For one, the book tells you all Devas are emotionless bastions of knowledge. Right off the bat, I wondered why anyone would want to roleplay as such a thing, but also how you could explain a level 1 shithead supposedly having several lifetimes worth of knowledge. I constantly second-guessed what my character would think or do in a certain situation, because there was no reasonable way for my stats to reflect my character, not because of how I wrote him, but because his entire race is that way. As for mechanics, I read through a ton of forum arguments on Shaman mechanics. Is my Spirit Bear ethereal or corporeal? No answer. It takes up a space, but is it really a "spirit" then? Can I ride it? Got a lot of shrugs from that question. How about abilities like Healing Rain or Spirit of the Healing Flood (I think that's what they're called)? My DM once gave a puzzle that, after much deduction, we figured out was solvable by splashing this rune with a ton of water. We twiddled our thumbs for like an hour before the DM told me he intended for me to use my spell on it, to which I asked, "Wait, my spells create ACTUAL water?" Which then got everyone thinking, because they don't sound like spells that create water - they're not described as such - they just sound like video gamey bullshit. What does Spirit of the Healing Flood? It heals people. Duh. Does it, like, summon a chick who dumps water on everyone that has medicinal properties? Does it create a giant potion of healing that shatters above all of us? Does it literally just drop numbers onto my friends' character sheets? No one could answer these questions for me. Don't even get me started on the "your spirit animal uses your movement to move" thing. I almost flushed my bear mini down the toilet when I found that Wizards had nothing to say to aspiring shamans who actually wanted to reach the enemies before the encounter ended, but was stuck behind a fucking shed with their pet and was afraid to "cheat" by using the more beneficial interpretation of that statement and not one of the other two.
It's not a matter of saying people's feelings are wrong, but I do believe 4th Edition is overly criticized. A lot of the complaints in 4th stemmed from elements that were first introduced in 3rd and it is important to make that distinction. When people said, for example that having Diplomacy as a skill killed Role Playing in 4th, it needs to be understood that skill was introduced in 3rd. You don't have to like the version of the game and that is fine. There are lots of reasons that someone might dislike 4th, but it's also okay to defend it as well. All I am doing is providing context for some of those common complaints. In the end everyone should make their own decisions.
The problem I could see with 4th edition was that the core rule books seemed empty as if they were designed for children. All the meat and detail of the 3.5 edition which made the fantasy world alive and rich seemed to of been cast aside
In terms of 4e not fostering role-playing you forgot 2 things: 4e defining characters by combat roles and pushing miniature and battle-mat use. I love miniatures and cool maps as much as the next guy but if you define a character by what weapon he/she uses and assign combat roles and then define their abilities/powers almost exclusively by what they do in combat and on the battle mat..then you are going to have to work harder to incorporate role-playing.
I don't think you do. Some of the best Role Playing that I've seen from my players occurred in my 4th Edition Campaign. I designed adventures in 4th Edition the same way I would for any other edition. My players were ones who were resistant to 4th Edition, but in the end they still greatly enjoyed the role playing opportunities I presented them.
The notion that strategic combat and miniatures limit role playing is pure nonsense. It just doesn't. The main problem with 4th ed was the expectation that RPG players actually knew how to role play. Get a better DM, and maybe try to use your imagination a little.
I DM as a more role-play type and describe what you're doing philosophy, based on starting in 2nd edition. I feel like the skill system started in 3rd edition has killed that type of roleplaying and player creativity. With 4th edition being so combat focused and geared around these are what the characters do in combat, definitely turned me off and to this date it is the only edition I have not played.
D&D has always been combat focused, character classes have always been built around combat, a 1st Edition AD&D Monk had to engage in combat with a higher level Monk in order to level up. One of the classes in D&D is literally called the Fighter. Most Wizard and Clerical spells are meant to be used in combat situations from the very beginning of the game. It's up to the DM to create interesting Role Playing situations and that can be done regardless of Edition.
DravenSwiftbow I thought this exact same thing right after I had submitted the comment, regarding how all previous editions class abilities were based on combat. I think what sets the later editions apart is the specific combat abilities where earlier editions were pretty generic and basic which encouraged more caution and world interaction with the players. Now a lot of things are easily defined for the players which is nice in some regards, but I miss the role-play interaction as opposed to just rollling for something to occur. It has made my job as DM a little harder to nudge and encourage that role-play with my groups, but it works itself out.
as you say, i played all editions and, in the end, 4th edition gave me the foundation to develop my own system, which i've been using for 10 years to this day
Thank you for this series on 4th Edition!
You helped me to see that parts of 5th Edition had their roots in 4th, and I now understand that many of the things I like in 5th would be things I could enjoy in 4th. Your effort to go into such detail is much appreciated.
I'm very much looking forward to hearing your take on 5th Edition. Best wishes to you and yours for a happy, healthy 2017!
Wow, thank you very much. That really means a lot to me.
You are very welcome. Keep up the good work!
Watching this retrospective series two years after you posted it. Great videos, well thought out and executed. I think this is some of the best gaming content on UA-cam. Thank you, Draven.
Thank you very much for watching. I put a lot of time into this series so I am glad to see it well received.
We should have a convention for 4e fans. It's so hard to find a group that wants to play it these days
I would love that
All 14 of you
One other thing that was different in 4e compared to earlier versions, is the fact that 1st level characters actually were able to survive in the World due to the higher starting hitpoint. This is one of the features from 4e I miss in 5e.
Martin Bernth Johannesson Higher starting HP along with everyone being able to heal to some degree during short rests does make 4e PCs far more viable at low level. That along with all the options at-will powers give low level characters makes 4e one of the only system I want to play a low level character. Played a level 1 fighter in 2e campaign and in combat my options were hit it with my sword, hit it with my sword, or hit it with my sword...
Wow, you are dead on about 4e, both its strengths and weaknesses. I have been saying for years if any other company released 4e, under any other name, it would have been a critical success, and everyone would have been saying, "It's like D&D, but fixed!" I also agree with your assessment that Pathfinder ultimately made D&D and the hobby as a whole better. As they say, what doesn't kill your game, makes it stronger...
So glad you made these videos. 4e is still my favorite and it's great to hear someone discuss it.
You mention that part of the strong reaction was because of the D&D name and that it may have been more popular under a different name. I've wondered before if it would have been better received as a spin-off, say "D&D Tactics."
It makes me sad that more isn't being done with the system. I wish Wizards would at least re-release some of the books with all the errata and extra powers and such from Dragon included.
that makes sense, as a tactics wargame, this would have done well under a different name.
I had been out of the game for 14 years and came back for 5th edition, having watched this 4th edition series I kind of wish I had came back sooner. I now plan to pick up some 4th edition core books!!! Thanks Draven!!!
This might be a bit late, but I would recommend sticking to Essentials and some of the lower level stuff in 4e. Once you starting getting past level 5 or so, the difficulty treadmill can make sessions very combat heavy as you can find yourself spending upwards of an hour on certain encounters. Once you hit paragon (levels 10-20) this becomes incredibly obnoxious and 4e's 'newbie friendly' design begins to look like a series of traps intended to elongate battles as much as possible. I eventually came up with an elaborate set of house rules to speed up combat but vanilla 4e really plods.
Honestly, outside of monster design and some dank lore, most of the cool shit from 4e ended up in 5e.
All that being said, for the first few levels of play, 4e is a blast. It's a shame the game scales so poorly.
While having more core books meant that you technically needed more books, there is one MAJOR benefit to this over what was done in 3rd edition. OFFICIAL CANON STATUS! I had so many of the 3.x splat books and so many of the classes, races, prestige classes, spells, etc, that were found in any non core book never should up again. anytime you saw a book or magazine would present new updates to classes/races they only included the core book material. I got the oriental adventure book for 3.0 that my players loved. I had a player playing a wujen and another playing a shugenja, not once did we see anything new for those classes. then 3.5 came out and revised them and again they faded away with out any new material where the other classes had many new updates for them.
Not so in 4.0 when the sorcerer was introduced in ph2, that would have been the end of it in 3.x, but future books/magazines had new material for the sorcerer, druids, and all the new classes/races that came out in the core book. those were official classes. you didn't have to worry about your class becoming obsolete because it was as fully canon as the fighter, the wizard, the rogue and the cleric. That was immense for me. I can tell from your videos you didn't seem to enjoy new options, but my group and i loved it and we were happy for something beyond the "standard" when you mentioned the classes/races for the first essentials book the only thought in my mind was pass. fighter/wizard/rogue/cleric is as plain vanilla and boring as can be. the second book you mentioned however was much more interesting. But with 3.x we soon realized all the options given to us were worthless as they were going to be left to rot while the standard classes would continue to get upgrades. 4e was the first time this was solved for me and for that i am very grateful.
This is a really good outline. I played 4e from 1-30th level and I think you are 100% fair about the strengths and problems 4e.
Stumbled upon your great retrospective, and as a diehard 4e GM, I think you missed one highly notable feature of this edition, which was its incredible ease of use & customization for GMs. I started playing tabletop with GURPS and D&D 3.5, and both systems require a ton of finicky "gut-feeling" estimates and assumptions to build an adventure. With 4e, everything from encounter-building to monster-creation is wholly transparent, and it's easy to "get under the hood" and still have a playable adventure. For one campaign, I even wrote a custom genie-type race and elementalist class - with powers! - as well as custom magic items & artifacts for players to use.
I've followed along with the development of 5e, and I'm glad that media attention (vlogs, Twitch, Stranger Things) has exploded the hobby and opened it up to a broader range of people. But I keep seeing that most 5e GMs are either running mostly pre-published stuff, or are prior-edition GMs just riffing off of years of experience. I don't see that same confidence to seize the creator's pen in 5e that 4e (and arguably 2e) championed, and that makes me sad.
I have always thought that wizards should sell an alternate system dnd game based on 4e. After watching your videos i've learned they had concurrent alternate games like chainmail, the minis and the star wars, d20 modern, and gamma world. So if they did it right they could do something really good. I always figured they could call it something like dnd tactical or something. So for those who want a more dynamic battle system you could use the tactical system and those who want a more streamlined system could use the standard 5e rules, or you could mix and match. perhaps most of the dungeon might be in standard rules but the boss fight might use the tactical system. There are plenty who still like 4e, who would enjoy that.
I agree, and would love to see them do something like that. It could be as simple as releasing it as D20 Fantasy, or D&D Tactics. It will never happen, but it would be interesting
I still prefer 4E to 3.5 and Pathfinder. None of the classes are overpowered, balance is maintained through the game. It isn't you hit level 15 and the Wizard murders everything in combat on one turn, while early levels Wizards hide in a barrel while the rest of the party does everything. Skill use is the other area where it shines. Everyone is able to roll for Arcana, which makes sense. You're traveling around picking up bits of information so there's a chance that random bit of Arcane knowledge the Fighter heard at a market three months back might be useful in a situation right now.
I've always thought 4th Edition was under appreciated. I look at how much of the 4th Edition ideas made their way into 5th Edition.
Any class could use Arcana knowledge in 3.5 too; wizards just got it as a class skill, so could more easily gain ranks in it.
@@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself Actually you couldn't for anything higher than DC 10. From the 3.5 SRD: "An untrained Knowledge check is simply an Intelligence check. Without actual training, you know only common knowledge (DC 10 or lower). "
I ran a 4E campaign for about 18 months. It didn't really feel like D&D to me mainly because it was obvious (and hit you over the head with the fact) that the classes and powers were designed to be of use in combat against the enemies written for the monster manual. Not that there were people (in classes) that had various abilities and the character would then try to make use of them to face a chaotic and dangerous world. It was possible to pull out the 12 to 16 main power effects and strip the fluff text and no classes were needed if you just had the power that attacks twice, the power that moves an enemy 10 feet, the power that attacks and moves one ally, the one that did X dice damage, etc. If felt too contrived, like it was obviously a "game world" the player was driving an avatar through.
i think the reason some people likely complained that 4e made you more dependent on magic items is because they wanted to play it as a 3x style game. They carried over the 3x expectations to 4e and even 5e and to reach that expectation they felt they needed ever more magic items. So if in the 3x they needed at least a +6 weapon and they had all this gear to increase their primary character stat mode by +10 well it was much harder to do that in 4e because that wasn't the way the game was designed to be played. but if your 3x experience told you that your character would be worthless without at least a +x weapon and a +Y mod to your stats and you tried to do that with 4e you might feel there will be a huge dependence on those magic items. This is especially true if you made all all of your assumptions having only read the rules and not actually playing the game.
also from what i heard from other players/parties was that they bascially houseruled wizards in such a way that they either also had spontanious casting or other similar rules so that it was easier for them, since most people probably liked the wizards larger spell access but hated the preperation requirement and didn't want to play a sorcerer because of the spell known limitation.
Just finished watching the whole series and it was very interesting and fun to watch. Thanks for taking out of you time to create this type of content.
Thank you very much for taking the time to watch. It means a lot to me
I have been playing RPGs for roughly 30 years off and on, but it was always AD&D and even alternatives like the World of Darkness stuff and Palladium books. I actually missed 3.0 and 3.5 d&D, so when I got back into playing again I went straight to 4th. I thought it was really good and a lot of fun. I had no idea about any of the controversy until later. I somewhat recently played in a Roll20 4th edition campaign and with the map and grid available there it made the game even easier to play. I must admit that there was a lot of bloat for completionists, but for the average person I think the core books were fine. Anyhow, good series, looking forward to the 5E review--which I think is one of the best editions of the game.
I never played 2nd ed or earlier though i did have the dragonstrike box set as a kid. But i did play both 3rd, 3.5 and 4th ed. We as a group gave 4th ed many months of playing and ultimately it killed our group. As a player I've never been as unhappy with a character by level 5 only the ranger in the group was still landing hits, running base modules and WotC written villans. Every session was 2-4 hours of watching only the ranger score hits while the other 4 players struggled to acomplish anything, this was a direct consequence of the change in saving throws from chance based rolls to actual def scores. As a additional addon, I would also say the very strict typecasting of classes was also a major letdown for me. For me part of the charm of table top games is how varied the classes could be, and no 2 charactors even if having the same class had to be played the same, maybe in your groups people did play the identically, but in groups i played in, that was frowned upon heavily. I also want to qualify that I went into 4th ed without any of the predujce that you describe here, simply because I wasnt aware of any of it. I went in blind and innocent of any meta-drama surrounding its release. My opinion of it was formed only through direct playing and that it was bad enough that I still havent tried 5th ed yet, and basically convinced me to never trust WotC again.
The main problem with 4E is that in role-playing you imagine to do things and the rules as the interface between you and the World. 4E subverts this concept by presenting you a string of combats loosely called "an adventure". (the less I do speak about the "class roles" the better: this should be an emergent behaviour, not something hardcoded in the rules).
Regarding the skill system, I don't see how it can be an obstacle to role-playing: it defines what your character knows and can do, nothing more.
4E was full of dire features, starting with the infamous "moving diagonally costs 1". This led to square fireballs, debates about if a gelatinous cube could, then, roll down a corridor, and non-euclidean geometry worlds.
And the quality of writing in 4E was childish. A 3/3.5E book was usually a pleasure to read - even if you used only part of it or the rules were broken. It treated the players as adults without alienating the younger audience. The 4E books I read were written for primary school gamers who were interested in playing ubercool characters (just look at the average illustration, with its perspective points bleeding into next timezone).
Wizards tried to be "cool" instead of striving to put out a good product. Pathfinder understood that leaving the good road would have been a mistake. What could go wrong for Wizards?
I think the main issue that people said "Magic Items were that necessary" in 4E is because of the fact the math on the monsters up until the Monster's Vault and Monster Manual 3 was severely bloated. The math they used in the third monster manual and essentials line fixed this main problem. There was also the issue of that math making "feat taxes" that they felt were an issue to keep up with the numbers needed to hit the defenses that were present. I find the easiest way to fix this is to implement the inherent bonuses from the DMG(2)/Dark Sun Campaign Setting to help alleviate it and let you distribute magic items that are based on effects vs the bonuses needed. Also I know this is years late but I came across your videos when I was reminiscing about the enjoyment i had with 4th edition, despite the flaws it had.
Thank you, that is probably the best explanation I have heard (or read) on the Magic Item issue.
I didn't get many chances to run 4E sadly and when I did it was 1st-4th level so I never really experienced higher level play with the early Monster Books, by the time I could convince my friends to try it I was using the Monster Vault.
All these years later and I still have a lot of positive nostalgia for 4th. I kept all my books and have been picking up more and more over time (over 30 books now). I think I’m going to run a 4th edition game next, instead of 6th.
Awesome. I'm actually starting a series about 4th Edition, and the first video is going live tomorrow (Nov 22nd)
@ that’s great news. I like 5th edition, but I’m glad channels like yours still occasionally fly the flag for older versions of the game - like 4th! Thanks!
Dude, this was a great breakdown. I bought dice years ago before 5e was out and I definitely think the system in 4 would have confused me like crazy, but knowing what I missed out is definitely making me enjoy starting 5e now 6 years later after buying dice and forgetting I had them. Thanks man. I'm sure I'll pick up 4 for more numbers! lol
thanks for this series (and all your videos). Based on your videos and Matt Colvilles's ones, i just bought the 4e Player's Handbook and Monster Manual (they were $12.95 on amazon!). I already own 5e and Pathfinder books and really like them. What i wanna do is just take the parts that i like from each system (maybe even dungeon world) and try to mixed them freely, just like Matt Colville says. All the best from Chile!
I just want to say that I really appreciate your breakdown of the history of D&D. I have been playing D&D since 2nd Edition and you cover many of the issues that come up with D&D in a clear and balanced way. None of the editions are perfect and there were many parts of 4E that where handled poorly, but it is nowhere near as bad as the toxic branches of the gaming community make it out to be and hopefully when WotC decides to open up the licencing, we will see a true 4.5 that addresses the shortcomings of the edition while keeping with the spirit that made 4E what it is (modular character development systems, Skill Challenges that allow DMs to set up engaging and challenging scenarios for players, etc).
Love the videos!!!!
Thank you very much, your kind words really mean a lot to me. I would love to see more support for 4th Edition since like you I thought it had a lot of positive concepts and ideas behind it even if the execution wasn't perfect (Calling things "Powers" rather than "Abilities" for example). I have started to see a slight shift in attitude towards 4th Edition over the past year or so, but there is still a long way to go.
Hey man, thanks for your retrospective on all the editions, well done! I got the 5e players handbook this Christmas. think I'm a bit older than you. When I was a kid some friends (or their older brothers) had the original AD&D books which I never played, but I was fascinated just reading them. I played a ranger 2e a bit with my buddy as DM and his little brothers (1 thief and 3 rangers all Drizzt clones lol). Anyways, it's been about 25 years since I've played. I really want to play again but I don't know anybody who DM's. I made my wife create a character but she's not into it (sigh, might have to try my luck as a DM) I'm rambling, sorry I don't know how to send a private message, but I wanted to say thanks. Your retrospect was great, I appreciate all the effort you put into it. The first few videos were a real trip down memory lane, and the 3-5e videos were very informative and was just what I needed to understand what's happened in the dnd world while I wasn't paying attention. Good job and thanks!!
Oh and no more THAC0!! (So much better, right?)
Thank you very much for the kind words. It means a lot to me to hear someone genuinely enjoyed the series so far, I've put a lot of time into my retrospective in terms of research, writing and some times hours of recording.
I don't miss THAC0 at all, but at the same time 2nd Edition is where I broke into D&D and every once in a while I'll look through my 2nd Edition PHB.
I know it can be difficult to find groups some times so I recommend the RPG One Shot Facebook group. The goal for it is to get groups together for gaming usually through online through Skype, Google Hangouts etc.
Here is the link if you want to check out the group:
facebook.com/groups/tabletoprpgoneshot/
I hope it helps, and again thank you very much for watching
DravenSwiftbow cheers, I'll check out the Facebook group. Thanks again. :)
I like 4E as much as anyone, but no, it did not handle magic items well. Your characters (ALL your characters) absolutely had to have certain items by certain levels or they rapidly fell behind the power curve and threw the whole encounter system off. Everyone needed to fill their neck slot for F/R/W defenses, their armor slot for AC, and a weapon or implement of choice for accuracy and damage boosting. They simply weren't optional at all. Overlevel items were loot finds, but the ease of making weaker items made all your gear need replacing regularly as they became outmoded. It was a very MMO-inspired system, and one of the weakest elements of 4E. 3/3.5 had a lot of problems there too, but the 4E attempt at a fix was a failure. Go look at 13th Age for how to do magic items right in what's basically a 4E game engine.
Essentially (no pun intended) my view. I love 4th edition. It was my gateway to D&D, and as far as new players, the Essentials line is the best place to start.
Core 4th got a little crazy with throwing around stat modifiers, shifting, marking, it got crazy. Essentials toned it down. I still believe there was a lot of potential, and I think something like 4th is actually the future of D&D.
I'll be starting an Essentials game with friends from work soon, and I'm very excited about it.
this is an incredibly well researched and balanced take on 4e. this was a joy to watch and pushed me to finally fill out my 4e hardcover collection. i look forward to the rest of the series! also did you make that extend skill challenge video you spoke of yet?
Well made and said dude.. I watched Ep 6 parts 1 to 4.. I totally agree with you.. 4th suffered unfair bandwagoning basically.. It is a well balanced and smooth flowing edition.. There is far more to the game than realised.. I think a lot of people suffer a lack of imagination and unfortunately those that do have a very loud voice..
As an old-school DM, I always felt that spellcasters having to pre-select their spells was a fun-killer. They would always choose combat spells. You couldn't even present a situation where more interesting spells were useful, because they'd never have them memorized. They could never even memorize Spider Climb, because they had to memorize Burning Hands twice. It's idiotic, really.
I remember starting to run a 4th campaign starter campaign. There was an ambush woth 4 goblins. The fight took 4 hours. I played and ran 3.5 during its entire run.
I tried roleplaying the goblns like I roleplayed them in 3.5. My lungs about died. Everything is too much of a health sponge. It seens to me if I were to continue playing it back then everyone would just be sitting around not roleplaying anything and just rolling dice. I don't see how 4 hour hp sponge combat encouges any type of roleplaying.
Just want to rant about zombies and immunities too...
Not to mention they made it possible to affect automations like zombies with fear. Though that looks like its still a problen in 5th heh. Alsohm hoe things created with magic that have no weak points can be critted is beyond me. Does that mean things like zombies have to have a weak pint like the brain? Imolying everything is a disease? If thats the case shouldn't zombies have a bite attack and the ability to inflict something that makes other cretures they bite zombies too? Or maybe you can dislodge a black onyx so you can use it (or the necomancer can use it again?). I always made thr black onyx get absorbed, but if there has to be a weak point thats the main thing that makes since. Rant over I guess.
im going to sell all my 5e and get 4e
Great video series. 4e is my favorite edition, and I’m an old timer.
Thank you for this great vid. I have moved on from 4th edition and would hardly revisit it for a full campaign, but I had so many good experiences with it. The "you can't roleplay" complaint I always found to be total bullshit: I played in a long running Eberron 4th edition campaign that was probably the best roleplaying experience I had in a long time because we, well, roleplayed a lot: we even roleplayed during the lenghty combat encounters (we came from two campaigns of Exalted, so we basically had elaborate descriptions of attacks and cheesy dialogue during combat burned in our DNA by that point) and it was a lot of fun. Seriously, even if Wizards made up a complex social system for 4th edition the same people would have complained that "there are too much rules, I can't roleplay properly".
Do you think with the 4e controversy that the books will become more valuable? After getting into and loving 5e I started looking into 4e to see what that was like. I am glad we are playing 5e because I feel 4e is more tactical and mechanically heavy. The group of friends I play with never thought they would play dnd. I think that’s a testament to how well 5e was done. I have started collecting the 4e books and have already noticed prices rising due to harder availability. Thank you for doing these videos!
Thank you for your question David (nice name by the way) I actually did a video on the subject in response if you want to check it out
This series on 4th ed. has been fantastic. Thanks for putting it together.
Interesting series. I only bought the 4th ed DMG and Player's Handbook. The thing that put me off was just the volume of books and supplements. Same problem with 3rd ed tbh. Having said that we play online now, my group are all MMO players too and we like the Ravenloft series of board games. I'm playing a BECMI campaign at the moment, reigniting the RPG flame but I think I might give 4th ed a go once that finishes. Thanks for the impartial and informative review.
Thank you for watching! I was put off by the amount of books that came out for 4E as well since I started collecting it after a couple of years. Honestly all you really need are the initial Core Rulebooks and you'll have everything you need for some great games. Also when the time comes I can answer any questions you might have about 4E.
4e is actually the reason I have not played 5e. I continue to wait to see an announcement for 6e because if WoTCs history.
Normally I would totally agree with you, however so far 5th Edition has been handled extremely well. Everything they consider gets released as playtest material. If you are concerned about investing money (and these books are expensive) then I recommend downloading the Basic Rules from the Wizards website. It has the standard races (Human, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling) and classes (Fighter, Cleric, Rogue and Wizard) for all of their 20 level progression. You can then download the Unearthed Arcana articles which have playtest material for several classes as well as an alternate Ranger (from level 1-20). It's all completely free.
I am a collector like yourself, so the money part is not a factor. I think it is just all those behind the scene things that WoTC did to mishandle 4e that put fear into me. Such as their promises of online tools that were killed off well before they were started, and the second straight edition with a flood of books that bloated the game. There were things about 4e that I was not a huge fan of, but I played that edition from launch to about a little over a year after and stopped when Pathfinder launched. I never looked back, but I am realizing from watching your videos and Matt Coleville's video about using 4e in 5e, that there was so much good in the edition that I should use. I guess the TLDR of it all is that 4e itself was not the issue that burnt me, it was WoTC's handling of 4e. Hearing all the good on how 5e is being handled has me leaning heavily toward getting past my fears and picking up the books.
Also what they did to the Forgotten Realms and they way they (WOTC) treated Realms fans in 4e was pretty disgusting.
Also what they did to The World and the way they (WOTC) treated points-of-light fans in 5e was pretty disgusting.
(without trolling) I don't think 4e fans and Forgotten Realms fans will ever truly reconcile :(
You can play 4E in third edition settings. A setting is just the backdrop, the world. The edition is just the rule set. You can run a 4E campaign in Ravenloft if you want
Except that the FR 4E are simply dire. I bought the two books while I was in Washington for my job and I left them in a bin at the airport.
That was one of the main reasons I never bothered going back to 4e. I started with ad&d 2e in the late 80s, and stuck with it until around when 5e was starting to emerge.
So now I play 3.5.
4th is the only edition where players were not overpowered in my experience. I've played 3, 3.5, 4th, 5th, and pathfinder all of those others are more busted than 4th
Back in the winter I tested 1st Level Human FIghters from each Edition against a never ending line of Goblins in a series of One-on-One fights until the Fighter was defeated. I ran each test 10 times to create an average and the 4th Edition Fighter killed the fewest Goblins, only averaging slightly over two goblins, where as the 3rd Edition Fighter killed up to 14 before being defeated himself.
4th Edition characters "looked" powerful if you read the character sheet by itself, but monsters were similarly designed the goblin warrior had HP comparable to the Fighters. When compared to something like the new Pathfinder Playtest where a 1st level character can have 15-26 hit points, but a Goblin still has only 6 HP it is a huge difference in power is much greater. 4th Edition is one of the most balanced editions to have been released
@@DravenSwiftbow: That doesn't really sound like a fair test. The equivalent to the "standard" goblin of older editions should really be a minion.
Just taking 3e as an example, a generic goblin with no class levels was a CR 1/3, so it takes three of them just to equal an at level threat for a 1st level fighter, plus those goblins would only have 5 HP each so a fighter with a reasonable strength score and combat focused feat selection will almost always drop them in a single hit.
Pitting a 4e Fighter against non-minion goblins would be more like pitting a 3e Fighter against a Goblin that is itself also a first level fighter.
I am very surprised that many of your 3e groups' players preferred sorcerer over wizard. Intelligence is almost always better than charisma, mechanically and flexibly. Wizards received higher level spells sooner, and what really sold it for me, was that wizards were free to toy around with the fun niche spells. Stuff like mount, Tenser's disk, disguise self, whispering wind - these are nifty little toys that sorcerers need to miss out on due to their very restrictive spell lists. The wizard looked bad on paper, but in play tended to be more enjoyable for myself and most of my friends once we experimented with the less popular situational spells the wizard can afford to learn
It never seemed to work out that way for me. My players were willing to wait the extra level as long as it meant not being locked into their spell selection. During my last 3.5 Campaign I house ruled in a magic system similar to what we have now in 5th Edition, but even then the Arcane player played a Warmage.
It's definitely a difficult trade off. Either way you have a restricted spell list. I can honestly understand where someone can feel more frustration with a wizard, guessing and forming their spells every time they rest, and inevitably having spell slots wasted on something that didn't have an opportunity to be used. At the same time the spontaneous guys are missing out on the spells that are not worth learning, but are truly fun to use. Did you find that this was also the case with favored soul or any other spontaneous divine caster that I'm forgetting over the cleric/druid?
I never had anyone actually play a Favored Soul in any of my campaigns.Clerics and Druids seemed the better choice as they had access to all the spells on their spell lists, and Clerics in particular were more versatile as they could swap spells for cure spells
3.5 wizards also more easily got item creation and metamagic feats. Sorcerers are great at low levels with a good handful of spells, but as they advance, they don't do anything else. They can get a familiar, but a wizard gets summon familiar, scribe scroll, spell research, school specialization, and bonus feats for more item creation or metamagic like I mentioned earlier.
At higher levels, wizards are far more magical.
So this retrospective series isn't done yet? You gonna make a video on the 5th edition any time soon? This was a fantastic journey and I'd love to see it locked with the current edition which I know nothing about.
No it isn't done. I'm still trying to find information on the Playtest Packets. I'll also be occupied with personal matters for the next few weeks. I'm hoping to have the 5th Edition video or videos completed some time in March
i wish i knew how much better 4e was than 5e before i was scammed into buying it by the nerds at the nerdstore.
Thoroughly enjoyed this series and has me excited to revisit 4th edition soon. Thanks for putting these together.
Awesome videos and narrative on history. I haven't played 5th edition yet but look forward to it.
I think 4E releasing a line of bland and lacklustre adventures to carry the line forward after the core books really hurt them.
What’s your favorite D&D edition?
Honestly the answer changes pretty regularly. I enjoy every edition of D&D for what it is. That said as of right now my top three are: 3) D&D BECMI 2) D&D 3.5 and 1) 4th Edition
But ask me again next month and it will likely be different.
It sounds as if management tied the hands of designers to make them have it lock into an online D&D experience that mostly never materialised. I wonder if they had the freedom of past D&D designers, not hobbled that way, if it would have looked so like World of Warcraft etc. I never played WoW but my younger friends said it was very like MMOs. Still, that might not have been the fault of the designers.
Would you consider 4e a good system for solo players?
I think it could be, so long as they have an NPC with them. For Solo play I would recommend using more Minions and not going above an Elite Monster.
Solo Monsters were designed to take on a party of 5 PC's.
Great synopsis, thanks for putting it together!
Great analysis and commentary.
Thank you
I never agreed with any of the complaints.
1. "Changed spells and classes."
Yeah, for the better in all ways. Finally, one fighter is not the same as the other, and wizards don't go from useless to overpowered. Every class has a wide array of abilities, rather than a single focus with limited pathways to customization. At-will powers are the best thing to ever happen to D&D.
2. "Too combat heavy."
The fuck? What version of D&D doesn't have tons of combat? Where does it say in the rules that all, or even any encounters need to be combat encounters? The strategic system, monster types, and powers introduced in 4th ed made the combat more fun and detailed than ever. Fight as much or as little as you want. "Too combat focused" is on the group and their goals, not the rules.
3. "It killed the role-playing aspect."
If you think it did that, you never knew a thing about role-playing in the first place. Like combat, this element is entirely on the players and the DM. This complaint makes no sense to me at all. 4th ed doesn't limit role-playing in any way. Lamebrains do that, and then blame the rules. Learn how to actually role-play. The skill system in 4th ed is the best in any edition.
4. "They turned in into an MMO."
MMO's evolved from D&D. Not only is nothing lost from the added MMO style elements, the addition is purely beneficial. D&D is a pen and paper MMO. It always has been. It's a huge positive, with no negative impact at all.
"MMOs evolved from D&D". Not really. MMOs evolved from MUDs which, while there were a few that used D&D or D&D-like systems the most popular and influential ones had their own unique rulesets and, at most, borrowed some class elements from it.
You've said in an earlier video you didn't own or use the Powers books, so where are you getting this balance issue stuff from? Online anecdotes? 4E's biggest problem was the monster stats, not the player abilities. Early monsters were often badly designed and far off the curve in terms of power level. By Essentials they'd finally gotten the formulas down pat (as proven by Monster Vault and Nentir Vale) and creatures started being real threats even to a well-coordinated party. Prior to that there were too many lousy write-ups, especially on solos and the perennially underperforming minions. Those badly built early monsters are a huge chunk of what hurt this game's popularity. They made what should have been hard encounters trivial way too often and removed all sense of threat. Which, ironically, seems to be a major issue with 5th - players don't feel a threat of death very often.
Is there going to be a 5e retrospective?
Probably not until 6th or 5.5 editon
My friend, that had never seen it, said it was just like GURPS, which is nonsense, so the rumour mill was so unfair at times.
Thanks, I really like your videos. 4th ed is my favorite edition.
Excellent video, thanks
D&D 4E let players see behind the curtain too much to lose the illusion of the great and mighty Oz. If it had not let people see so much under the hood, did not handle skill difficulties in exactly the way they did and did not name feats and accomplishments as "powers" it would help. The essentials made it so fighters were a lot less weirdly presented. People were right to wonder why the fighter had "powers" but it was just the name. An anaemic layout and look was just an added problem.
If _"seeing behind the curtain"_ was really so detrimental to the experience, then no one who has ever been a DM in one game would be able to also enjoy being a player another. As someone whose old group rotated between at least three DMs, I can safely say that none of us ever had any issues with the illusion being broken, regardless of which edition we were playing.
@@EmeralBookwise Perhaps I was not communicating the idea of the curtain very well. The idea was that in such a huge paradigm shift in design, they would have benefitted from less transparency regarding seeing "how the sausage was made" by the game designers. That led to, among many other things, a sense of how levelling up made task difficulty shift up with skills so players felt levelling did not matter etc. It has been several years now so I am having trouble recalling details but I remember we did have these discussions at the time.
My dispute on your arguments on casters only being spontaneous, for better or worse, sorcerer and warmage were not as optimal as the wizard, same with the favored soul as compared to the cleric, my group universally considers the spontaneous caster classes as less powerful and our experience bears it out, we have no problem preparing spells before hand, but that said, we are a group that optimizes practical usable builds that are much stronger than you would find in most handbooks, though a tad under theoretical stuff like pun pun.
My issue with 4th Ed, and 5th Ed, the classes and characters are a too homogenized, it made it feel like a video game in the sense that there is very little mechanical difference in how the classes function, the differences depend more on fluff and actual mechanics, take the proficiency system for 5th, everyone is basically at the same level of proficiency on a pre determined set of skills and weapons and technically a wizard is just as skilled with any weapon or skill overlap that he might have with a fighter or rogue class, which are supposed to be weapon and skill specialists respectively.
I remember getting my hands on the core books on day 1 of release. I tried to devour the PHB but there was just so much that was foreign to me that it was a slow-go at best. After giving it more time and attention, I realized that, with this particular PHB as it stood right then, a ranger could not fire a bow! Ranged weaponry wasn't among the class's powers at that point in time. And I had to dig fairly deeply just to find some semblance of a tracking skill.
Benjamin Brunson What are you talking about? I've got a PHB first run from 08 out in front of me and it clearly has simple and military ranged weapons in the rangers weapon proficiency. Not to mention the next page gives suggestions for an Archer Ranger. Also the Perception skill states that it can be for following tracks. Granted it doesn't say it, but I've never seen a DM who wouldn't allow a nature check to follow tracks in a natural setting.
Benjamin Brunson What are you talking about? I've got a PHB first run from 08 out in front of me and it clearly has simple and military ranged weapons in the rangers weapon proficiency. Not to mention the next page gives suggestions for an Archer Ranger. Also the Perception skill states that it can be for following tracks. Granted it doesn't say it, but I've never seen a DM who wouldn't allow a nature check to follow tracks in a natural setting.
Your accent is so wild. You can hear the Irish?? influence on your Canadian accent
Really? I guess you never really think of yourself as having an accent.
Interesting videos- but 4E is just trash.
It does receive some unfair criticism and there are things it did well. But it is NOT a good edition of D&D, let alone 'the most important edition of D&D'. I didn't think too much about making an essay length rebuttal to this but the more I listening the more I felt inclined to.
This retrospective series has been my introduction to you, just saying this in the interest of full disclosure so you know I am not a subscriber or super familiar with what you normally do. Just someone really opinionated who stumbled across your channel. I am also going to be nice seeing as you have legitimate criticisms of all editions of D&D and assume you aren't just being a fanboy, at least a full blown one.
But you are either misunderstanding people's issues with 4th or have had some people explain those issues really poorly to you. Maybe a little bit of both. Though I think this is one of those cases where everyone is just laying into something zealously and that is making you feel sorry for it. Sometimes the mob with the pitchforks and torches have a point, all I am saying.
I'll tackle points you made or I want to make in order of importance, with importance determined by just how angry I am over it and which bits contributed the most to 4th being my most despised edition of the game.
First, you say that WotC is just a company trying to turn a profit and that you can't blame them for that. As a fellow capitalist I understand the sentiment, but I can and will blame them when their business practices border on the unethical or when they actively harm their own bottom line!
Their business decisions with 4th are- as you yourself said in a previous video AND in this one- wretched and it is due not just to their poor marketing decisions. They already annoyed me with the constant conga line of splat books for 3.5, but splitting the core books up the way they did was asinine. Keeping fan favorite races and classes out of their first release to try to force people into buying additional material was worse than any supplement they released for 3.5 as most of those could at least be safely ignored. Not to mention if you were playing one of the classes or races that were core in 3.5 and your group wanted to move on to 4th... you couldn't for about a year without house rules because they didn't release all the core books at once. Not that transferring a character to 4th was very easy to begin with. In fact, it was rather tedious (where as moving my 3.5 character to 5th in the one case where I've done it was comparatively much more simple)
Then the grid system. All editions of D&D were helped with minis and maps, but 4th really DID make it almost mandatory. I tried playing a 4th game over an internet forum and the lack of a map at certain points caused massive contention amoung the players and DM. It was a clusterfuck. The DM ended up having to draw a grid map in paint and put dots on it. That's the bigger problem isn't it? By putting so much emphasis on the grid system people uninterested in buying their minis would go for cheaper or even free alternatives. I recall using chess pieces at one point for a 3.5 game. All they did was make it more frustrating for players who DIDN'T want to use minis.
This is an idiotic business model, a massive misstep on their part, and they deserve all the criticism lobbed at them. It made me honestly grind my teeth and wish WotC would have went the way of TSR, though that would be a disaster as there's no telling what Hasbro would replace them with.
Pathfinder capitalized on that in more ways than you are letting on. Aside from only needing two core books for Pathfinder, I bought a bunch of cardboard pawns from Paizo... and I don't even run Pathfinder (will talk about that more later). The tackle boxes and sowing kits I bought to house them in costed almost as much as they did.
I think part of the disconnect here, why this is so much more serious of a breech of conduct for me than you, is that you seem to have more money to spend than I do. I wasn't even one of those houses that got to choose between a Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, we had a Nintendo and that had to do. While that was when I was a child, I still absolutely have a budget to follow. How many core books did you say there were? "That is a lot to expect players to have" indeed. ;p
But we are more or less in agreement that it was a bad decision, you just seem way more forgiving of it than I am and are trying to find a positive in it. 4th edition killed my interest in 5th as well and made me highly cynical of WotC as a company, I am only just now warming up to trying 5th and that speaks volumes. Their shenanigans hounded 4th into extinction and even if it helped influence 5th it's reputation has also hurt them. They absolutely brought it on themselves and absolutely deserve the consequences of their actions.
Secondly, and finally getting into the actual mechanics of the game, is... the everything! If I wanted to play a videogame I would play a videogame. I can't begin to express just how much I despise the power set up. It clutters and over complicates an already pretty complicated game. When I and a friend first looked at 4th we didn't think you COULD make a standard physical attack and that they were completely replaced with at-will powers. We were wrong, but we missed that because you were kind of expected to and all the books emphasis was on the new powers. Fine, casting magic missile infinitely wasn't a bad idea, but it completely obsoletes the idea of the wizard pulling out a bow.
I find it funny you say you had a ladyfriend who did better in 4th. For most players I was introducing to 3.5 at the time 4th was the more confusing for them. I think the problem was having her play a wizard. You mentioned before that you like helping new players? It is a bit too late for this advice, seeing as 3rd has came and gone, but it is true for all editions of the game really- except 4th.
New players should pick the warrior classes. Fighter is best, but Barbarian, Paladin and Ranger are all solid too. Simply put, there is less to keep up with. Paladin and Ranger eventually get spells, but in limited quantities. Paladins also have smite evil and lay on hands, but that isn't too hard to wrap your head around compared to a hefty spell list. There are feats, but feats are basically the same for all classes and much easier to keep up with. Power attack and cleave work the same for everyone who takes them and what's more? Many of them are purely optional. If I forget I have power attack and never use it? It isn't the end of the world.
For spell casters- especially wizards- there is so much they have to keep track of. But in 4th everyone has the same problem, it may have simplified the casters over all, but for other classes keeping track of all your powers became more of a head ache. I just want to be a fighter, take a few feats that make me more accurate and hit harder, and swing my sword at the bad guys. I don't need your feints, or bullrushes, or sunders. Let alone all these weeb animu World of Warcraft Final Fantasy powers that you were EXPECTED to use, when all I want to do is hit the goblin with my sword, I only need two rolls- one to hit and one for damage and sometimes I frankly think that is one too many.
The character classes might be balanced, but they all play too similar to each other. Yeah yeah, you have tanks and damage deals and healers, just like in third. There was a difference. But I barely felt it.
I will admit a bias, seeing as Tome of Battle Book of Nineswords was kind of a precursor to 4th and several people in my groups were going nuts over it. It was some seriously OP crap that completely obsoleted the core 3rd edition classes. What's more is when I made it clear "Play the classes in the PHB and the DMG only" I was told "Core is boring" more than a few times. See, I don't mind you wanting to do more than swing your sword at the goblin, but I want that option open to me and especially new players so they don't feel overwhelmed.
This is also why I didn't actually jump over to Pathfinder either. I have the book, I will play it if people prefer, and I get why people like all the new shiny bells and whistles Pathfinder brings. I like options too. Until those options are being forced on me against my will, then I resent them. Pathfinder at least had the good courtesy to not lay it on quite as thickly.
It also kind of babies you and I don't like that. Sure, it is cool that they tried to take away negatives and make things net positives, but sometimes I liked it when there were drawbacks and potential hazards. That things could back fire. I always have been strict in my PCs getting health back through resting. I get that from one of my earliest DMs. It makes you feel every fight you're in and if you come out of a fight victorious but wounded and don't have a health potion or someone with a healing spell it added grit to the campaign. It made you feel more vulnerable. It made you think about what you were doing more carefully before you did it.
During perhaps my first D&D game- if you don't count video games like Neverwinter Nights!- we were hunting this group of cultists that were kidnapping children as our first quest. We snuck up to an abandoned farm and saw them in the barn, they were getting ready to sacrifice a little girl. I said my character charged in. The DM did a double take and made sure I knew "There's a bunch of them, they might kill you." and I said that my character couldn't live with herself if she stood by and did nothing while that child died.
My character wasn't yelling, but they heard me running. The rest of the party was behind me while I Leeroy Jenkins'd my way into the barn at full speed. The head priest saw me and sneered, stabbing the girl anyway as his allies shot me with crossbows, several hit. I ran up to him and ran him through- WITH A HALBERD. First combat roll of the game and a critical hit. Next turn the other PCs were in there fighting, but one of the cultists was still shooting at me. I ignored him and my character released her polearm that she'd pinned their leader to the wall with. Sure she got shot again, and sure she howled in pain when she was, but she was too busy using all of her lay on hands on that little girl that had been stabbed.
We didn't have a healer, outside of me. The rest of the party killed or captured the remaining cultists while I had my character cradle the girl, making sure she was okay while my character was barely alive. She had 2 HP left and was bleeding REALLY badly. Only after she was sure the girl was okay (in better shape than her at this point) did she stand up, stumbled and fell to a knee, having to steady herself. The girl she healed helped her up the rest of the way. She limped and wheezed, the wizard yelled at her for being so stupid, our rogue was having a good laugh about it, and the half orc barbarian who'd been standoffish with her when we'd first met expressed his new found respect for my Paladin elf by peeling that halberd off the wall, walking to her with it and offering back to her wordlessly, stoicly. He offered to carry her, she told him to take the girl, and that she'd manage.
It was a short lived campaign, but that saw a massive 180 in how the barb and paly viewed each other. He considered her a joke at first, but in his eyes that stunt made her a true warrior. He'd go on to be one of my better internet chums and a staple player in many of the games I'd run in the next decade.
My paladin limped all the way back to the town, using her halberd as a walking stick to prop herself up. Her refusal for help and charging blindly into battle made the Barbarian respect her. Her bravado in the face of danger charmed the pants off the rogue. The wizard was scared to death she'd die before we made it back to civilization, or worse something else would attack us before she could get help. In the town the parents, dirt poor peasants, had nothing to offer as reward other than the ecstatic thanks, a bed and food. As there were no clerics in this tiny hamlet she had to rest the night to get her lay on hands back in order to heal herself the next morning, and several PCs and NPCs tended her bedside and bandaged her wounds. The rogue (who had the healing skill) ended up developing a crush on her. If the game had went on something may have even came of that.
But you can't have a situation like that in 4th, not easily anyway, because HEALING SURGES! WOOO! Regenerating health, just like in those triple a vidyagames 360 noscope noob!
On that note there is the roleplaying. Which it absolutely killed. ;p It goes above and beyond being combat heavy, as I hope I demonstrated just now. It makes the game a videogame. If I want to play a videogame I will. If people want hack and slash, that's fine. Yes, all editions of D&D are combat heavy, and there are much better table tops for roleplaying, but I feel like such a damn fool playing a non magic user who can go "Oh I was just stabbed by a spear. No problem let me use my healing surge." It rubs me wrong on so many levels and THAT is just the main thing that sticks out to me from memory. I feel like most of the utility spells, magic not meant for buffing or healing or killing things, were just thrown out the window.
I am not going to assume the worse of you, and the player you mentioned doing the bluff check might have been... that way. But question? If your character has several ranks of knowledge: history but doesn't actually know much about the campaign setting's history should the DM help them out? If they had profession; sailor and don't know all their nautical terms like someone with ranks in that profession would do you just disregard it? Is this one of those "If you can't remember then your character can't remember!" moments like in that Dead Alewives skit?
I mean, there are times you will play a character dumber than you or a character smarter than you. If they have a high wisdom and a high sense motive you need to fill them in on the things they are picking up on. If they have a high intelligence the same thing. You don't expect people to be as physically strong as their orc barbarian or to actually know how to magic if they are a wizard. The same goes for how charismatic you are.
So when someone rolls a good bluff or diplomacy check you kind of help them out. Charisma is the raw pulchritude, the skills themselves are knowing WHAT to say to someone to get the desired result. Of course, if they don't even want to know what that thing they need to say is, let alone actually say it, then they are being... well. Some people are just there to kill monsters.
That isn't why I play.
So to me consolidating some of the skills annoyed me. Once I played a ranger/barbarian with an eye that'd been partially put out. Could still see out of it, but it was fuzzy and she had the scar to show for it. It was a neverwinter nights server, and she got to epic levels. Some twat had us make a spot check while roleplaying to notice something about their character, as this server was modded to allow dice roll commands. At level 30+ she had a spot check that was +12ish, though I had a maxed listen check to make up for it. This person proceeded to ridicule me for my bad spot check and started rolling their massive power gamed twinked out skills to show off (Neverwinter Nights didn't force you to spend your skill points when you leveled up, so basically you'd have wizards stock up on them until they got very high leveled then take two or three levels of rogue before hitting their maximum and spending the lot of them there). Whatever explanation I had wasn't good enough because to this doofus any reason to limit your character like that was stupid. I've also played a ditzy rogue and deliberately made them easy to sneak up on to simulate that they never payed attention.
That you consider certain skills for Rogues in 3.5 to be 'predetermined' (especially UMD, I actually kind of despise that skill and in at least one campaign banned it) tells me part of why we don't see eye to eye on this is that we have very different play styles. That's fine. I can... maybe see how 4th could appeal to a hack and slash player. But try to understand why it is anathema to me.
That said I am not as upset about this one. The decision was made to streamline things and there is a good argument for a perception check to exist over dividing it into spot and listen. But to me it did sort of take some of the roleplay out of it, because sometimes there was a reason behind the skills doing basically the same thing but having a different flavor that might limit their use in certain situations. Some of the utility spells going out the window annoyed me, I liked having magic that didn't buff or kill stuff but most of it was removed if I recall correctly.
You already mentioned 4th's lack of play testing, but this was a big issue. In previous editions game breaking characters occurred mostly through power gamers actively looking for combinations that would twink them out. In 4th characters ended up way too powerful just by following their class structure. Absolutely a result of the hand holding and desire to make 'everything a positive' and never a negative.
Moving on, yes, I vastly prefer playing sorcerer over wizard simply because of how much easier it is to keep track of things. We already went over that, but here is the thing, in third you had the choice. You could be a sorceress, have an easier time by picking whatever spell from your spell list you wanted to cast spontaneously. But there was a trade off in that wizards had access to more spells and got higher level spells sooner. The sorcerer was always ready to go and easier to figure out, but the wizard- if they knew what they were going up against- would be more way more effective against enemies with exploitable weaknesses so long as they had prep time. Like Batman. ;p
What 4th did was basically take that choice away from you. You all work like sorcerers now, only even more simplified. And to a lot of people that was very upsetting. Sure, wizards might not have been the most friendly or easy class to play, but I recall playing one and making it a personal quest IC and OOC for them to learn every spell in the game through an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. The sheer number of spells that wizard had at their disposal was uncanny and it meant that if they knew they might be fighting, say a red dragon, they could stock up on ice spells and be way more useful than the sorcerer that might not even an ice spell (bare with me, we all know that powerful cryomancy dominates higher level spell lists) and picked fireball over lightning bolt for its better utility. That was a nuance that 4th decided to just throw out the window, at least on release.
Your criticism of 3.5's magic items is also a bit silly. Oh, your players expect high powered magic items to just be sold anywhere and to get to customize their own without the craft feats? Not in my campaign. But the damage resistance on some of those enemies requires all of this BS! Guess I will just have to nerf it. ;p If I recall, I had any magic weapon halve damage resistance regardless of whether it called for silver or cold iron or whatever. 15 was about what Balors and Pitfiends stood at if I remember, so 7 was a bit more manageable especially for a high strength fighter whose magic sword no doubt also did element damage.
Also having items not increase stats bugged me. Oh, you hit harder. What if I wanted to use it to be able to pick up more or do something cool like move a giant boulder from in front of a cave? Well, I can hit the boulder harder anyway. ;p
You are the DM. You don't have to justify shit when altering monsters for your party to fight.
The minion thing also kind of annoyed me. Yeah, they die in one hit. Okay. But if you are some high level powerful warrior with a high strength wouldn't a 4 HP monster also be a one hit kill anyway? Seemed redundant to me. But whatever.
It is much easier to implement the things that you like from 4th into 3.5 than vice versa. But I might be bias, as I hate 4th pretty passionately both for its actual content and the behavior of WotC at launch.
But what do I like and/or agree with you about on 4th?
"It's not dungeons and dragons" is an invalid one to me. In fact, while writing this I consulted with someone to make sure I was remembering certain aspects of 4th correctly as they played it more than I did and don't hate it passionately like I do. One of the things they did say negatively about it was "It just wasn't D&D". This actually baffles me. Yes, there were lots of changes, but I already pointed out how similar 4th is to the supplement book Tome of Battle Nine Swords (which I also hate) for 3.5. All the same hallmarks of D&D are there. Just... in a really unpleasant and unappealing way designed to bring in people that played video games.
I think you could say that it didn't FEEL like dungeons and dragons. But feelings aren't facts. While it was perhaps one of the biggest departures, I am sure lots of people said third didn't 'feel' like D&D when it came out. I am sure people said that about second as well. People don't like change, as a general rule of thumb. They like what is familiar to them. It is how you can get people that- no kidding- hate Pathfinder and Paizo because they aren't under the D&D 'brand' despite the game being almost a carbon copy of the third edition games. Or hate WotC simply for not being TSR. Its the same concept, even if it is more cosmetic than anything else. Rose tinted glasses.
I already said being able to use at-will spells wasn't an AWFUL idea. But again, there are certain cases where a mage using up all their magic and exhausting themselves can lead to opportunities to roleplay. Finding themselves a little helpless and vulnerable when a major villain approaches, being forced to run or talk them down or surrender could be fun. If the villain does capture them then the rest of the party has to rescue them. Its kind of a double edged sword, but I lean towards dislike just a hair. It feeds too much into 4ths 'always positives for the players' nonsense that took the moxy out of the game.
I like how they handled skills better. But I feel like that shot themselves in the foot. I like the idea of just being proficient in a skill, in theory it means that a low level character could be more skilled than a high level character. But then they murdered the idea by having half your level added to your skill checks. ;p So all the praise I just had? Disregard it. Because a 20th level character should automatically be more knowledgeable about history because "eh I had skill proficiency left over and wanted to spend it on something niche" than a first level character wanting to specialize in it as part of their back ground. Oh man killing those orcs sure did give this flippant historian deep knowledge, didn't it? That isn't just a problem with 4th, but at least in third you had to deliberately focus on it over several levels instead of just picking it as a lark.
Still the seed of an idea is there. I personally have ranks, but also have them cap out at a certain point. Like in BESM, you could only get up to six ranks at which point you are considered a grand master, and each rank adds a +2 to the skill in question.
Skill challenges were something I was already doing anyway in third though, before I even saw 4th. ;p Multiple rolls instead of just one, to give kind of a back and forth, and skills being used creatively. I did that for things like say a tug of war too. It wasn't all riding on one check and when you failed you'd just be pulled closer to the mud pit.
You didn't mention it, but I also liked that you had a separate starting HP and HP per level/hit die. Which while more of the hand holding wasn't a bad idea. Low starting HP and the unbelievable fragility of first level characters was one reason why most games I played started on level 2 or 3 so it was a semi-needed fix. I like grit, not being taken out in one hit because a goblin rolled a critical hit and I was playing a mage.
I can't speak to D&D essentials. I dropped all interest in D&D and WotC after 4th and haven't really went back. Only recently with people insisting 5th is pretty good have I even looked back in their direction, but I've only been a player in 5th and most of my stuff was being handled for me by the DM because, and I quote myself "I can't be fucked to learn a new system everytime Wizards of the Coast wants to sell us the same product with different rules". That might be ugly and a little mean spirited, but that's where I stand.
A contrived load of total bullshit.
I know this is very old comment … but - well said!
You can call me a newb or whatever, but I didn't really get into D&D until 2012. In 2011, a lot of shitty things were happening around me and my best friend was joining the army, and we saw Chris Perkin's game with the writers of Robot Chicken. Our mutual friend mentioned he had a "similar" game called HeroQuest. We played it, loved it, and then collectively decided to try D&D 4e, which is what Perkins was playing in the video that inspired us. I knew very little about D&D going into 4e. I saw one game of it on UA-cam and listened to Perkins's commentary, too. My uncle played AD&D before I was born, so I grew up hearing about the game and seeings bits and pieces of it around the house. You could say I had a preconceived notion of what D&D was and it had nothing to do with 2e or 3e.
I'm saying this because it seems like a lot of your counter-arguments in 4e's defense is that "3e does it, too." Well, I knew nothing about 3e until just a couple years ago, and yet I had all the same problems when playing 4e. It was impossible not to look at it like a video game. The books and their presentation were structured in such a way that it all felt like a menu of mechanical options and all of the lore/fluff was brushed off to the side. I also felt heavily burdened with options to the point where I wasn't picking a race/class I wanted to play, but was instead picking "what my party needed." It didn't feel like there was really a difference between playing a Deva Shaman or a Pixie Monk, I just wrote down their numbers and took it from there. My friends and I didn't really get how people got INTO roleplaying, since it seemed like there was no mechanical reason for it and our entire focus was on shifting and charging and moving minis around maps. Did it matter what my race was? I couldn't understand why. Also, putting things like magic items in the foreground - for a new player, making his character - was really confusing, because now I suddenly felt like I was supposed to have like a super cool totem or something, but I couldn't find where it said how my character got the thing or what it really was besides a +1 to a stat.
What makes this even worse is that I actually roleplayed while playing HeroQuest, even though no one asked me to, because it just seemed like a fun way to keep the mood light. Playing 4e, I was always sitting there looking through cards and trying to make sure I used my abilities at the right moment, I barely paid attention to what the DM was saying and none of us could remember each other's names/races.
If 3e was like this, too, I don't see how that makes it suddenly okay. Maybe 3e was also really grating for people but they were willing to ignore that stuff for the first couple years. Or maybe 3e's other features distracted them from those aspects they disliked. All I really know about 3e is that it seems to heavily be about crafting your own magic items. If people like that aspect, they'd probably forgive a few poorer parts of the game. But if all the game is is those parts you dislike, then why bother with it?
The way I grew up understanding D&D was that it was a legitimate roleplaying game, not like DragonQuest or Final Fantasy where you just customize a player avatar, but a game where you have full agency over what is ostensibly supposed to be a real person. All of the descriptions of superpowers and statistics are just a reference for your benefit, so you understand the physics of how this person operates in their world. When making your character, you should be thinking about what they look like, where they're from, what they're doing at this point in time, not things like your role in your party (which 4e emphasizes) or whether your racial and class features synergize well or not (which were the only things I really noticed flipping through the books).
I can earnestly say that 5e at least presents that illusion to me. When I flip through a 5e book, I see a lot of stuff about why characters would want to be certain things in-universe or why a certain class is able to perform a specific feat over someone else, and not just numbers. That shit comes afterwards. You don't need to know that until you're doing it. In 4e, all I see are stat blocks. Also, this is kind of a weak argument, but I hated 4e's artwork. At least for the races/classes. Gnomes look like Santa's little helpers got raped by some species of alien arthropods. The half-orc - resident big bad bruiser - looks like a balding middle aged man; and I mean that for both the male and female. Even when I did try to read more into the lore of races, when it came time for me to pick what my Shaman would be, I discovered that every single high WIS race was some boring asshole alien who's tied to the fucking creation of the cosmos. I didn't find out until 5e that it was possible for me to play something else. Look at which races in 5e get a bonus to WIS: feral hippie Elves, the cunning and pragmatic Lizardman, the gentle giant Firbolg, creepy Hobbits, quiet fishy Water Genasi. I think I just described a more varied cast of characters than every 4e book combined. It's so jarring to me because every now and then I'll read a small bit of text in a 5e book or see a picture of something and suddenly become inspired to play something new and I end up creating a whole character or encounter based on it. In 4e, I only ever wanted to be a Pixie Monk for the memes.
At the end of the day, though, I think what it all boils down to is that you're not going to get anywhere by telling people their arguments "aren't fair." People experience things and they - without any conscious, intellectual input - like or dislike it. If you ask them why, they will try to deconstruct their own feelings for you. To then say, "Well, your feelings are wrong," won't help you or them understand where those feelings came from. You can change someone's appreciation for something conceptual, but you can't actually change their unconscious feelings for something they themselves have experienced. It's like trying to convince someone 2001 isn't boring because it's so deep and abstract. They're not mutually exclusive; they'll still think the movie's boring.
Also, I've posted a lot, but I also had a ton of very specific problems and had trouble finding anyone who could help answer my questions. I played a Deva Shaman once and really struggled with both the roleplaying aspect and the mechanical one. For one, the book tells you all Devas are emotionless bastions of knowledge. Right off the bat, I wondered why anyone would want to roleplay as such a thing, but also how you could explain a level 1 shithead supposedly having several lifetimes worth of knowledge. I constantly second-guessed what my character would think or do in a certain situation, because there was no reasonable way for my stats to reflect my character, not because of how I wrote him, but because his entire race is that way.
As for mechanics, I read through a ton of forum arguments on Shaman mechanics. Is my Spirit Bear ethereal or corporeal? No answer. It takes up a space, but is it really a "spirit" then? Can I ride it? Got a lot of shrugs from that question. How about abilities like Healing Rain or Spirit of the Healing Flood (I think that's what they're called)? My DM once gave a puzzle that, after much deduction, we figured out was solvable by splashing this rune with a ton of water. We twiddled our thumbs for like an hour before the DM told me he intended for me to use my spell on it, to which I asked, "Wait, my spells create ACTUAL water?" Which then got everyone thinking, because they don't sound like spells that create water - they're not described as such - they just sound like video gamey bullshit. What does Spirit of the Healing Flood? It heals people. Duh. Does it, like, summon a chick who dumps water on everyone that has medicinal properties? Does it create a giant potion of healing that shatters above all of us? Does it literally just drop numbers onto my friends' character sheets? No one could answer these questions for me.
Don't even get me started on the "your spirit animal uses your movement to move" thing. I almost flushed my bear mini down the toilet when I found that Wizards had nothing to say to aspiring shamans who actually wanted to reach the enemies before the encounter ended, but was stuck behind a fucking shed with their pet and was afraid to "cheat" by using the more beneficial interpretation of that statement and not one of the other two.
It's not a matter of saying people's feelings are wrong, but I do believe 4th Edition is overly criticized. A lot of the complaints in 4th stemmed from elements that were first introduced in 3rd and it is important to make that distinction. When people said, for example that having Diplomacy as a skill killed Role Playing in 4th, it needs to be understood that skill was introduced in 3rd.
You don't have to like the version of the game and that is fine. There are lots of reasons that someone might dislike 4th, but it's also okay to defend it as well. All I am doing is providing context for some of those common complaints.
In the end everyone should make their own decisions.
The problem I could see with 4th edition was that the core rule books seemed empty as if they were designed for children. All the meat and detail of the 3.5 edition which made the fantasy world alive and rich seemed to of been cast aside
In terms of 4e not fostering role-playing you forgot 2 things: 4e defining characters by combat roles and pushing miniature and battle-mat use. I love miniatures and cool maps as much as the next guy but if you define a character by what weapon he/she uses and assign combat roles and then define their abilities/powers almost exclusively by what they do in combat and on the battle mat..then you are going to have to work harder to incorporate role-playing.
I don't think you do. Some of the best Role Playing that I've seen from my players occurred in my 4th Edition Campaign. I designed adventures in 4th Edition the same way I would for any other edition. My players were ones who were resistant to 4th Edition, but in the end they still greatly enjoyed the role playing opportunities I presented them.
I'm glad your group's experience was better than mine.
The notion that strategic combat and miniatures limit role playing is pure nonsense. It just doesn't. The main problem with 4th ed was the expectation that RPG players actually knew how to role play. Get a better DM, and maybe try to use your imagination a little.
I DM as a more role-play type and describe what you're doing philosophy, based on starting in 2nd edition. I feel like the skill system started in 3rd edition has killed that type of roleplaying and player creativity. With 4th edition being so combat focused and geared around these are what the characters do in combat, definitely turned me off and to this date it is the only edition I have not played.
D&D has always been combat focused, character classes have always been built around combat, a 1st Edition AD&D Monk had to engage in combat with a higher level Monk in order to level up. One of the classes in D&D is literally called the Fighter. Most Wizard and Clerical spells are meant to be used in combat situations from the very beginning of the game. It's up to the DM to create interesting Role Playing situations and that can be done regardless of Edition.
DravenSwiftbow I thought this exact same thing right after I had submitted the comment, regarding how all previous editions class abilities were based on combat.
I think what sets the later editions apart is the specific combat abilities where earlier editions were pretty generic and basic which encouraged more caution and world interaction with the players. Now a lot of things are easily defined for the players which is nice in some regards, but I miss the role-play interaction as opposed to just rollling for something to occur.
It has made my job as DM a little harder to nudge and encourage that role-play with my groups, but it works itself out.