Welllll, it depends on what you watched. Staged productions like Critical Role don't show you the pain and anguish of searching for a rule or doing the nonsense D&D arithmetic of plusses and minuses enough. THIS is the most accurate play video I've ever seen to show beginners what it's REALLY all about. ua-cam.com/video/-leYc4oC83E/v-deo.html
This explains so much. I couldnt imagine how or why Puffin got thru the Waterderp AL epic so quickly. He was forged in an environment where being quick MATTERED.
LOL I was expecting the same XD I do have PTSD from 3.5 specially becouse of the stupid people not reading the rules properly and thinking they found a good "combo" hahahaha In 4E I do have a good time mastering and playing, but I think that the most diference is that when we started playing 4E, we already have 5 years of experienice playing TTRPG in general
In a video game its fun to just stack literally every possible bonus because its funny, in a Table-top Rpg, you do that, everyone at the table looks at you and leaves because by the time the next session happens, it might be the end of your turn
@@EricIsntSmart Usually digital only mean saved digitally(as in like in a pdf format) instead of a physical book, it doesn't mean having a whole virtual engine handling the game's running processes (like a video game system). And even if they meant it like the 2nd, does it really matter when it only properly came out as the former.
@@haraken3119 No like im pretty sure 4E was designed to be a digital game with a system running the bonuses and stuff but the development was cancelled and we only got the paper details
@@EricIsntSmart Sure... maybe... Honestly my point was that everyone keep throwing the digital term erroneously, when for most tech people it just mean the way it is stored (ie: digitally like a pdf, ironically to what people says, it did also get release digital that way), when people think they said a game engine treating and computing information. If you say a product would be made to be digital, the most it actually factually mean is that it isn't in a physical format and is stored in data, with nothing so far implying anything more.
Not really, it was just another version of multiclassing, which was a whole 'nother thing that came before. Using both you can make some interesting, if albiet overall useless, characters. I mean, I suppose it CAN work, if you chose the right combos...….
@@tyrongkojy Abserd is a character who had multiclassed into all the available classes in 5e, so this system would be his bane because it would stop his specific build.
Yeah, I hadn't gotten to the part about multiclassing when I first saw you. He um... is straight out wrong. So wrong that, when he gets into that MAYBE it was that they were all new and didn't know what they were doing, and blaming each other and no one tried fixing things... that's 100% what it was, really. Either he never actually read the book (first PHB has a whole section on multiclassing, NOT hybrids. I can get him not liking how they do it, but it's in there.) or they were just not... good....
4E was designed to be digital and have all that bloat be handled by the system. Unfortunately they stopped the development of it, so we just got a system designed for a different format.
The most popular historical tabletop RPG, that basically started the genre and absolutely popularized it, was designed to be digital? Jesus that's a terrible idea.
@@YukonHexsun not D&D. 4E D&D is completely different than any other edition. There are good reasons it was abandoned. Consider it an evolutionary dead end.
You got the idea of skill challenge is completely wrong. That just must’ve been the way you and your group ran it but not the way it was meant to be run. Skill challenges and minions were the only two good things about fourth edition
See your getting it wrong, if you rolled Thievery you would of noticed, he's being held hostage and is forced to say that, which you otherwise wouldn't of noticed anyone else if you rolled something else.
I! GMed 4e and played 3.5 as my first games back in 2015, before I really had a look at 5e. I'd had the books of 4e for years, but never had anyone to play with. Long story short... it, Wasnt a bad system. It was just rigid. The whole system was Rigid. It made issues of Class Based systems shine through like an ugly step child, but they genuinely tried harder on 4e then they did on 5e. It had three times the options of 5e... even if those options had no customization what so ever.
Now that I know what Tenser's disk does, this is even more disheartening. I used to assume it was some arcane buzzsaw of death. Now I know it's a cargo/corpse mover.
In my first ever dnd campaign I played a high elf wizard and by the end of the game, I had made it my mission to use all 150(or however, I don’t remember how much) feet of movement to just jackhammer back and forth into their knees and shatter them. I succeeded.
After playing 4E for a while, I came to two conclusions: 1. It's heavily dependent on the skill and creativity of the DM. 2. It seems like it'd be a better rule-set for a sci-fi setting where the PCs are spaceships. Multiple common abilities you can use over and over, while you have a few only once an encounter and one you can use once a day? That sounds like Phasers, Torpedoes, and Polarity Reversal.
@@MerlosTheMad Oh god that almost describes what I started playing with my friends recently. Warhammer Underworlds. Its actually a horrible game to learn too. The rules are so counter-intuitive and needlessly complex. And that's coming from a hardcore 40k veteran. Its so dumb lol.
I never felt 4E was a bad game (after I played it). However it wasn't D&D which was the sticking point for the group I played with. We did a short campaign and had fun with it but quickly went back to 3.5 because it was what we felt D&D should feel like (plus we had like, a literal ton of the splat books for it)
unpopular opinion here but 3.5e is way overrated tho, without supplements you're useless unless you are a Cleric or a wizard, the other classes are "fun" and "viable" for like 5 levels and then at leves 6-7 hey reach a capstone of power that means they'll never be more powerful than that while cleric and wizard skyrocket, by preteen levels 10-12 if you're playing a fighter or a barbarian you're just playing the wizard's loot mule, and with supplements it goes in the level of the redonkolous, because there's waaaaay too many and you eventually end with a deluge of rules if the gm doesnt have a strong hand and there's the following problem: if you allow the fighter to use a supplement to get on a similar power level to the wizard but decide to keep the wizard vanilla, the wizard's player complains that why can't he use a supplement if the fighter can, so you allow the wizard to use a supplement, they bring the complete arcane/unearthed arcana which creates the massive power gap between fighter and wizard they originally had and you're back to square 1.
Nah not really, there are quite a few systems that have only so much common in each other that they all had the design goal to control one character who you roleplay as. For example GURPS got its roots from wargaming too, but from completely different wargames that were designed entirely independently from D&D. In fact most systems that were made before 2000 are, and some after too, like PbtA stuff not only has nothing to do with wargames it has nothing to do with other RPGs either.
What @Jen farmer tries to tell you, to play OD&D you need 220+ pages of material (if you wish to play as it was intended with Chainmail and Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival on top of the game but not including any sort of supplement), which he thinks is simple and a very small set of parameters. But in reality he's one of the OSR mouthbreathers who like reading thousands of pages worth of rules but then not use any of it because it's unfair and boring.
I’ve played Pathfinder, 3.5e, and 5e. Out of all of those, I think 5e is the best but Pathfinder really isn’t that bad either. Pathfinder and 3.5e are basically the same.
it wasn't that bad, 4th introduced Statblocks for monsters, and you had all the info needed to run the monsters and their behavior ina single statblock. Honestly if you failed as a Dm in 4th, its because you where inept from the start...
4th was my first DnD system, I had played a Star Trek game for a year or so before but that was it. I also started 4th by DMing. It was easy to run an encounter, but because of all the effects and how much HP and AC everything had it was difficult to keep them from getting bogged down. Also, as Puffin mentioned, there wasn't as much thought put into the other play styles and so you're limited by how the game wants you to interact with the players.
Honestly as a DM of both, I much prefer DMing for 4E at least on the monster end. They were better designed and had all the information you needed in the stat block. I hate how so many 5E monsters have a list of spells that you have to look up.
@@andyenglish4303 You should check out Dark Heresy and its varients. NPC's/Creature statblocks are: These are the stats, it has these 2 weapons (most do have the stats of the weapons), these 6 Talents (go to the talent section to see what they all do, these 4 traits (trait section, go), Has these psychic powers (you know the drill), and has these non-weapon/armour gear (go see if any give them mods that will matter to you) Love the system, but holy fuck the bestiary can suck a dick. D&D 5e, all you need to look up is spells if the creature has it, and most spells you can know generally what they do and if they'll matter by their name
@@ryanbell6672 boring? My good sir, boring depends on the DM and the players. I personally think that it is an exiting, fun, and creative game but I can understand why one with a DM or a DM with players whom are boring would not enjoy it but that isn't on the edition now is it?
@@thomastakesatollforthedark2231 , yeah bud, it really is on the edition. The mechanics of 5th are like playing a "choose your own adventure" with only the three mundane choices you are given. instead of being able to customize a character as early as 1st level, 5th edition barely has enough nuance for you to even buy dice. You see, here's the difference, if you take a system like Pathfinder and you prefer NOT to have complicated mechanics, then you simply don't use them and your story won't suffer one bit. If you play 5th, your story will turn out exactly the same, but there isn't anything interesting at all about the actual stats and mechanics of the character. It is as vanilla and boring as the character next to it. 5th has fluffy mechanics because the kwel kwazy kids who wanna be sexy catfolk, don't like being given actual rules to learn, they just wanna have a crazy story about... whatever drivel they think is a good story.
@@ryanbell6672 excuse me but. What lack of mechanics are there missing? Multiclassing which 4E didn't have? The actual differing classes which 4E didn't have? The hundreds of different spells? The dozens of races? The different settings? All of which 5E has? And im sorry but... Have you forgotten DND is an *RPG*? Aka: the whole point is making up a story and playing it out with your friends?
Imagine you’re in the hospital and you’re dying lying in the bed. And then the janitor walks up you and you’re like “what the hell?! I need a doctor!” And he says “I just have the highest dex soooooooorrrrrryy”
Ben: I still like 4th Edition. 4e: See. SEE someone likes me Ben: *Proceeds to list all the flaws in 4e and proclaims that he doesn't like most of the rules* 4e: THIS DOES NOT HELP MY SELF ESTEEM
It's not supposed to, 4th... See, He went and jumped on 5th ed the moment the thing rolled off the presses... My group came in from 3.5, tried the system, said "Screw this trash" and went back to 3.5 and Pathfinder... and it was such a foul taste in our mouths that I only recently gave 5th edition a shot. And it was primarily the trash, heavy handed way they pretty much deleted any concept of making your own character... or your own enemies, or even giving you the core classes and races, you had to buy the shitty 4th edition DLC, because they did everything they could not only to rip out all customization options, but to make sure the system was so gimped that you couldn't put them back in, and had to pay them for DLC because you couldn't homebrew, build your own adventures, or even play a normal elf. Or a gnome. I'm frankly surprised 4th ed didn't come in GOD DAMNED LOOTBOXES.
@@Tomyironmane It didn't help that the licensing change pretty much made it impossible for 3rd parties to develop anything for 4E and fix its problems. As for 5E, it's an alright start to making a system and there's a lot of great 3rd party material for it. My biggest complaint with the system as a whole is the overuse of the Advantage/Disadvantage system. Too many abilities revolve around it, which ends up limiting the gameplay options too much.
@@InfernosReaper the disadvantage/advantage thing can be pretty fun if your dm allows double/triple advantage/disadvantage, so you can still end up rolling trash/amazing after 4 rolls that should’ve saved/fucked you
Puffin: "I'm here to talk about how much fun and special DND 4e was to me, I don't understand why people didn't like it>" Also Puffin: *spends the next 22 minutes complaining about how awful the game is.*
I'm thinking, if 4e was built like a real time strategy, like wc3, everything would be calculated live, and combat would just run on by, with some spell spam each fight.
I'd said more than once that 4th Edition felt like a collectible card game or collectible miniatures game back-ported to a pen-and-paper RPG. And when I played 4th Edition in board game format (by way of the Ravenloft board game), I felt like 4th Edition made for a fun board game experience. Regarding 3rd and 3.5 Edition "crunch", it was 4th Edition that really had me re-evaluate everything I liked and disliked about the earlier editions, and realize that it was the wargame/miniatures game/card game/board game aspects of the whole thing that I disliked the most, and the "crunchier" it all got, the more my group felt like they were being held hostage for an hour or so of unrewarding dice-tossing and accounting. Like the old saying: "An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications", pen-and-paper D&D - especially starting about 3rd Edition, and particularly in 4th Edition - really felt like the HeroQuest board game built to some unnecessarily bloated specification. I think that these days, I'm more likely to aim for a more minimalist game system, the sort of thing that de-emphasizes throwing dice at numbers for a few hours, in favor of the social and storyteller aspects of the game. That won't be to every group's taste, but I think it works for mine. (Yahtzee generally works better for scratching my group's dice-tossing itch, and HeroQuest still remains one of the most fun board-game dungeon-crawl experiences I've ever seen, with the 4th Edition board games coming in second place to fill that niche.)
honestly that may be part of why i liked it so much. i lean into min-maxing, and 4e was a lot better at allowing/enabling that style. 5e is a lot more condensed numbers wise. which is good in some ways, bad in others. in 4e one thing i liked was if something made sense, i could give a +1 on it and it wasn't a big deal. in 5e, because the numbers are so compacted by comparison, at least in terms of AC and attack rolls, its closer to if i gave a +5 to something in 4e for the same effect. i also grew up in MMOs, so it having similarities was not a problem to me. i started playing WoW with my dad in 2nd grade, back in its early days. started dnd in 2014 or so. let me translate a few things from 4 to 5. At Will Powers : Cantrips (weapon attacks were technically a form of at will power) or "whenever you do this, add this effect to it (sometimes once a turn for balance)" Encounter powers : regain this at the end of a short or long rest. Daily powers : regain this at the end of a long rest. healing surges : hit die (that may be a slight simplification, but my group never leaned on surges anyway. hit die almost never get used in my group. if we take a short rest, its usually a long rest to allow our wizards/sorcerers to regain their spell slots) 1 square : 5 feet. Utility power : non-damaging/offensive effect (Ghost of the Rooftops was a personal favorite of mine as an assassin player) Minor action : bonus action (again, TECHNICALLY different in application, but for all intents and purposes they are the same) my big criticism of 5e is casters hit so much harder than any non-caster after about level 3. the main thing 5e has over 4e is it encourages roleplaying a bit more via inspiration, but thats not that hard to port from one to the other. 4e's combat system was solid. personally i was a fan of having a set of 4 defenses, with Fortitude, Will and Reflex alongside AC. Each being able to select one of two stats to lean on meant that you didn't have to worry about keeping one of your dump stats crazy high to avoid having a crazy vulnerability to some form of attack. i can choose to have a +4 in charisma and still have a high will defense, even if my wisdom isn't the greatest. 5e makes certain characters feel like their asses are in the wind defensively speaking. if i want to play a strong, intimidating (STR/CHA) barbarian, im screwed, because now all 3 of the primary save rolls are weak (Con, Wis, Dex). the other 3 exist only rarely. there are precisely 10 spells (4 of which are unearthed arcana) that target intelligence and 14 for charisma (most of which i have never seen used). 17 for strength. there are a few monster effects that target those stats, but nowhere near as often as the primary 3 get targeted. personally i liked the square count for effects and movement, because it meant that the GM could tailor what units each square represented for that campaign. 25 square feet for one character tends to feel a bit overblown. especially when want to represent something like a phalanx, where it wouldn't be unrealistic for, in a 5 foot stretch, to have 2 or maybe 3 people side-by-side locking shields. im not really convinced that 5e is better at supporting non-combat encounters system wise, i think its just our gms have figured out how to run them, we only really started using them within the last 2 years or so, but made the jump 5 years ago. though the spells support non-combat better in some instances, so that's something, but i'd have to compare them to utility abilities, which had their own list of applications. 5e makes combat feel kinda sluggish to me, enemies just feel like they have health pools too large to deal with rapidly, but it rarely feels like they can threaten the players. i will say 5e once i figured it out does give more room to homebrew classes in. i can find ways to build that just wouldn't work in 4e because of a mechanical lock (more than one attack per turn in 4e was busted, generally speaking). 5e has what i would consider to be holes in their lineup though, so i have more things to build that just don't quite exist otherwise.
@yuvalgabay1023 I didn't have any problems with the format of Ars Magica. I think it's just such a dense ruleset, no matter how you flip it around, it's a bit tricky to learn. Ars is great though, once you learn it.
Yeah, when you were all like "OMG! It was terrible!" in the Dingo and Jackdaw video, I was like "Well, it sounds like your GM didn't know what they were doing..." And then you went over everything in this video and I was like, "Oh yeah... I remember now, we edited all that garbage out when we played it... heh heh... err...."
I hear ya on that. I love D&D, but running 4e burned me out as a DM for several years. I tried running 4e as written most of the time and god was it slow. When a combat encounter happened, that was pretty much everything we were doing for the night. Eventually we started simplifying powers and effects just to make it easier to get through encounters. The 4e Essentials series helped with that a lot when they came out, but not enough to really save 4e from being easily the worst of the editions I have played.
I've technically only ever played 3.5e, but because most people play 5e, one of the campaigns that I'm in (run by the older sister of one of my friends, who does 5e) is basically 5e with mostly 5e characters, but added to it are a few 3.5e characters , who have the 3.5e rules applied to their weapons, abilities, skills, etc. For example, I've heard that in 5e, the only way to get a critical is to roll a natural 20 (unless you are a fighter). However, for the 3.5e characters, the critical threat range is dictated by their weapons. A 5e character could use the perception skill to act as any of these 3.5e skills: spot, listen, maybe sense motive, and probably more. I don't know how she did it, but the DM somehow managed to seamlessly merge the two editions, without confusing any of us players.
@@KingNedya Technically there is one other way to expand critical threat (Warlock's Hexblade Curse), but the main reason that they don't expand critical threat is because of the major shift towards advantage/disadvantage rules. When you have advantage, you are technically twice as likely to crit. Once you look at it that way, you normally have a 5% chance to crit. A third level fighter champion or warlock against a cursed target has a 10% chance to crit. Anyone who has a method of giving themselves attack advantage (barbarian can reckless attack with every attack, for instance) also has 10% chance to crit. With advantage, hexblade and champion have a 20% chance to crit. A level 19 champion has a 15/30% chance to crit. That doesn't even mention the fact that criticals are automatic against paralyzed opponents as long as the attack would hit normally (arcane trickster in particular can take advantage of this to great effect). Worth noting, p. 217 of the 5E DMG, Sentient Moonblade can roll with 19-20 critical threat range... so there's no reason that as a DM someone can't still homebrew balanced weapons with this function.
@@orioncooper1705 Funny, that is the exact opposite of my experience, DM'ed 3.5 for a few years and was feeling really burned out just from how difficult it is to force that game to work with how poorly the system explains itself, when I jumped to 4e everything just got so much more enjoyable, I didn't need to spend every moment of preparation trying to make sure fights didn't end immediately in either player victory or TPK. It really reinvigorated my love of DM-ing as a whole. I still run 4e, 5e is just so lacking in options by comparison
In other words, you changed about 80% of the mechanics and gameplay just to make it enjoyable lol. I tried.... well... the correct term would be attempted I guess.... to play 4e.... 45 minutes later we were back in 3.5 working on a new story arc to destroy a necromancer that was churning out books that were turning people into raving lunatics and slobbering idiots.
@Jen farmer No, not really. You didn't need to rely on other players at all, because all classes were the same, you needed to rely on other weapons with different weapon effects to exploit vulnerabilities, that's it. There is no "thinking man game". Just a long grind of doing exactly the same with a fire sword or an ice hammer, depending on what you had before you.
@@TheBayzent You needed to rely on the other roles. The game was designed for everyone to work together in a fairly predictable way on purpose. The Defender marked the enemies that could hit hard to force them to attack him. The Controllers had area of effect abilities to take care of a lot of small creatures at once. Strikers were single target damage so they were supposed to kill the big monsters while they were attacking the defender. The Leader healed people and buffed them and gave them extra movement to put them in the right spots. Without any of the roles or without someone playing their role correctly, the entire party would lose. Which meant there were a lot of people playing "incorrectly" which did cause battles to drag on or to have the whole party die.
In my experience, damage type rock-paper-scissors was not nearly as important in 4e as having attacks that hit. Nothing was ever more important than an extra +1 bonus to attack rolls. Every single combat power was done with attack rolls, and if they didn't hit, you were fucked. And monster defenses were high, even the minions. You needed every +1 to hit that you could get or combat would slow to even more of a crawl and become absolutely unbearable. Axes and hammers were totally unplayable because swords got an extra +1 to hit. PCs and monsters alike will quickly lock themselves into a conga line of death where everyone is flanking everyone for that sweet +2 to hit. Most DMs will give 4e players an Expertise feat for free because it provides +1 to hit and is therefore mandatory. This also affected how you bought or enchanted magic items. Yeah, having a +3 exploding flaming burst weapon sounds cool, but you'll never try it because you need to save up for that vanilla +4 weapon.
@@Zamrod Yeah, but you can have a party of 4 controllers and do just as good. Leaders are somewhat necessary but aside from that every character is pretty similar.
Wow the first comment I’ve ever liked in my 21 years. Brushed my teeth, and chuckled so much I explosion-blasted my bathroom mirror with toothpaste. Have a gold star!
Genuine D&D4 Lore checks, these were a DC to learn an interesting thing about what you see, both of these are the DC20 Lore check: > Goblins sleep, eat, and spend leisure time in shared living areas. Only a leader has private chambers. A goblin lair is stinking and soiled, though easily defensible and often riddled with simple traps designed to snare or kill intruders. (Wow, thats actually really cool to know!) > Dire bears typically maul prey with their claws or crush them to death with their thick, bestial arms. (Wow, you mean big angry bears act like big angry bears?! *sigh*)
If the DCs work like 5th edition and it isn't any easier to get high numbers in 4e, those should be like a 15 and a 10 respectively. Maaaayyyybe the goblin one should be a little above a 15 in a setting where goblins are more rare?
@Lance Clemings I assume you're not talking about 5th edition, since in 5th edition a 30 is borderline impossible for even 20th level characters and a 50 is actually impossible. An arcanaloth in their true form would be like a DC 20 max.
@@SheffiTB With expertise you can get up to +17 to a skill without any magic. A roll of 13 would be enough then to reach 30. Adding a d12 Bardic Inspiration and a d4 Guidance could possibly allow for a roll of 53 in total. It's highly improbable, but not impossible.
@@animusnocturnus7131 I mean, Vax in Crit Role would consistently get 30-40 stealth checks on a d20 roll bc of expertise. Once I think he got a 50?? Bc of Pass w/o a trace. Spoiler: Also, in episode...107? 108? (I think) of Season 1, Matt put forth a skill check that required a DC30 to not fail and potentially permanently damage a lock, and Vex hit it right on the nose, breaking her pick in the process.
I did that, I dONT RECOMMEND IT. ITS REALLY %@^^#ING WIERD *WHERES IS MY MIND PLAYS.* kinda enjoyable if your well, how do I say this(THINK RIGHTIOUSLY) LOOKING AT PORN OR EATING PIZZA, ItS LIKE EATING FOOD WITH ALTIMERZ, I recommend LITTLE SEASERS TASTE THE BEST COLD.
Thats something that I also did in 5e but because my DM was garbage, he had bullshit homebrew monsters with 1k or 2k hitpoints and he spent a lot of time talking about the lore.
@@schwarzerritter5724 No, he hated 4th, he said it was like a videogame or something like that, the monster had so many hitpoints just because he didn't want us to go that way, he was always railroading the party, if we went somewhere he didn't like we were dead or at least we had to run for it.
>is in the game and talks about how the pathfinder ninja class is full of inside jokes based off my troll account on word forums DM: anyone else hear piano music?
@@benpearson49 I have played 1st,2end,and 3rd editions of D&D. I never played 4th. Reading the base book for it alone told me it was terrible.. ( The worst possible idea to ever have been printed when it comes to RPGs.. and that is putting it lightly. ) I am really shocked anyone played it over any of the previous editions, or of course other RPG games like Pathfinder,Earth Dawn, Rifts, ect ect...
@@UndyingZombie The worst possible idea ever? Good job falsifying your own comment within a single half-sentence. 4e isn't for everyone, but calling it objectively bad like that is just straight up lying. Especially given you claim to have only ever read the book and never even played it. You basically just straight up said you have no idea what you're talking about. Your opinion is as worthless as it is uninformed.
@@SpectralWaltz To anyone that played the previous editions it is. You obviously never have and are upset about it. You are crying to the wrong person here.
4E had a ton of brilliant ideas that were executed horribly. I've found that the best use for 4E is to mine it for ideas that you then fix and patch into other systems.
4E was an interesting system if you were thinking about how to have an Epic boss encounter (except for the low lethality rate). But turning the whole game where every fight was an Epic Boss encounter turned it into a slog and snooze-fest, as he described in the video.
"People just hate 4e because it came at a low point in popularity..." "So, here's a half hour video about all the totally legitimate reasons people hate 4e"
More like the "assumed" reasons, half of what he's telling is either completly off the mark or exagerated. And i laugh my arse off when people are like "there was less Roleplay in 4th", no, no, it did not, its just that for once WotC thought that players who allready played din't have to have written rules and spelled it out for them on how to RP and though people where smart enough to know how to do it... But has we all know, the vast majority of people are fucking Morons, that needs warning lables on coffee mugs, because they don't know if the coffee is hot and they might burn themselfs...
@@bobbobson110 we're talking assigning crunch (explicit rules) to RP. that's not something you do. A chapter that introduces a new player to good habits for RP and general etiquette is something that would be great, but thing is that's always great. However, a good amount of RP tends to have strings attached in the form of game relevant mechanics. Take those away and instead all you need for 4e is the skill challenge system which can be adapted for literally ANYTHING where you'd need to roll the dice. Downside is skill challenges are retarded unless you're doing them ON THE FLY.
@@G0LD3NR0D , I think Bob was highlighting a good point, one that can be used to judge if a Rule systems is 'complete:' Can someone lacking experience read this and be able to play this game? It is a common phenomenon, especially in franchises that have spread across editions, for Rules to be written as if the players already have a complete understanding of the concept. While this isn't as terrible in a system which has a 'storyteller' to make on-demand rule decisions, I've seen it occur in 'leaderless' systems as well. There are also people who will be stubborn even with a 'storyteller' and start demanding to see mechanics written down somewhere for these things to be valid for use. I highly recommend looking at the new Shadowrun system, it is a headache due to being incomplete!
To be fair, that's not exactly THE hallmark of a complete system. It's one that can be used generally to judge if a rule system is complete but it doesn't work for all systems and as such it will improperly judge those it doesn't work for as incomplete, even if they are complete. Also there is a reason why I still run Shadowrun 4th edition and you've pointed it out perfectly. The thing is, the 4th edition PHB, DMG, and Monster manuals actually CAN be read by someone who is completely new and they CAN play the game or even run it with little to no experience. Will they play a good character or run a good campaign? Probably not, but they can still jump into the system and make it work. Shadowrun's newest edition, however really doesn't work that way as it basically keeps essential systems away from the player by making them really, REALLY hard to understand, whereas 4th edition D&D simplified pretty much everything (though that did homogenize a lot of aspects of play which can be seen as both an upside and downside) and as a result is playable by people with absolutely no experience.
When he was going on the rent about the crazy combat at the beginning and "how is this meant to be an introductory game?" I got an add for DnD saying how easy it is to get into. Perfect timing
I relate to this so hard. I started playing with 4e too and when you said noon to midnight i had war flashbacks. Every saturday, starting 12, and getting done by midnight was a LUXURY. There were times we would play until around 3-4 AM. And we would sometimes play more than once a week because we didn't get where we needed to end up. Granted we had 12 players but we'd rarely have more than a mix of 5-6 of them. Someone would always be asleep, others would be chatting in the kitchen, and i was the only one trying to stay invested because it was so impossible to care about what everyone else does until it effects you. But i also still love 4e, although i play almost exclusively 5 now. It had a certain charm that you really only understand if you played it for long enough to "get" it (even though no one ever truly gets it)
This sounds like a good lead-in for a parody of Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch. Like, ending at 4am? Luxury! In my group we started at 10 in the morning and played until 6 the following morning, playing every day because we'd fall behind otherwise. Our group had 18 players in total but we'd only have 10 in a session at one time. A third of them were asleep, a third were playing Mario Kart, a third were helping the neighbours move and I was the only one trying to stay invested!
It’s like when you think back to a girl you broke up with and you’re thinking about all the good times you had; then you read your journal and letters and posts from that time and you suddenly realize WHY YOU BROKE UP IN THE FIRST PLACE. Then you have to go and eat a pint of ice cream just to get back into a good enough mood to deal with people again.
Puffin: I got into D and D through online videos. Me: Two years ago watching one of his older videos, “That looks cool” Me Now: Been DMing for my group for 6 months and everyone loves it.
Aesthetically, I remember 4th edition being awesome. Every power was like, "You backflip over the enemy and unleash five arrows into its gaping maw!" And I'd be like, "Dude, that's so sick! I need that power!" And then I'd read the effect, and it would be like, "Deal 5d8 damage to one target, and until your next turn allies get a +2 bonus to opportunity attacks against enemies adjacent to it unless their name begins with a Q or a W, in which case you instead add your Wisdom modifier to all damage dealt by . . ."
"... when the syzygial alignment of the vernal equinox strikes your flanking position, unless it's Chinese New Year in the year of the emu, and if you possess a Cheetos bag of +2 MSG while screaming in Wilhelm, then you can make 2.76 strikes against an opponent lying prone in the Family Guy position, who wished he stayed in bed, BUT ONLY IF THE OPPONENT OPENLY DECLARES SAID STAYAGE IN BED..." Crap, this is why I can't play YuGiOh CCG, or as I'd like to call it, "Exceptions: The Game"
@@commandercaptain4664 This is the spell that never ends. Yes, it goes on, and on, my friends. Some wizard started casting it, not knowing where it went, and he'll continue casting it forever, because this is the spell that never ends...
12:59 One of the things that I LIKED about 4e was that you DIDN'T need "Detect Magic". If you had the Arcana skill...you could sense magic all the time. No spell slot used, not 10 minute stoppage in play - you just rolled a D20 and the DM told you if you sensed any magic in the area. Another thing that I really liked (and really miss in 5e) was the "exotic" materials that added to the flavor of the world - fabric made out of shadows for use in armor and magic items; things like that. 5e has lots of "monsters" and "magic spells"...but the rest of the world is apparently untouched by this and everthing is made out of "steel", "stone" and "generic wood".
I mean, that makes perfect sense. Same for any other class in which you can basically "smell" in that way. So if someone does necromancy, you don't need to role to sense it, you know, because you know the feeling, or smell, or see an aura, whatever it is. Unless there is another magic cast over to disguise it, but you'd probably sense that too, but still be unable to know what type of magic is being clouded. I'd say something like "You feel a chill down your spine and smell a familiar smell of death and decay. This zealot member clearly uses necromancy." Same goes with say someone who is a follower of a deity or god. Others who either have researched it, or are it themselves usually can see it in others unless it's being hidden. "You see a familiar heavenly aura around the priest and hear distant voices of angels. They are definitely a follower of Jarcrine, the holy god of healing" etc etc. No need to roll. That's something I want fixed as a mechanic in general. If you are proficient in something or an expert, you'd very very rarely fail. IE instead of 10 and below being a fail, the higher you are in that expertise, the harder it is in each dice roll to ever fail and if a 1 is rolled, if you are super proficient you need a critical fail confirm. Most of the time you can just do narrative, but for those moments when it's needed, a level 20 rogue is super unlikely to fail a stealth check for instance.
To be fair, though, this is how I run 5e games. A good Arcana check can intuit magic, cool materials are easy to homebrew with the base game rules, and so on. It really falls on the DM (and to a lesser extent an adventure module) to make the worlds interesting. You don't *need* 10 minutes to cast _Detect Magic_ either if the Arcana fall through, but the ritual can save you a precious spell slot at low level. You can always burn that slot and cast it in a few seconds. I mean, you can get a _staff of defense_ made of nigh-indestructible, hollow glass in the _Lost Mine of Phandelver_ module, and that's like the simplest thing. Meanwhile I'm over here merrily making a _Monster Hunter_ style crafting system to carve up magical beasts and make cool shit out of them, and it's really not hard to do. Basically, bring it up to your DMs, and have them step it up.
@@Verbose_Mode They had an entire catalogue of materials in 4e. NONE of them got brought over as general hallmarks of the "magical and monster infested world" - all the mystic elements end where civilization begins....rather than being incorporated into it by clever people. And again, you're talking about a low-level character burning an entire spell slot for the "convenience" of a general-use utility function and the "benefit" of a ten-minute stoppage in the progress of the story so you can cast a ritual. Neither of those things was a feature in 4e - you just made an Arcana roll and moved on.
This will sound like the Four Yorkshiremen sketch from Monty Python. "You were looky to have COVERS! When I bought 2300 AD (Traveller 2300 2nd edition), they didn't put covers on the books AT ALL!" (Same for Gamma World 3rd-edition.)
@@cortex6065 Crosscheck the section from the DMG with the last page of this document that explains how later monsters from 4e were made. www.wizards.com/dnd/files/UpdateDMG.pdf
@@cortex6065 Absolutely! I do it all the time. It takes a bit of work seeing how you can reconstitute their powers, but it's a fun way to keep your players on their toes.
I never played that edition. I've never met one DM who wanted to. I also never played 1st edition or 3rd edition, only 2nd (once), 3.5 and 5th. I understand why 1st is left aside, it's probably like a pilot... then 3rd probably had such a large number of problems that it had to be fixed with a 3.5 revision... but I always wondered what was 4th edition like, and now I'm about to find out. edit: and now I know, and the fact that I was never subjected to such horror fills me with Christmas spirit.
No, in fact, you don't know. You just know that you do not want the same experience as Puffin. There is more than enough fun to be had with 4th Edition, if it fits your style. Just as with 5th edition, how the DM handles things more than anything else determines the fun a group has with it. It wasn't perfect, nothing is, but it had great balance in classes and monsters and players had loads of cool choices to make for their characters. 5th really dropped the ball regarding that, in my honest opinion. Also, I really hate that they went back to saving throws, but that's just a pet peeve of mine :)
So I'd take this video with a pretty big grain of salt. I started with 4E, and while it's far from a perfect game, I think Ben is exaggerating some of the issues and is just kinda missing details on some of the others. Combat being a bit of a slog? Yeah, that's a real issue - 4E likes to pile on conditional +1 and +2 modifiers and they can be a bitch to track sometimes. Multiclassing? Was a thing right from the first PHB, I think he just missed it? Classes "all being the same"? Really arguable. Classes shared similar abilities... but in 3.5 or 5e, a lot of classes literally share the same spells on their lists! 4E was a little nuanced, all Leaders had a 2/encounter heal, but the Cleric's did more HP while the Warlord's would let you move, etc. Different spins on admittedly *similar* abilities. Rituals? Really cool... I pin this one on his DM. If the gold was an issue that's 100% a Dungeon Master thing. There's a lot of cool ritual magic that I borrow mechanics from still. A lot of the "utility" magics got moved there, so if Ben's DM shafted them on gold or materials then I can see how that'd get frustrating. I'd play another 4E game, but what I really do more of is rip off more 4E stuff to stick in my 5E game.
People mostly don't play 3e because there's very few differences between 3e and 3.5; while most of the material assumes you're playing 3.5 as that came fairly quickly after 3e; and all the 3e material can be fairly easily made to work with 3.5.
3rd mostly just had a bit of weird power imbalances and hangovers from 2E (ad&d) that 3.5 patched. The level adjustment system of 3.5 (which they had dabbled with in the later bits of 3.0) in particular opened up a lot of variability in playing monsters rather than specific player character designed races- you could play a baby dragon if you were okay with losing a few levels to being a dragon or just gave up on player character levels and just advanced as dragons do
If for nothing else, fourth edition had and still has my favorite class: Warlord. I didn't know how much I wanted to play a support fighter/cleric that didn't actually have magic nor any kind of deity baggage. Even now, I haven't found a way to simulate Warlord in 5th edition that felt half as good at it did in 4th edition.
Yes! 4e has a couple of things that made the Warlord make sense - everyone has Healing Surges and all martial classes have powers, so the Warlord can do healing without feeling like they're supernatural. (Also, the importance of tactical movement goes well with Warlords telling everyone where to go and how to get there) In addition to being a great class for roleplaying someone like Nick Fury or Mal Reynolds, lazylords are perfect for playing a Zeppo like Sokka of the Water Tribe - it doesn't even matter if the character seems to know or do nothing about healing, because everyone's just spending their own Healing Surges. Ben isn't wrong in his points about 4e, but it's too bad he didn't go from Cleric to Warlord, he might have actually enjoyed it a little bit.
I wouldn't say it's limiting, it's just a different type of game. 5e is more of a narrative game, while 4e is almost a turn based RPG like Final Fantasy. If you really liked character optimization, cool gear, easy combat building, then it was a ton of fun!
I am sorry that 4E was your only experience. D&D was and is something that has changed a lot over time, but most of us who played earlier did not "upgrade" into it. A lot of people I know who started with it, either fell out of D&D after the byzantine combat "buff" system sucked the joy from the game, or skirted around those issues, which made the game closer to 3.5 without knowing it. I myself bought my first 5e books, but now that my last 3.5 campaign has "ended" because of adulting issues, I might finally get around to writing my own campaign to check it out. Nothing like a couple hundred dollars of books collecting dust for want of a group.
1st and 2nd ed were about the same for flexibility. Limited or no multiclassing. Punishing rules if you DID try to multiclass. 4th at least had learned the lesson that you try to avoid truly arbitrary limiting character design decisions. Only Half-Elves Half-Orcs and humans could be clerics. At all! No real reason why dwarf clerics were forbidden, they just were. In 1st edition the classes didnt even finish at the same level. Gnome fighters of less than 18 strength are limited to 5th level while a human fighter could go up to 20. The max level of a druid reguardless of race was 14 and only 1 guy could be a level 14 druid at a time in the game world as it was a political position (The Great Druid). The whole thing was a mess. The kings of flexibility are 3.0 and 3.5 editions. Pathfinder 1.0 is also in the same vein and was frequently referred to as 3.75. Multiclassing? Sure go ahead. Wide choices and variance in potential builds? Yup, more than you can read most likely. Sooo much choice that it all just sorta blends into a massive mush of half understood rules if you don't have a eidetic memory and money to pick up virtually every supplement? Yes. No edition of D&D has been perfect. 5th is a neat blend of 3.5 and 1st ed with lessons learned from 4th ed. Less flexible than 3rd, simpler like 1st but waaaay less arbitrary.
@@kevinschier8765 Older editions had some strange, arbitrary restrictions that mostly seem to have existed to justify the default D&D setting. Non-humans got these weird level caps to "explain" why they aren't the dominant species (and why long-living races like elves aren't all 20 level blokes), and druids and monks used to be rare by design because after a certain point, you could only level up by beating up someone of the next higher level. Thankfully that older stuff is very toolkit-y in its approach, so you can just ignore stuff that doesn't make sense. I think the first time you got some legit customization options was when the latter versions of Basic D&D and AD&D 2e gave you weapon specialization.
If you think 4th edition was limiting, you should have seen AD&D. The Hybrid Classes he was taking about WAS AD&D multi-classing. You had to pick it at character creation, and you were limited in what you could pick based on your race. You couldn't change your class unless you played a human character and "Dual-Classed" your character, in which case you couldn't use your previous abilities from your former class until you reached the same level in your new class. There were no feats, so if you played a Fighter, you had only one move, Attack. If you played a Thief, you had two moves, Attack and Backstab. If you played a Barbarian, you had two as well, Attack and Berserker Rage. They tried fixing this with splatbook Kits, and then later Skills and Powers, but by then it was too little too late. If you played a magic-user, on the other hand, you had as many options as your Intelligence or Wisdom would allow in the form of spells; until you ran out of spells, then it was attack with a weapon, and if you didn't have a weapons proficiency with that weapon, you did so at a penalty. Anyone who hates 4th edition has never played AD&D. It's everything people hate about 4E, but without the character customization.
@@monokumaprincipalofhopespe8295 They also bought back Dark Sun without all the metaplot nonsense where NPC's killed all the major villains. That's a big point in the edition's favour.
4e did have good ideas to it though. The 1 HP minion concept is solid and 5e benefits from it. Enemies having auras, or half HP reactions makes fights more interesting too.
Agreed when I home brew with 5th I draw a lot from 4th to spice up combat because 5th combat is mechanically boring, just like 3.5 and pathfinder's combats are mechanically boring never had a mechanically boring fight in 4th.
@@vepristhorn8278 I like how people say this, but Ben literally says that playing 4e he hated combat because it was slow and boring at least partly because there is so much going on that rounds take forever.
@@Bighappykitty The good old days of 2nd edition where we got rid of stupid sillyness like Barbarian being considered a separate class instead of just being a type of fighter...
Wow, I started with 4e. I guess I was lucky enough to have a DM that was running a home brew campaign, rather than a module, and must have been fudging quite a bit of the system, because I don't remember a whole lot of these flaws. I had a fantastic 18 months or so on that campaign and it really got me into D&D. I like 5e a whole lot more now, but I have fond memories of that first group.
4th edition was and is a great system with the proper DM. Combat is more strategy based than 5e. I have not taken a look at any modules for 4e as I run a homebrew game, so I can't speak there, but god I do love it. The classes and characters all feel so fresh compared to 5e
To be fair, it is legitimately hard for veteran players to talk about 4e without becoming a ranting mess eventually, and sometimes a bath of tears. Vietnam flashbacks everywhere.
I've played pretty much every edition of D&D, even played the old Chainmail and the D&D Miniature Game that was out during 3.5e. While many of my friends loathed 4e, I've always been of the opinion that it's not a bad system, just a bad RPG system. D&D 4e is a great rules system for a tabletop wargame, their biggest problem was marketing it as a tabletop RPG.
Its a "bad" RPG system, cause for once you don't have a 85 paragraphe chapter on how to talk to the King or the blacksmith, cause WotC thought that people where smart enough to know how to role play. But we all know people can be dumb as fuck sooo...
@@Mugthraka 4ed introduced a more dice-focused system for rolling out social encounters. You could ignore it, and social encounters will then play about the same as any other system (but with less role-play lore information, as you stated), but the system doesn't get credit for that. It was a bad RPG system because of how possible it made it to play correctly, as intended, without doing any role-play. 4ed made my group sort of feel like role-play was just a house rule we were adding to a wargame. It was an excellent tabletop board game though!
I agree, Inifus - not a bad system, just not a very good tabletop RPG system - and i think much the same thing could be said of 3rd/3.5/Pathfinder, too - and maybe some of the others as well, though I've not touched 5th Edition at all, or the other editions/versions since the '80s. Puffin's video does a fair job of describing what, to me, made 3rd-4th Edition "bad RPG systems" just perfectly: too many moving parts, too much record-keeping, too many gimmicky gaming mechanics, too many false options, too much railroading into fixed mechanical roles. As Inifus mentioned, it's all stuff that would have been handled elegantly as a computer system, but at the game table, especially with new gamers or a mix of new and experienced gamers, it was a distraction from the things that made tabletop gaming a rewarding activity that couldn't be delivered by computers. I don't really recognize that reference to an "85-paragraph chapter on how to talk to the King or the blacksmith" - it doesn't seem to be present in the core rulebooks 3.5 Edition, 2nd Edition, 1st Edition, 4th Edition, or Pathfinder 1 or Pathfinder 2: all those versions seem pretty consistent in the core rulebooks as far as being fairly laissez-faire about the game world and how you're "supposed" to interact with it beyond the core rules, and all those versions seem pretty consistent with a similar amount of hand-holding to introduce new gamers to the basics of role-playing in a D&D game - that is, if any particular edition explains how to use e.g. Persuade/Intimidate/Charisma/whatever to interact with other characters, they all do, and I don't think any of them devote an entire chapter to talking to NPCs. (The non-core rulebooks might be a different story, but selling books of bloat is basically the business model for D&D and Pathfinder both, and 4th Edition was no exception.) I'm always open to being proven objectively wrong, though - if anyone has a verse-and-chapter reference to that 85-paragraph chapter on talking to NPCs in any of the other D&D core rulebook versions/flavors/editions, let's see it....
mechanically it was glorious. as someone who likes min-maxing builds, it was fantastic, in a way that 5e just hasn't hit for me in the core rulebooks (i tend to make my own classes as a result. i did in 4e, but it was more a reflavoring of something that exists, rather than a ground-up construction). 4es only real weakness was a lack of embedded roleplaying rules. as someone who came in during 4e, i completely ignored roleplaying until later on, when i joined a campaign that had roleplayers in it. (i was absolutely a murderhobo on my first character, but i didn't realize until 5e that it existed to a large degree. i had brief spurts of it after about a year, but nothing major. in fairness, thats about a 3 year thing for me? 5e initially alienated me because i got killed about 4 times in the first campaign in it, but in retrospect that was less the system, more the GM. 3 of them were utterly out of my control, and the 4th i had just stopped caring because i died so much anyway it didn't matter to me at that point. the GM put me in a Saw-esq scenario where the girl at the table had to pick between two players to kill off. i was one. and her boyfriend was the other. HMMMMM, GUESS WHO. Then i was put in a situation where my new character figured out one of the party members was a doppelganger. on its own, no problem. but this was a doppelganger who was also a serial killer, going alphabetically based on name. well, my character, who's name starts with "S", was isolated with him when this revelation came out, by way of him killing "R". the character starts attacking, figuring well either i end him or he ends the character. the party killed me off instead of the doppleganger (even the guy playing the dopple was going "guys wtf") get my 3rd character in (by this point im about 8 levels behind everyone because i keep having to come in lowered in levels) and get critically drilled into oblivion by a fight one of the other party members had sparked. the damage i took anyone else could have survived with a goodly amount of health left. but it dealt over twice my max hp, and i had no window to react to it, because nothing i know of from that character can negate a crit. i think the GM forgot i was that far behind and figured i would be able to take the hit. but funny, a level 4 rogue with a 12 constitution can't take the same hit a level 12 fighter with 20 constitution can. when i came back (at level because the gm wanted me to not get deleted in one hit again), the group goes to my character's god, in effect flips them off and attacks. my character sides with her god (shouldn't be surprising). apparently in the session prior, which i had missed, one of them got a god-slayer weapon, so my character is pissed, but not in a position to do anything about it. when we got to the BBEG, immediately after killing him, i dropped meteors on the party (aside from one guy who was in on it, he helped me out). i figured im 300 feet in the air (dragon sorcerer wings), i should be safe from retribution. apparently the god-slayer sword wielder also had some artifact to teleport and fly as a free action. so i got aced. i kinda deserved that one, but i had just stopped caring by then. they still have me branded as the one in our group to expect "blind-side" betrayals from. which is funny, considering i have one of the lower PvP instigation counts of the group, and the player(s) it targets did something to earn that attack. or my character was still being introduced and it was planned with the DM. oh, playing a turncoat from the evil empire and actively obscuring your alignment is a really good way to get players to not trust you.
D&D 4e, it was like someone thought "let's take the mechanics of an MMORPS, and slap them into a tabletop game... where there's no computer to constantly keep track of every modifier from the ever changing list of buffs/debuffs that keep popping up and expireing every tick, I mean turn.
There's was 4 types of Buffs, Arcane, Insight, Power and Divine, and you could not stack bonuses/maluses from the same source. So at best and depending on your party composition, you had at most 4 bonuses to keep track off... But of what i've seen so far, seems like a loot of people who played 4th, simply had no idea on how to read and understand rules... No wonder that 5th was dumbed down to its utmost for the fish brains to understand how it works...
Wasnt the Cooldowns in 4e just "At will" (no cooldown) "once per encounter" and "once per Day". I dont recall others. The cooldown management was easy. no idea how it gets called hard because its less of a faff than any other system, such as Spell Slots, in D&D.
Yeah, when I've heard people say why they don't like 4e, they'd always say it's "too much like a video game" without elaborating why. This video did a lot to help me understand what exactly people meant by that.
To this day, my old gaming group from 20 years ago still gravitates towards 4E. A lot of the criticism seems copy pasted from people who never played it. It also doesn't help that WOTC buries their old editions and doesn't really support them anymore. Just some of the things I can think of that are great: -Powers were a great idea, and solved the issue of the martial vs. caster bridge -Skill Challenges were amazing (If you knew how to run them, the rules were a bit janky on explaining) -Second Wind is cool -Healing Surges are cool -Short rests only being a few minutes is cool -Attribute based targeting was great. It really flexed the game beyond "weapon vs. AC" and "Spellcasting DC vs. Save" -Creature roles is an awesome idea. Bumps up the games tactical edge on both sides -The Warlord class is cool -Feats every two levels, and powers offering dynamic choices every level was great -Level cap being broken into three tiers, and each one having a "advanced subclass" choices was pretty awesome. Reminds me of Seiken Densetsu, or Fire Emblem -Darkvision was very rare -Minions. Another great idea for mooks. Let's the players flex their power, while also keeping the enemies relevant -Radiant damage hurts undead (I really don't get why this is not a thing anymore. In fact... elemental damage in general is pretty weak nowadays) -Treasure parcels made sorting loot way easier
New player: So what's the most powerful epic spell in the game? 3e player: What do you mean by powerful? 5e player: What do you mean by epic? 4e player: wHat iS sPell?
@@creativemalfunction7100 Yeah, lol, I agree. I just find it funny that if you ask a 3e veteran about the best option to take, you'll often get a rather philosophical response along the lines of "What is best?" You know, because the seer number of tools (a spellcaster) have, there are probably highly specialized options for every job, and then there are flexible ones for everything XD
Um yeah I've never played 1e I've thought of it though it sounds very hard but rewarding I mean 1e as the game and not playing spellcasters in general I have played those
I literally just started playing seriously 2 weeks ago. And I wanna say thanks to you. It was your videos that convinced me to really give dnd a try and play adventures at my local comic store. So thank you.
Dnd is one of the best games, it can be hard to get into and can get lost easily but 5e simplified a lot and the stories you get to tell and enjoy with new and old friends are amazing and completely worth it for the players who get past the first couple sessions of initial confusion
I can hear Ben’s hesitation when he says he still likes it. Either he’s hesitating because he does like it and is worried about the online toxicity about it. Or he’s trying to convince himself to like it for nostalgia reasons
"4E was _kind of_ a low point in D&D's popularity." Considering that one of D&D's biggest competitors, Pathfinder, came out as a direct response to 4E's changes by advertising itself as "D&D 3.75", it may as well have been _the_ low point for the D&D brand. Not to hate on 4E or anything, I at least get why someone could like it (and don't really care for Pathfinder myself).
To use an example for comparison, 4e was kind of like Smash Brawl. It was so bad that someone made a mod that completely revamped it, called Project M, that actually became really popular.
@@michaelbesser5348 Makes sense, the few people I knew who stuck with it went heavy with the homebrews (though to be fair they did that with everything).
Pathfinders Much better than 4.0. nobody I know likes it or plays 4 .o. 5.0 is far better than 4.0. 3.5 D&D works fine, with a few house rules..if you can't multi- class or create a character that you want to play,why bother with it?!
@@aaronhumphrey2009 I'm currently playing a homebrew FFIV-reskin of 5th Edition campaign. I was not at all able to make the character I would have wanted to play. But I am playing it because it's the only option I have. I can only hope that the group agrees to switch to something I can make an enjoyable character in once this campaign is over.
@@CrazaelGood luck with your adventures.. I'm currently playing a Dragonborn Sorcerer- Favored Soul of Kossuth, Lord of Fire.. In between throwing fireballs and flaming spheres, it's quite handy to be able to ' upcast' a simple cure light wounds spell up to your maximum level to increase the healing bestowed and revive the cleric/ guy down in the heat of battle. I like to add ' empower Spell' onto Cure Critical Wounds ( 4d8+50%+ 14) ,if needed,( 6th level spell used up). The "short rest" in 5.0 addition is welcome, taking some of the healing load off the healers and allowing more multiple per day encounters. Combat has been simplified compared to Pathfinder,but still allows plenty of options and class- specific features that 4.0 watered down too far .
The only way anyone would ever convince me to run 4e is if we set it in a world where the characters were characters in a video game and were self aware of that fact.
Which is what most people suspected that it was designed for. This is when World of Warcraft was HUGE, and every company in existence wanted to make the next computer MMO game hit. WotC went around killing their entire digital ecosystem of small companies that supported the players, to hoover it up into their Digital Initiative. When then never really materialized as a small book publishing company isn't suddenly a big computer game company.
By 20th level I had to print out 12 PAGES of abilities. Note: you could get to 30th level in that game. I think it was fun because of all the friends I made, not the system.
@@JustLooking1996 ehh for cleric you only need, Righteous might/Spiritual weapon, healing word, remove curse, polymorph and a Resurrection spell, the rest is just decor so you dont need the whole spell list
Arc Neo Masato there are feats, Paragon Path feats, feats, Epic Destiny feats, more feats, magical items you're supposed to get every 4 levels out of 5, feats, have I mentioned feats? I tried to make(!), not play, make 21-level character, and ohhhh boy. O finished doing it but after looking over all the shit I decided that those combats must take like 8 hours or something, cause holy crap there's a lot of options before you get to apoint where you start to replace the powers.
I was playing 3.5 when 4th edition came out and i went to a once shot session of it. Never again i touched 4th edition, for me it felt like the creators were trying to copy videogame mechanics, which wouldn't be strange in a action rpg, but on a table were boring or simply restrictive.
That's exactly what they were doing. 4e came out right in the heart of the WoW/MMORPG craze when 3.5 was...flagging to say the least. The ruleset was ancient and massively over bloated with expansion content. On top of that, tabletop games weren't really popular and everyone was migrating in droves over to the new hottness: MMORPGS. So in an attempt to win back players, 4e was designed to appeal to WoW players with rigidly defined classes, party roles (reminiscent of the tank/healer/dps trinity), and "hotkey" abilities each with their own cooldowns. Unfortunately in doing so, they managed to sacrifice the essence of what makes tabletop games unique from MMOs: the freedom to do...whatever you and your DM can come up with. In WoW, if you want to climb on the dragon's back and stab it in the neck...you can't do that unless the fight was pre-designed to work that way. In tabletop games, the system SHOULD have a function allow the DM to adjudicate a series of rolls/checks to make it work. 4e failed to make that kind of play possible by basically saying, "if your character doesn't have a power that lets you do the thing, you can't do the thing."
I bought the PHB and we flipped through it, and my group decided not to even bother. It was like they really wanted to make an MMO, but got stuck in the tabletop gaming department.
I started with 2E, but 4E was the edition I played the most, having a long running game group going during that time period. I enjoyed the version immensely.
Puffin: "I like 4th edition. I'm going to talk about it for a while, and I'm going to try not to be negative because I know a lot of people don't like 4th edition for some reason, and I don't want to feed into that." Puffin by the end of the (almost completely negative) video: "I re-read the book. I understand why a lot of people don't like 4th edition." Puffin, I think you also may not like 4th edition. And this is coming from someone who also started with 4th, was sad that there was no multiclassing, the powers were repetitive, and combat would take us hours and hours, sometimes multiple sessions, and every time I had what I thought was a really cool idea I'd ask the DM "Can I do X?" and he'd say "No! But you could in 3.5!" And he was not a good DM so he'd always say it like a snide asshole like "Yea but 3.5 is old so no one is playing that anymore." But I didn't care about the way he said it. 5 or 6 "You could have in 3.5!"'s later, I left that 4e game and found at least 3 different groups of people still playing 3.5 and played that for a decade until 5e came out.
4e had a lot of cool ideas imo. i love that martial classes had abilities, and not simply just "attack twice." skill challenges were a great system when the DM would run it as allowing the players to do whatever, but still need to fulfill the overall requirements (pass 3 before you fail 3 i think), which i thought was the RAW way to run it but you've said otherwise. leaders existed and they were great. i found there was a lot of customization with feats and such too. the heal system with hit die and such felt a lot better than the healing system in 5e too. there were definitely some bad ideas too, like just how many effects were going on in combat. usually our DM would keep enemies simplified, save for one special thing that would appear once or twice per combat, except for the bosses who were about the full suite of things. combat would run pretty quickly that way, like it does in 5e when 5e is running smoothly (and 5e can run very poorly sometimes, all depending on the DM; that scene you laid out where everyone was completely disengaged happens a lot in 5e in my experience, since i've played with a lot of newbie DMs). multiclassing was fairly bad as mentioned too. overall, i like 4e and would definitely like to play more. but what i really want is 5e with martial cantrips and leaders, lol.
Nick Porter skill challenges had a level, which set their DCs and rewards, but had a “complexity” of between 1 to 5, which dictates how many skill successes and failures the challenge would amass before ending (always twice the successes needed compared to failures) This feature was monumentally great, along with healing surges, engaging monsters designed to illicit dynamic encounters, the only non-stupid multi-class system D&D ever had, and a small pile of other things that just simply SHOULD HAVE BEEN in 5E. I still exclusively run 4E.
In 5E martial classes don't just have that lol. I don't see why people complain about 5E martial classes when they all have their own abilities and their subclasses even customize them more. Want a fighter with extra abilities? You have one that offers menuevers, one that offers special arrow shots, one that allows you to crit more often / hit more often. Etc. So depending on what kind of fighter you want to be you can specialise hell you can even be a fighter with spells! With barbarian you can be one that can take an unending amount of damage or roleplay a bear or some other animal through totems, etc. With rogue you can me a magically gifted one, a highly effective assassin, a trikster that can trick everyone, etc.
I actually liked 4E. I like 5E too, but 4E has some positive qualities. Notably I felt like it was very easy to make a balanced, effective custom monster from the ground up in 4E. It unfortunately fell into some of the same traps of 3E though, which is to say way too many situational modifiers and overall system bloat. It did some things very right though, like making everything "attack versus defense" instead of SOME things "attack versus defense" and other things "save against DC" seemingly arbitrarily. Don't understand why they went backwards on that in 5E other than nostalgia. Kinda wish 5E inherited more of what 4E did right, but I suspect that a combination of nostalgia and not wanting to associate with it prevented the designers from doing that--I remember them promising "We'll have every single PHB1 class from all editions in the 5E PHB" but had to walk it back because no warlord (a 4E PHB1 class). Oh well, I suspect no system is perfect.
I get the feeling that the main reason why balanced monsters were so easy to create is because every combination of players was the same. If you know exactly what the players get to the table, you can have 100% balanced fights. Like a RPG videogame that never lets you choose how you level up your characters and scale the level of their monsters to your party.
@@bigstromboli965 I mean, it is inconsistent in some places, though. Like sometimes they are kinda consistent about it--but then you have the ranger's volley aoe, which is attack vs. defense against monsters in an area, or Disintegrate, a single-target spell which is a saving throw. But that's really not my main point. In 4E, it was always the ATTACKER that was rolling dice, and the DEFENDER had a static defense. This was easy and consistent. Can you explain to me what benefit there is to saying sometimes the attacker rolls, and sometimes the defender rolls? Mathematically, it can work out the same. "Half damage on a miss" as in 4E after all as a mechanic, which is the same as "save for half". 4E's approach makes a lot more sense to me, because it says "it's your turn, you roll the dice". The more "traditional" way is back and forth in a way that is, frankly, arbitrary.
@@Jake007123 I would not go that far. I played a variety of classes in 4E and they had notable differences. What 4E did was make sure that all classes were capable of doing combat well. There were still, frankly, some severe balance/math issues in 4E, but it was a somewhat level playing field. I also feel that the monster creation rules in the 5E PHB are needlessly complex. I know 4E's monsters can seem a little "streamlined" math-wise, but frankly I felt that just gave me more space to emphasize special abilities and environments (in my set piece encounters, the environment in which players encountered a monster was always a major factor, like tentacles erupting from pools of water or jets of flame bursting from fissures in the ground)--in other words, balance gives me more freedom, not less. That is the approach I prefer, anyway, which I know is not very "old school" and some people call it video-gamey but whatever. It's not like 3rd edition wasn't compared to Diablo when it came out.
@Kuuryo But that's still arbitrary. Because the defender only rolls sometimes. Like, if it was a rule that the PLAYER always rolled, that I'd get. That'd be consistent. Like, monsters have static attacks/static defenses, and players always roll attacks against monsters, and roll to defend against attacks. In any case, it's still not a hard and fast thing, because out-of-turn actions and effects still were a thing in 4E, as they are in 3E and 5E alike. Opportunity attacks, immediate actions, ongoing and triggered effects, etc. I say, let those fill the space for paying attention when it's not your turn. There was no need to make a whole "saving throw" mechanic which is exactly the same as "attack vs AC", except sometimes we use one and sometimes we use the other somewhat inconsistently.
@@AnonSeacat Well, the defender might have different modifiers than the attacker, so who is the one to make the save does make a difference. Also, it does feel better to avoid an attack because YOU rolled well, rather than the attacker rolling badly, and it implies that your character dodged it because he is skilled and competent, rather than just being lucky that the enemy missed. I do agree that saves should be a little more "consistent" though, because you can never really tell when a spell or ability needs a save without actually reading their description, which can slow down combat a bit, especially for new players, but that also makes them feel more unique and quirky, and honestly, players should know how their powers work anyway, so that's not the gm's nor the game's fault. Overall, i like saving throws, they feel more apropriate than just AC, like, it's more focused on your skills rather than just numbers, like you know why you beat that attack, it wasn't just because your defense is higher, it was because your character i very tough, or very dexterous, or very wise, you know? It stimulates my imagination more, idk. I've started with 5e so honestly my opinion might not be very important, but oh well...
Don't know why, But i could listen to this guy tell story's for days on end. Love ya work man.. Not even a Fan of DnD. Have never played it in my life. Ty for your work man. Cheered me up, been in hospital for a week with back problems. This put a smile on my face when i am miserable ATM. Thanks again.
I just dmed my first home brew campaign and it was a ton of fun. Hearing your videos and the confidence (even as things went to hell) was a big help. Thank you.
I was in the same boat as you, I too started in 4e, except I loved it. I loved doing team attacks with my warlord, it was the funnest thing to me. Coming from playing video and board games all my life, I loved all the combat rules and strategies. I eventually switched to the Pathfinder games and play those these days, but I’ll never forget all the fun I had with 4e with my friends. Good times.
Yeah, I think you covered the what I remember about 4E. People I played with would say over and over again, "it's still a new system, just wait til a few more books come out and it'll get better."
I loved 4e back when I was playing it. It was my first edition of D&D, and somehow all 7 of us got the hang of it really quickly so it flowed well for my group. All of my best D&D stories are from the 2 years I spent playing 4e.
Yeah. I think it depends on the people. I had a group of friends that all played 4E and would constantly tell me how good it was...but I started playing with AD&D right before 3E came out, and switched to 3E when it happened... You cant go AD&D to 3E to 3.5, to 4E...That just...it doesn't work. Everytime i read the rules for 4E my brain went "NO. You PUT THAT BOOK DOWN. THATS A BAD NERD! Don't do it again" Which is really a shame because I was REALLY tired of 3.5e's design too. That was a ruleset with some serious flaws. So I basically had no D&D until 5e came out. Bummer.
Same here. I suppose it helped that my experience with earlier editions were never as fun as I wanted them to be. I was primed for something completely new.
My group absolutely loved 4e and we HATE 5e. The reason being, all of us were and still are tabletop mini players. Warmachine, 40k, you name it. So 4e to us was just a natural extention of things, so battle to us was a blast of fun.
Same here. I never had a problem with managing everything. Combat did take longer, but this was mainly due to the hit point spread. Minions were easy kills, other monsters took forever (unless you optimized a striker class).
I loved 4th Edition! It was the edition I first started with too and it was perfect for me. I'm am avid wargamer (Warhammer, malifaux, infinity, Magic, etc.) And the combat always scratched that itch so well, I would spend hours building optimized characters, or building something off the wall and unique. The feats especially added so many unique options. It also helped that our DM treated every encounter like a WoW boss fight which is as much a puzzle based around abilities and movement as it is a grind. And I guess our team was pretty good at moving turns along and keeping track of the combat stack from years of playing magic. I also really liked the rituals, but I guess that's just personal taste. The only thing I felt 4th really lacked was that it separates the combat from the roleplay side.
A lot of the issues Puffin brings up are things that still happen in 5e as well, and are issues that occur because of a bad DM. Players forgetting bonuses, realized they had certain abilities, etc. I've played 5e for years, and have gotten into 4e recently as well, and it's actually a lot of fun. You could have 5 characters of the same class that all have drastically different styles, and your fighter is going to feel just as cool as your wizard. Combat is very straight forward, you have 4 action types. Movement, Standard, Minor, and Free. -Move Action. Well you move. -Standard is gonna be your abilities, (ie; weapon attacks and spells) -minor are certain abilities that are easier, akin to bonus actions. Sheathing/Drawing a weapon, applying poisons -Free actions are things like talking, certain abilities, just things that take little to no effort or time. You can standard and move actions can go down, so you can take 3 minor actions, or 2 minor and a standard/movement. Combat is only boring if your DM makes it boring. I've never once found 5e combat fun aside from when my DM throws in so much homebrew mechanics it's barely recognizable as 5th edition. In standard play at LOW levels, sure there's not much to track player side, but at high levels, there is tons of spells, magic items, abilities, auras, etc to track player side. Then not to mention DM side is hell in 5e. I've played quite a few sessions of 4e now, around 10, having several combats, and it's all riveting. Each action is meaningful, and you plan and strategize around it. When you know a fight is coming, you scout ahead and gather info on your enemies to know what they do so you can counter them effectively. Enemies actually have tactics and goals in a fight. The things to keep track of are your powers, which are worded very well. Combat is not an issue in 4th edition, and it is much more fun than 5th edition in my opinion. Skill bonuses are a bit of a non issue as 4e was meant to be digitized, but that received backlash from the community, which I agree with. They get crazy high at some points, but in 5th edition, you have so many spells, abilities, and bonuses as well. The amount of times I've had a rogue in my games roll a 30+ on stealth, or a barbarian roll a 30+ on athletics, or other stuff is insane. I had a rogue get a 54 on a stealth check. She got a nat 20, had +14 stealth, PWT, and a few other buffs from magic items. These are not things that 5th edition resolved. For those few of you who see this 3 years after this video, don't discount 4th edition based off of the words of people who didn't know how to play it. Not to mention, if the DM was bad, then that can ruin any game from AD&D, to Call of Cthulhu, to Zweihander, and even 5th edition. Give it a try yourself, there's a discord for 4th edition play with a decent following. But 4th edition is extremely fun, and if you wish to give it a try, I'm looking to run a game on Tuesday afternoons CST. Just reply to this comment and ask for my discord tag.
I might be three years early, but I wouldn't mind lurking around some 4E servers. I might actually even join to conversations and report of my ongoing/past campaigns if the server feels ready to hear the tales of how my players escaped from a disguised lich by putting on a play.
Ahhhh, the 4e debates. The Greatest War of our time (so far). I remember listening to a bunch of 4e sessions DMed by Chris Perkins, and I could never figure out why people disliked it so much. Then again, Perkins is particularly adroit at running games, so it is possible he smoothed off a lot of 4e' s rough edges.
Michel Javert Mostly because it’s written and plays like a war game. If you ran the campaigns as written, the lore and character motivations were regulated to side notes and the stat blocks were the whole page.
Reading through this is starting to make a lot more sense because it's like D&D has always basically been a war game, but the roleplay aspect was the one people really liked the most. So if you want to tell a story with each action then that's one thing, but if you just want a BUNCH of factors everywhere influencing the battle then it's just like "Oh, +2 and +5 on this minus these things and this is what your attack does." I could see people jumping into 5e, rolling 1d8 for damage on a cantrip, and then being like "Okay. But why don't I have more things to stack to that?" I'm at least getting the impression that this is very much sort-of more like turn-based combat compared to MMO combat, generally speaking, in terms of one's more for just picking a thing and making choices and the other one's more for appealing to people who want just all the numbers happening everywhere all over the place. Am I off on this?
@@apersonwhomayormaynotexist9868 Nope, you're lying. And if you've played 5e you should know it's a bland, uninspired, unbalanced mess made by a bigot.
@@PataHikari you dont just get to say I'm lying just because I disagree with you, 5e is certainly better than 4e, and this is the first I'm hearing of either being made by a bigot
@@PataHikari also 5e is plenty balanced, super fun, and the inspiration of a tabletop RPG is mostly based off the group you're in. I'm sorry if your father was murdered using the 5e players handbook or something, but to the rest of us who played the game (I seriously doubt you've played with a good group before, did you just have a terrible DM or something) 5e just is more fun
As a 4E DM for the duration before 5E came out, I just chucked out most of the stuff enemies could do and reduced their HP and increased their damage. Worked great. I would focus on one or two elements of the monsters in the combat, enough to theme the battle. I don't think you were intended to run _everything_ a monster could do. As far as out of combat, I actually really loved 4E because it treated out of combat as an afterthought. Gave me complete freedom to run it however I needed for the moment. The stories my 4E games delved into were vast and interesting, 5E tends to get in my way because if I forget any of the things my players can do, it can bork the whole narrative. I've gotten better about it, but I definitely had those skill atrophy in the 4E era.
Funny, part of the reason I started playing D&D in general, and 5e specifically, was because I was looking for inspiration for my stories. Of course, didn't want to spend $50+ for a game I wasn't into - funny how that turned out - got $300+ worth of books (got all the player-related ones up to Theros), and a lot of dice (like $100 for just that, along with $40 for the Crown Royal Regal Apple - wanted the green bag, but the whiskey was good when mixed with apple juice, and was useful for "medicinal" purposes - lol!). Anyways, there's a guy I go horseback riding with, and he too likes D&D, being a veteran of 3.5e, although he's trying to get into 5e. Turns out, he has the 3.5PHB, and he let me borrow it. Been a little bit, and perhaps it was because the type was smaller, but I had issues with it. One issue I had was how everyone had some sort of racial penalty (don't get that much in 5e, and with the revised Volo's, no one gets it), with certain weapons meant for specific races (I can understand racial Martial Training as a culture thing, to have the ability to use certain armor/weapons regardless of class) and how certain races "should" be "certain" classes and not others (granted, given that certain races have bonuses to certain stats, still got a mild bit of that, but there's no real issue making "sub-optimal" race/class combos), and I might even argue about rolling for stats without an alternative stat array for those who just want to make a character real quick (but I know that's just Tradition). Of course, I like to talk to him about the different races and their abilities. For instance, I mentioned the Aarakocra and Winged Tiefling, who can be above the main action. He was like, "Sounds a bit unfair to the DM." I point out, "Yes, goblins can't use melee weapons against flying PCs, but every creature tends to have access to some sort of ranged weapon, and since goblins are at least smart enough to recognize a flying threat to be dangerous, some leader will go 'You two, use bows. Bring down bird-lady. She taste good!' so a good DM will will set at least one or two dedicated to such foes." I also point this out about any other PCs that might just run over an encounter, like using a minor fiend to mess up a Yuan-Ti Paladin or a good Bruiser-type to mess with a satyr (I know how to work around magic resistance.)
I had my best memories wih 4th ed! i had a charater called mozi mc bug (a swarm of bugs inside a human skin) hybrid wizard rouge, i think he got to 12 level, and i just remember him being so powerful with all his feats sunk into magic misiles (i called them bugs that acted like missles made of fire and force), added fire damge to magic missile and increased fire damge to that, and the house rule we had we could throw out all our attacj encounters to recharge a dailie we used. and mozi always did that to get the dailie to double his magic missile every round! basically all i used and used the rouge powers to move hide run away lol. also i remember we had so little magic items to. i just remember it being so much fun!
Puffin: This was an amazing game! I'm going to tell you all why I loved it. Also Puffin: THIS IS THE WORST GAME IN HISTORY OH MY GOSH WHY DID ANYONE EVER PLAY THIS GARBAGE AAAAA!!!!!
@@Agreus-WolfsbaneYT I bought the 3.5 books but was never able to play the game with someone. My first actual game was Pathfinder, but I liked it a lot because it took the 3.5 rules and upgraded them a bit to make each of the classes a bit more unique and simplified some of the rules that were a bit overly complicated in 3.5. In fact, I still play Pathfinder to this day.
@@Agreus-WolfsbaneYT I love it. Each class has some unique features none of the other classes get to make them worth playing, and feats make each one even more customizable. There's also no such thing as an "empty" level because every level in just about every class your character will get something nifty. The Pathfinder lore is also pretty cool.
I loved 4E back in the day, especially the artwork and all of the classes and Lore. My friends and I would do a weekly 12 hour session. Combat was a breeze for us and quick. I miss the Nentir Vale setting.
I’ve played 5th and I still do for two of the four games I play in. I don’t hate it but it’s really not my jam. 4e was and still is a good system (at least I think so). Edit: Noticed a typo
Thank you, Puffin, for always going over this...Breaking down and analyzing this, and then its relation to the rest of D&D and RPG development and history is useful for discovering of greater game design. My thanks, for Truth, sincerely!
Going by his description, he liked the role-play aspect of the game. It was just the mechanics that were such a drag. And he was in a 3.5 game concurrently, so he got a view into a system that wasn't...4e, let's be tactful.
@@Bluecho4 If i go by his other vids, his group is pretty terrible at playing by the rules... And the mechanics where'nt much of a drag, even compared to 3.5 or 3rd. Yes there was a lot of bonuses and maluses to keep track off, but also a lot din't stack, you Had Divine, Arcane, Primal and Insight bonuses, and you couldn't stack bonuses coming from the same kind of source. Some of the numbers could be staggering to see, since hte game had a leveling curve on 30 lvls, with your AC been in the 40's for a squishy to medium character, and Attack bonus been +37. But in the end its the same has having only 22 in AC and +15 AB in 5th
To be honest, his DM was a newbie and they played a complicated crunchy system. 4e had problems, but a lot of problems Puffin mentioned sounds a lot like DM issues.
Nah, me and my group are still playing 4e to this day. A good DM makes a good game. A lot of what he said in this video was either objectively wrong, or a super easy fix with a halfway decent dm.
We all have memories that will last a long time, like the time one shows the DM the info on a Celestial Warlock, and he just freezes. That was a fun moment, as prior to that, he mainly stuck to the Core rulebooks, and then I came in with Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Then there was the time we (the group) were trying to figure out what to make my mother, who had decided to join the group, and we realized that we didn't have a monk, and this other player was like "Tabaxi Monk!" and the DM was like "Tabaxi?" and I go "Volo's" and get that book out and show it to him, and thus, Tabbitha the Way of the Open Hand Tabaxi Monk came to be, and my mother loves being the crazy cat lady of the group. (Can't wait until the DM gives the "Go Ahead" and we can play again.)
...That's 5th edition. Not that your comment isn't relevant but you're replying to "D&D 4e was a game || Memories from an older D&D edition" with memories from 5th edition without prefacing them as such.
"Originally the way I got into Dungeons & Dragons was online D&D videos."
The cycle continues...
The cycle of tabletops, like life itself creates stories in an endless cycle.
Truly inspiring
Welllll, it depends on what you watched. Staged productions like Critical Role don't show you the pain and anguish of searching for a rule or doing the nonsense D&D arithmetic of plusses and minuses enough.
THIS is the most accurate play video I've ever seen to show beginners what it's REALLY all about.
ua-cam.com/video/-leYc4oC83E/v-deo.html
IT'S THE CIRCLE OF LIIIIFE
Dracopol Critical Role is not staged.....
@@KRob811 Its not staged, but its certainly unlike 90% of D&D games out there.
This explains so much. I couldnt imagine how or why Puffin got thru the Waterderp AL epic so quickly. He was forged in an environment where being quick MATTERED.
Holy crap, that makes so much sense
Consider my mind blown
So, it's like a form of PTSD?
@@marcocappelli2236 More like instinct
@@willofthewinds3222 same thing
Came for Puffin recalling fond memories of playing D&D with friends.
Stayed for the 22 minute PTSD flashback.
Lightning Point I laughed way too hard at that description XD
HAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA
LOL I was expecting the same XD
I do have PTSD from 3.5 specially becouse of the stupid people not reading the rules properly and thinking they found a good "combo" hahahaha
In 4E I do have a good time mastering and playing, but I think that the most diference is that when we started playing 4E, we already have 5 years of experienice playing TTRPG in general
bruh i was doing literally the same thing
22 minutes of him not remembering a single actual thing about 4e*.
Dude got nothing right.
Stacking bonus and passive is really fun... in a video game... when the game system does it for you and keep track of it...
In a video game its fun to just stack literally every possible bonus because its funny, in a Table-top Rpg, you do that, everyone at the table looks at you and leaves because by the time the next session happens, it might be the end of your turn
Wasnt 4E designed to be digital?
@@EricIsntSmart Usually digital only mean saved digitally(as in like in a pdf format) instead of a physical book, it doesn't mean having a whole virtual engine handling the game's running processes (like a video game system).
And even if they meant it like the 2nd, does it really matter when it only properly came out as the former.
@@haraken3119 No like im pretty sure 4E was designed to be a digital game with a system running the bonuses and stuff but the development was cancelled and we only got the paper details
@@EricIsntSmart Sure... maybe...
Honestly my point was that everyone keep throwing the digital term erroneously, when for most tech people it just mean the way it is stored (ie: digitally like a pdf, ironically to what people says, it did also get release digital that way), when people think they said a game engine treating and computing information.
If you say a product would be made to be digital, the most it actually factually mean is that it isn't in a physical format and is stored in data, with nothing so far implying anything more.
The hybrid classing system sounds like the bane of Abserd.
Not really, it was just another version of multiclassing, which was a whole 'nother thing that came before. Using both you can make some interesting, if albiet overall useless, characters. I mean, I suppose it CAN work, if you chose the right combos...….
@@tyrongkojy Abserd is a character who had multiclassed into all the available classes in 5e, so this system would be his bane because it would stop his specific build.
Basically he just straight out gets that wrong. We had multiclassing.
Yeah, I hadn't gotten to the part about multiclassing when I first saw you. He um... is straight out wrong. So wrong that, when he gets into that MAYBE it was that they were all new and didn't know what they were doing, and blaming each other and no one tried fixing things... that's 100% what it was, really. Either he never actually read the book (first PHB has a whole section on multiclassing, NOT hybrids. I can get him not liking how they do it, but it's in there.) or they were just not... good....
I don't know what else to say,. He's either lying straight out, or is wrong and has no idea.
Player- " can I steal the ghosts haha" Dm rolls " yes" player "what?"
:)
Michael Hughes You can do this in 5th if you’re clever. In 4th it’s just...”yay you did it even though it makes no sense”
I'd allow it
Now I know why his brother called it “The Sadness”.
Underrated comment xD
And The Darkness.
@a random guy on the internet No! You hit the gazebo!
Sounds like the bad guy from a crappy Neverending Story sequel.
@a random guy on the internet d&d 4th edition comes from hell and thus has dark vision 60ft so it isn't effected
4E was designed to be digital and have all that bloat be handled by the system. Unfortunately they stopped the development of it, so we just got a system designed for a different format.
That's a good point.
That... actually explains a lot.
The rituals costing money sounds so much like micropayments in a MMORPG it's painful.
The most popular historical tabletop RPG, that basically started the genre and absolutely popularized it, was designed to be digital? Jesus that's a terrible idea.
@@YukonHexsun not D&D. 4E D&D is completely different than any other edition. There are good reasons it was abandoned.
Consider it an evolutionary dead end.
"it's not a review of 4th edition"
Riiiiiiiiight
It's not a review, it's a rant.
You got the idea of skill challenge is completely wrong. That just must’ve been the way you and your group ran it but not the way it was meant to be run. Skill challenges and minions were the only two good things about fourth edition
I think that was just him earlier on in the script then as he kept going it turned into a review/rant. Lol
Whats a "4th edition"... i dont understand the topic here.
@@RexOrbis I mean, it is, but nothing about this not-review is really wrong
Puffin: "I still... Like 4th edition."
ME: "I would like to roll sense motive."
You sense that he is telling the truth. It is a shame that you didn't roll medicine or dungeoneering to check if he is insane. Ah well...
See your getting it wrong, if you rolled Thievery you would of noticed, he's being held hostage and is forced to say that, which you otherwise wouldn't of noticed anyone else if you rolled something else.
Rolls Insight instead.
I! GMed 4e and played 3.5 as my first games back in 2015, before I really had a look at 5e. I'd had the books of 4e for years, but never had anyone to play with. Long story short... it, Wasnt a bad system. It was just rigid. The whole system was Rigid. It made issues of Class Based systems shine through like an ugly step child, but they genuinely tried harder on 4e then they did on 5e. It had three times the options of 5e... even if those options had no customization what so ever.
@@maxxumus9891Would it be possible to play 4th edition with the best of 5th? Somehow? Is it doable?
"Why did I buy all these books?"
Because the covers are cool.
Specially better with goggly eyes!!!
@@pixieskitty all d&d covers are better with googgly eyes
exactly
No joke, I begged my mom to by me 4e Monster Manual just for the pictures when I was 13. I didn't play DnD till I was 20!
Meh. 3.0/3.5 tome covers were the best for sure and I wish they would have stuck with that for 5E.
Now that I know what Tenser's disk does, this is even more disheartening. I used to assume it was some arcane buzzsaw of death. Now I know it's a cargo/corpse mover.
I meaaaan, you technically can, ride it and mow over enemies lol
Man that has to suck.
@@oceanna7550 you can’t ride it, it has to hover 20 feet away
@@oceanna7550 the caster can't ride it. And it floats behind the caster
In my first ever dnd campaign I played a high elf wizard and by the end of the game, I had made it my mission to use all 150(or however, I don’t remember how much) feet of movement to just jackhammer back and forth into their knees and shatter them. I succeeded.
After playing 4E for a while, I came to two conclusions:
1. It's heavily dependent on the skill and creativity of the DM.
2. It seems like it'd be a better rule-set for a sci-fi setting where the PCs are spaceships. Multiple common abilities you can use over and over, while you have a few only once an encounter and one you can use once a day? That sounds like Phasers, Torpedoes, and Polarity Reversal.
That's... Actually a really cool concept.
That, or playing worldofwarcraft the boardgame adventure lol
Silverhawk100 very nice
@@MerlosTheMad Oh god that almost describes what I started playing with my friends recently. Warhammer Underworlds.
Its actually a horrible game to learn too. The rules are so counter-intuitive and needlessly complex. And that's coming from a hardcore 40k veteran. Its so dumb lol.
I never felt 4E was a bad game (after I played it). However it wasn't D&D which was the sticking point for the group I played with. We did a short campaign and had fun with it but quickly went back to 3.5 because it was what we felt D&D should feel like (plus we had like, a literal ton of the splat books for it)
Always wondered why everyone seemed to really like 3.5e and 5e but no one talked about what happened in between them at all.
They were dark days.
It's like the 2016 of board games.
3.5 had variety and homebrew potential. 5E is easy for newbies.
It's like the france's censorship of the jews deportation by our own country all over again
unpopular opinion here but 3.5e is way overrated tho, without supplements you're useless unless you are a Cleric or a wizard, the other classes are "fun" and "viable" for like 5 levels and then at leves 6-7 hey reach a capstone of power that means they'll never be more powerful than that while cleric and wizard skyrocket, by preteen levels 10-12 if you're playing a fighter or a barbarian you're just playing the wizard's loot mule, and with supplements it goes in the level of the redonkolous, because there's waaaaay too many and you eventually end with a deluge of rules if the gm doesnt have a strong hand and there's the following problem: if you allow the fighter to use a supplement to get on a similar power level to the wizard but decide to keep the wizard vanilla, the wizard's player complains that why can't he use a supplement if the fighter can, so you allow the wizard to use a supplement, they bring the complete arcane/unearthed arcana which creates the massive power gap between fighter and wizard they originally had and you're back to square 1.
“Really when you stop and think about it: isn’t every system just a home-brewed version of every other system?” Beautiful...absolutely beautiful.
Nah not really, there are quite a few systems that have only so much common in each other that they all had the design goal to control one character who you roleplay as.
For example GURPS got its roots from wargaming too, but from completely different wargames that were designed entirely independently from D&D. In fact most systems that were made before 2000 are, and some after too, like PbtA stuff not only has nothing to do with wargames it has nothing to do with other RPGs either.
What @Jen farmer tries to tell you, to play OD&D you need 220+ pages of material (if you wish to play as it was intended with Chainmail and Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival on top of the game but not including any sort of supplement), which he thinks is simple and a very small set of parameters.
But in reality he's one of the OSR mouthbreathers who like reading thousands of pages worth of rules but then not use any of it because it's unfair and boring.
"...I came here voluntarily....I didn't have to come here...this was my SATURDAY!"
hahahahahahaha, I hope 5e treats your Saturdays with more care.
And if not us Pathfinder Bros will adopt you sure it's super complicated if you make it that way but combat is super stream lined
No
I’ve played Pathfinder, 3.5e, and 5e. Out of all of those, I think 5e is the best but Pathfinder really isn’t that bad either. Pathfinder and 3.5e are basically the same.
I get stressed out running encounters in 5e, I can't imagine DMing for 4th. My brain hurts just hearing you talk about it.
it wasn't that bad, 4th introduced Statblocks for monsters, and you had all the info needed to run the monsters and their behavior ina single statblock.
Honestly if you failed as a Dm in 4th, its because you where inept from the start...
4th was my first DnD system, I had played a Star Trek game for a year or so before but that was it. I also started 4th by DMing. It was easy to run an encounter, but because of all the effects and how much HP and AC everything had it was difficult to keep them from getting bogged down. Also, as Puffin mentioned, there wasn't as much thought put into the other play styles and so you're limited by how the game wants you to interact with the players.
I'm just bad at simple math
Honestly as a DM of both, I much prefer DMing for 4E at least on the monster end. They were better designed and had all the information you needed in the stat block. I hate how so many 5E monsters have a list of spells that you have to look up.
@@andyenglish4303 You should check out Dark Heresy and its varients.
NPC's/Creature statblocks are: These are the stats, it has these 2 weapons (most do have the stats of the weapons), these 6 Talents (go to the talent section to see what they all do, these 4 traits (trait section, go), Has these psychic powers (you know the drill), and has these non-weapon/armour gear (go see if any give them mods that will matter to you)
Love the system, but holy fuck the bestiary can suck a dick.
D&D 5e, all you need to look up is spells if the creature has it, and most spells you can know generally what they do and if they'll matter by their name
I got into DnD at 5th edition.
This makes me appreciate what I have holy cow
Jair Artis do not take the holy sky cows name in vain
Especially considering what a boring pile of trash 5th is
@@ryanbell6672 boring? My good sir, boring depends on the DM and the players. I personally think that it is an exiting, fun, and creative game but I can understand why one with a DM or a DM with players whom are boring would not enjoy it but that isn't on the edition now is it?
@@thomastakesatollforthedark2231 , yeah bud, it really is on the edition.
The mechanics of 5th are like playing a "choose your own adventure" with only the three mundane choices you are given. instead of being able to customize a character as early as 1st level, 5th edition barely has enough nuance for you to even buy dice.
You see, here's the difference, if you take a system like Pathfinder and you prefer NOT to have complicated mechanics, then you simply don't use them and your story won't suffer one bit.
If you play 5th, your story will turn out exactly the same, but there isn't anything interesting at all about the actual stats and mechanics of the character. It is as vanilla and boring as the character next to it.
5th has fluffy mechanics because the kwel kwazy kids who wanna be sexy catfolk, don't like being given actual rules to learn, they just wanna have a crazy story about... whatever drivel they think is a good story.
@@ryanbell6672 excuse me but. What lack of mechanics are there missing? Multiclassing which 4E didn't have? The actual differing classes which 4E didn't have? The hundreds of different spells? The dozens of races? The different settings? All of which 5E has?
And im sorry but... Have you forgotten DND is an *RPG*? Aka: the whole point is making up a story and playing it out with your friends?
Imagine you’re in the hospital and you’re dying lying in the bed. And then the janitor walks up you and you’re like “what the hell?! I need a doctor!”
And he says
“I just have the highest dex soooooooorrrrrryy”
Ben: I still like 4th Edition.
4e: See. SEE someone likes me
Ben: *Proceeds to list all the flaws in 4e and proclaims that he doesn't like most of the rules*
4e: THIS DOES NOT HELP MY SELF ESTEEM
ha
It's not supposed to, 4th... See, He went and jumped on 5th ed the moment the thing rolled off the presses... My group came in from 3.5, tried the system, said "Screw this trash" and went back to 3.5 and Pathfinder... and it was such a foul taste in our mouths that I only recently gave 5th edition a shot. And it was primarily the trash, heavy handed way they pretty much deleted any concept of making your own character... or your own enemies, or even giving you the core classes and races, you had to buy the shitty 4th edition DLC, because they did everything they could not only to rip out all customization options, but to make sure the system was so gimped that you couldn't put them back in, and had to pay them for DLC because you couldn't homebrew, build your own adventures, or even play a normal elf. Or a gnome. I'm frankly surprised 4th ed didn't come in GOD DAMNED LOOTBOXES.
Mat colville likes it.
@@Tomyironmane It didn't help that the licensing change pretty much made it impossible for 3rd parties to develop anything for 4E and fix its problems.
As for 5E, it's an alright start to making a system and there's a lot of great 3rd party material for it. My biggest complaint with the system as a whole is the overuse of the Advantage/Disadvantage system. Too many abilities revolve around it, which ends up limiting the gameplay options too much.
@@InfernosReaper the disadvantage/advantage thing can be pretty fun if your dm allows double/triple advantage/disadvantage, so you can still end up rolling trash/amazing after 4 rolls that should’ve saved/fucked you
Puffin: "I'm here to talk about how much fun and special DND 4e was to me, I don't understand why people didn't like it>"
Also Puffin: *spends the next 22 minutes complaining about how awful the game is.*
The books were well formatted, tho
It does say a lot that when he thinks of memories of 4E these are the only things that come to mind
I'm thinking, if 4e was built like a real time strategy, like wc3, everything would be calculated live, and combat would just run on by, with some spell spam each fight.
@@GAMA65509 They have really industry standard grade paper too.
I was gonna say something similar, but, no need.
4e number-crunching was a fine system... for a computer-calculated game. It was MMORPG rules, backported to pencil and paper.
Yeah because 3rd and 3.5 had fewer crunch huh?...
I'd said more than once that 4th Edition felt like a collectible card game or collectible miniatures game back-ported to a pen-and-paper RPG. And when I played 4th Edition in board game format (by way of the Ravenloft board game), I felt like 4th Edition made for a fun board game experience.
Regarding 3rd and 3.5 Edition "crunch", it was 4th Edition that really had me re-evaluate everything I liked and disliked about the earlier editions, and realize that it was the wargame/miniatures game/card game/board game aspects of the whole thing that I disliked the most, and the "crunchier" it all got, the more my group felt like they were being held hostage for an hour or so of unrewarding dice-tossing and accounting. Like the old saying: "An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications", pen-and-paper D&D - especially starting about 3rd Edition, and particularly in 4th Edition - really felt like the HeroQuest board game built to some unnecessarily bloated specification.
I think that these days, I'm more likely to aim for a more minimalist game system, the sort of thing that de-emphasizes throwing dice at numbers for a few hours, in favor of the social and storyteller aspects of the game. That won't be to every group's taste, but I think it works for mine. (Yahtzee generally works better for scratching my group's dice-tossing itch, and HeroQuest still remains one of the most fun board-game dungeon-crawl experiences I've ever seen, with the 4th Edition board games coming in second place to fill that niche.)
Ahh, the age old "it's an MMO" when no, 4e was closer a throwback to Chainmail, the pre-DND table top miniatures game that later became DnD.
honestly that may be part of why i liked it so much. i lean into min-maxing, and 4e was a lot better at allowing/enabling that style. 5e is a lot more condensed numbers wise. which is good in some ways, bad in others. in 4e one thing i liked was if something made sense, i could give a +1 on it and it wasn't a big deal. in 5e, because the numbers are so compacted by comparison, at least in terms of AC and attack rolls, its closer to if i gave a +5 to something in 4e for the same effect. i also grew up in MMOs, so it having similarities was not a problem to me. i started playing WoW with my dad in 2nd grade, back in its early days. started dnd in 2014 or so.
let me translate a few things from 4 to 5.
At Will Powers : Cantrips (weapon attacks were technically a form of at will power) or "whenever you do this, add this effect to it (sometimes once a turn for balance)"
Encounter powers : regain this at the end of a short or long rest.
Daily powers : regain this at the end of a long rest.
healing surges : hit die (that may be a slight simplification, but my group never leaned on surges anyway. hit die almost never get used in my group. if we take a short rest, its usually a long rest to allow our wizards/sorcerers to regain their spell slots)
1 square : 5 feet.
Utility power : non-damaging/offensive effect (Ghost of the Rooftops was a personal favorite of mine as an assassin player)
Minor action : bonus action (again, TECHNICALLY different in application, but for all intents and purposes they are the same)
my big criticism of 5e is casters hit so much harder than any non-caster after about level 3. the main thing 5e has over 4e is it encourages roleplaying a bit more via inspiration, but thats not that hard to port from one to the other. 4e's combat system was solid. personally i was a fan of having a set of 4 defenses, with Fortitude, Will and Reflex alongside AC. Each being able to select one of two stats to lean on meant that you didn't have to worry about keeping one of your dump stats crazy high to avoid having a crazy vulnerability to some form of attack. i can choose to have a +4 in charisma and still have a high will defense, even if my wisdom isn't the greatest. 5e makes certain characters feel like their asses are in the wind defensively speaking. if i want to play a strong, intimidating (STR/CHA) barbarian, im screwed, because now all 3 of the primary save rolls are weak (Con, Wis, Dex). the other 3 exist only rarely. there are precisely 10 spells (4 of which are unearthed arcana) that target intelligence and 14 for charisma (most of which i have never seen used). 17 for strength. there are a few monster effects that target those stats, but nowhere near as often as the primary 3 get targeted.
personally i liked the square count for effects and movement, because it meant that the GM could tailor what units each square represented for that campaign. 25 square feet for one character tends to feel a bit overblown. especially when want to represent something like a phalanx, where it wouldn't be unrealistic for, in a 5 foot stretch, to have 2 or maybe 3 people side-by-side locking shields.
im not really convinced that 5e is better at supporting non-combat encounters system wise, i think its just our gms have figured out how to run them, we only really started using them within the last 2 years or so, but made the jump 5 years ago. though the spells support non-combat better in some instances, so that's something, but i'd have to compare them to utility abilities, which had their own list of applications.
5e makes combat feel kinda sluggish to me, enemies just feel like they have health pools too large to deal with rapidly, but it rarely feels like they can threaten the players.
i will say 5e once i figured it out does give more room to homebrew classes in. i can find ways to build that just wouldn't work in 4e because of a mechanical lock (more than one attack per turn in 4e was busted, generally speaking). 5e has what i would consider to be holes in their lineup though, so i have more things to build that just don't quite exist otherwise.
4e is pretty good as a skirmish competitive miniature games.
I really loved the "hang in there" poster in the background.
hehehehehe
You never realize how important a books formatting is until you try to read through the shadowrun 5e core rule book
We never even got to play because we couldn't get through character creation. That book was garbage.
Or ars magica(from what i heard
@yuvalgabay1023 I didn't have any problems with the format of Ars Magica. I think it's just such a dense ruleset, no matter how you flip it around, it's a bit tricky to learn. Ars is great though, once you learn it.
Puffin: Oh, I remember 4th Ed. It was my first system. Oh, the nostalgia...
Rando: Does it mean you like it?
Puffin: FKKKK no!
Yeah, when you were all like "OMG! It was terrible!" in the Dingo and Jackdaw video, I was like "Well, it sounds like your GM didn't know what they were doing..."
And then you went over everything in this video and I was like, "Oh yeah... I remember now, we edited all that garbage out when we played it... heh heh... err...."
I hear ya on that. I love D&D, but running 4e burned me out as a DM for several years. I tried running 4e as written most of the time and god was it slow. When a combat encounter happened, that was pretty much everything we were doing for the night. Eventually we started simplifying powers and effects just to make it easier to get through encounters. The 4e Essentials series helped with that a lot when they came out, but not enough to really save 4e from being easily the worst of the editions I have played.
I've technically only ever played 3.5e, but because most people play 5e, one of the campaigns that I'm in (run by the older sister of one of my friends, who does 5e) is basically 5e with mostly 5e characters, but added to it are a few 3.5e characters , who have the 3.5e rules applied to their weapons, abilities, skills, etc. For example, I've heard that in 5e, the only way to get a critical is to roll a natural 20 (unless you are a fighter). However, for the 3.5e characters, the critical threat range is dictated by their weapons. A 5e character could use the perception skill to act as any of these 3.5e skills: spot, listen, maybe sense motive, and probably more. I don't know how she did it, but the DM somehow managed to seamlessly merge the two editions, without confusing any of us players.
@@KingNedya Technically there is one other way to expand critical threat (Warlock's Hexblade Curse), but the main reason that they don't expand critical threat is because of the major shift towards advantage/disadvantage rules. When you have advantage, you are technically twice as likely to crit. Once you look at it that way, you normally have a 5% chance to crit. A third level fighter champion or warlock against a cursed target has a 10% chance to crit. Anyone who has a method of giving themselves attack advantage (barbarian can reckless attack with every attack, for instance) also has 10% chance to crit. With advantage, hexblade and champion have a 20% chance to crit. A level 19 champion has a 15/30% chance to crit. That doesn't even mention the fact that criticals are automatic against paralyzed opponents as long as the attack would hit normally (arcane trickster in particular can take advantage of this to great effect).
Worth noting, p. 217 of the 5E DMG, Sentient Moonblade can roll with 19-20 critical threat range... so there's no reason that as a DM someone can't still homebrew balanced weapons with this function.
@@orioncooper1705 Funny, that is the exact opposite of my experience, DM'ed 3.5 for a few years and was feeling really burned out just from how difficult it is to force that game to work with how poorly the system explains itself, when I jumped to 4e everything just got so much more enjoyable, I didn't need to spend every moment of preparation trying to make sure fights didn't end immediately in either player victory or TPK. It really reinvigorated my love of DM-ing as a whole.
I still run 4e, 5e is just so lacking in options by comparison
In other words, you changed about 80% of the mechanics and gameplay just to make it enjoyable lol. I tried.... well... the correct term would be attempted I guess.... to play 4e.... 45 minutes later we were back in 3.5 working on a new story arc to destroy a necromancer that was churning out books that were turning people into raving lunatics and slobbering idiots.
Ah, the most fabled, intricate, evocative buff in the game, the almighty aura of...
.
.
.
+6
@Jen farmer No, not really. You didn't need to rely on other players at all, because all classes were the same, you needed to rely on other weapons with different weapon effects to exploit vulnerabilities, that's it. There is no "thinking man game". Just a long grind of doing exactly the same with a fire sword or an ice hammer, depending on what you had before you.
@@TheBayzent You needed to rely on the other roles. The game was designed for everyone to work together in a fairly predictable way on purpose.
The Defender marked the enemies that could hit hard to force them to attack him. The Controllers had area of effect abilities to take care of a lot of small creatures at once. Strikers were single target damage so they were supposed to kill the big monsters while they were attacking the defender. The Leader healed people and buffed them and gave them extra movement to put them in the right spots. Without any of the roles or without someone playing their role correctly, the entire party would lose. Which meant there were a lot of people playing "incorrectly" which did cause battles to drag on or to have the whole party die.
In my experience, damage type rock-paper-scissors was not nearly as important in 4e as having attacks that hit. Nothing was ever more important than an extra +1 bonus to attack rolls. Every single combat power was done with attack rolls, and if they didn't hit, you were fucked. And monster defenses were high, even the minions. You needed every +1 to hit that you could get or combat would slow to even more of a crawl and become absolutely unbearable. Axes and hammers were totally unplayable because swords got an extra +1 to hit. PCs and monsters alike will quickly lock themselves into a conga line of death where everyone is flanking everyone for that sweet +2 to hit. Most DMs will give 4e players an Expertise feat for free because it provides +1 to hit and is therefore mandatory. This also affected how you bought or enchanted magic items. Yeah, having a +3 exploding flaming burst weapon sounds cool, but you'll never try it because you need to save up for that vanilla +4 weapon.
Hey man, +6 is a +6
@@Zamrod Yeah, but you can have a party of 4 controllers and do just as good.
Leaders are somewhat necessary but aside from that every character is pretty similar.
7:12, you forgot the most powerful ability rotation: C->A->B, where you call a cab to go home because you hate 4e combat so much
Wow the first comment I’ve ever liked in my 21 years. Brushed my teeth, and chuckled so much I explosion-blasted my bathroom mirror with toothpaste. Have a gold star!
This is a highly underrated joke you've made. Thank you for your service to our country
@@hampemakken570 wdym by first comment you liked in 21 years, I mean even if YOU are 21 years old UA-cam has only been around for over 16 years old XD
You good sir have made my day, THANKS!
Shame it's British racial ability though...
Genuine D&D4 Lore checks, these were a DC to learn an interesting thing about what you see, both of these are the DC20 Lore check:
> Goblins sleep, eat, and spend leisure time in
shared living areas. Only a leader has private chambers. A goblin lair is stinking and soiled, though easily defensible and often riddled with simple traps designed to snare or kill intruders. (Wow, thats actually really cool to know!)
> Dire bears typically maul prey with their claws or
crush them to death with their thick, bestial arms. (Wow, you mean big angry bears act like big angry bears?! *sigh*)
If the DCs work like 5th edition and it isn't any easier to get high numbers in 4e, those should be like a 15 and a 10 respectively. Maaaayyyybe the goblin one should be a little above a 15 in a setting where goblins are more rare?
Sounds like pokedex's info.
@Lance Clemings I assume you're not talking about 5th edition, since in 5th edition a 30 is borderline impossible for even 20th level characters and a 50 is actually impossible. An arcanaloth in their true form would be like a DC 20 max.
@@SheffiTB With expertise you can get up to +17 to a skill without any magic. A roll of 13 would be enough then to reach 30. Adding a d12 Bardic Inspiration and a d4 Guidance could possibly allow for a roll of 53 in total. It's highly improbable, but not impossible.
@@animusnocturnus7131 I mean, Vax in Crit Role would consistently get 30-40 stealth checks on a d20 roll bc of expertise. Once I think he got a 50?? Bc of Pass w/o a trace.
Spoiler:
Also, in episode...107? 108? (I think) of Season 1, Matt put forth a skill check that required a DC30 to not fail and potentially permanently damage a lock, and Vex hit it right on the nose, breaking her pick in the process.
Puffin: “I don’t wanna feed any arguments on if it’s good or bad”
*Looks down at comment section* welp then
I havent seen any arguments, most people here are in agreement really.
@@adamushu you realize what you just did right ?
@@afoolishmortal5265 You fools!
Apparently falling to sleep and waking up on command is an important skill when playing Fourth Edition.
I did that, I dONT RECOMMEND IT. ITS REALLY %@^^#ING WIERD *WHERES IS MY MIND PLAYS.* kinda enjoyable if your well, how do I say this(THINK RIGHTIOUSLY) LOOKING AT PORN OR EATING PIZZA, ItS LIKE EATING FOOD WITH ALTIMERZ, I recommend LITTLE SEASERS TASTE THE BEST COLD.
@@merlenclownshuffles I read this 3 times over and I have a little question: Wut?
Thats something that I also did in 5e but because my DM was garbage, he had bullshit homebrew monsters with 1k or 2k hitpoints and he spent a lot of time talking about the lore.
@@elmeromogollon Perhaps he was a fan of 4th edition?
@@schwarzerritter5724 No, he hated 4th, he said it was like a videogame or something like that, the monster had so many hitpoints just because he didn't want us to go that way, he was always railroading the party, if we went somewhere he didn't like we were dead or at least we had to run for it.
When he tried to describe his introductory session to 4e i felt like i was listening to a JoJo episode
>is in the game and talks about how the pathfinder ninja class is full of inside jokes based off my troll account on word forums
DM: anyone else hear piano music?
Ben: I still like 4th Edition.
Ben, this is a safe space. You can admit this was a relationship was going no where. You don't have to suffer anymore.
4th edition isn’t your abusive spouse, puffin! Stop rationalising!
@@benpearson49 That's fair.
@@benpearson49 I have played 1st,2end,and 3rd editions of D&D. I never played 4th. Reading the base book for it alone told me it was terrible.. ( The worst possible idea to ever have been printed when it comes to RPGs.. and that is putting it lightly. ) I am really shocked anyone played it over any of the previous editions, or of course other RPG games like Pathfinder,Earth Dawn, Rifts, ect ect...
@@UndyingZombie The worst possible idea ever? Good job falsifying your own comment within a single half-sentence. 4e isn't for everyone, but calling it objectively bad like that is just straight up lying.
Especially given you claim to have only ever read the book and never even played it. You basically just straight up said you have no idea what you're talking about. Your opinion is as worthless as it is uninformed.
@@SpectralWaltz To anyone that played the previous editions it is. You obviously never have and are upset about it. You are crying to the wrong person here.
4E had a ton of brilliant ideas that were executed horribly. I've found that the best use for 4E is to mine it for ideas that you then fix and patch into other systems.
I can definitely vouch for this approach.
I did exactly that
4E was an interesting system if you were thinking about how to have an Epic boss encounter (except for the low lethality rate). But turning the whole game where every fight was an Epic Boss encounter turned it into a slog and snooze-fest, as he described in the video.
*cough* minions are an awesome cinematic idea *cough cough*
Or fix a wobbly table leg.
"People just hate 4e because it came at a low point in popularity..."
"So, here's a half hour video about all the totally legitimate reasons people hate 4e"
More like the "assumed" reasons, half of what he's telling is either completly off the mark or exagerated.
And i laugh my arse off when people are like "there was less Roleplay in 4th", no, no, it did not, its just that for once WotC thought that players who allready played din't have to have written rules and spelled it out for them on how to RP and though people where smart enough to know how to do it...
But has we all know, the vast majority of people are fucking Morons, that needs warning lables on coffee mugs, because they don't know if the coffee is hot and they might burn themselfs...
@@Mugthraka why would a new player know how to rp? A chapter about that topic would be reasonable.
@@bobbobson110 we're talking assigning crunch (explicit rules) to RP. that's not something you do. A chapter that introduces a new player to good habits for RP and general etiquette is something that would be great, but thing is that's always great. However, a good amount of RP tends to have strings attached in the form of game relevant mechanics. Take those away and instead all you need for 4e is the skill challenge system which can be adapted for literally ANYTHING where you'd need to roll the dice. Downside is skill challenges are retarded unless you're doing them ON THE FLY.
@@G0LD3NR0D ,
I think Bob was highlighting a good point, one that can be used to judge if a Rule systems is 'complete:'
Can someone lacking experience read this and be able to play this game?
It is a common phenomenon, especially in franchises that have spread across editions, for Rules to be written as if the players already have a complete understanding of the concept. While this isn't as terrible in a system which has a 'storyteller' to make on-demand rule decisions, I've seen it occur in 'leaderless' systems as well. There are also people who will be stubborn even with a 'storyteller' and start demanding to see mechanics written down somewhere for these things to be valid for use.
I highly recommend looking at the new Shadowrun system, it is a headache due to being incomplete!
To be fair, that's not exactly THE hallmark of a complete system. It's one that can be used generally to judge if a rule system is complete but it doesn't work for all systems and as such it will improperly judge those it doesn't work for as incomplete, even if they are complete. Also there is a reason why I still run Shadowrun 4th edition and you've pointed it out perfectly.
The thing is, the 4th edition PHB, DMG, and Monster manuals actually CAN be read by someone who is completely new and they CAN play the game or even run it with little to no experience. Will they play a good character or run a good campaign? Probably not, but they can still jump into the system and make it work. Shadowrun's newest edition, however really doesn't work that way as it basically keeps essential systems away from the player by making them really, REALLY hard to understand, whereas 4th edition D&D simplified pretty much everything (though that did homogenize a lot of aspects of play which can be seen as both an upside and downside) and as a result is playable by people with absolutely no experience.
When he was going on the rent about the crazy combat at the beginning and "how is this meant to be an introductory game?" I got an add for DnD saying how easy it is to get into.
Perfect timing
Your art style has evolved so much over time, it’s amazing
Indeed. He upgraded it recently again. You can see it most in his hair this time.
Won't be long now until nobody has round bodies.
I relate to this so hard. I started playing with 4e too and when you said noon to midnight i had war flashbacks. Every saturday, starting 12, and getting done by midnight was a LUXURY. There were times we would play until around 3-4 AM. And we would sometimes play more than once a week because we didn't get where we needed to end up. Granted we had 12 players but we'd rarely have more than a mix of 5-6 of them. Someone would always be asleep, others would be chatting in the kitchen, and i was the only one trying to stay invested because it was so impossible to care about what everyone else does until it effects you. But i also still love 4e, although i play almost exclusively 5 now. It had a certain charm that you really only understand if you played it for long enough to "get" it (even though no one ever truly gets it)
This sounds like a good lead-in for a parody of Monty Python's Four Yorkshiremen sketch. Like, ending at 4am? Luxury! In my group we started at 10 in the morning and played until 6 the following morning, playing every day because we'd fall behind otherwise. Our group had 18 players in total but we'd only have 10 in a session at one time. A third of them were asleep, a third were playing Mario Kart, a third were helping the neighbours move and I was the only one trying to stay invested!
I relate so much to this post and video. Started in 4e check
12-18 hour games check
Biweekly games to move forward check
Exclusively play 5e now check
It’s like when you think back to a girl you broke up with and you’re thinking about all the good times you had; then you read your journal and letters and posts from that time and you suddenly realize WHY YOU BROKE UP IN THE FIRST PLACE. Then you have to go and eat a pint of ice cream just to get back into a good enough mood to deal with people again.
Puffin: I got into D and D through online videos.
Me: Two years ago watching one of his older videos, “That looks cool”
Me Now: Been DMing for my group for 6 months and everyone loves it.
Aesthetically, I remember 4th edition being awesome. Every power was like, "You backflip over the enemy and unleash five arrows into its gaping maw!"
And I'd be like, "Dude, that's so sick! I need that power!"
And then I'd read the effect, and it would be like, "Deal 5d8 damage to one target, and until your next turn allies get a +2 bonus to opportunity attacks against enemies adjacent to it unless their name begins with a Q or a W, in which case you instead add your Wisdom modifier to all damage dealt by . . ."
And so on, and on, and *on* that RPG technobabble would go forever, and ever, and *ever*
"... when the syzygial alignment of the vernal equinox strikes your flanking position, unless it's Chinese New Year in the year of the emu, and if you possess a Cheetos bag of +2 MSG while screaming in Wilhelm, then you can make 2.76 strikes against an opponent lying prone in the Family Guy position, who wished he stayed in bed, BUT ONLY IF THE OPPONENT OPENLY DECLARES SAID STAYAGE IN BED..."
Crap, this is why I can't play YuGiOh CCG, or as I'd like to call it, "Exceptions: The Game"
We can imagine making a backflip and roll agility check instead of being restricted
@@commandercaptain4664 This is the spell that never ends.
Yes, it goes on, and on, my friends.
Some wizard
started casting it, not knowing where it went,
and he'll continue casting it forever, because this is the spell that never ends...
how to fix the system: get rid of everything but the 5d8 damage to one target, maybe allow you to move over them as a jump.
12:59 One of the things that I LIKED about 4e was that you DIDN'T need "Detect Magic". If you had the Arcana skill...you could sense magic all the time. No spell slot used, not 10 minute stoppage in play - you just rolled a D20 and the DM told you if you sensed any magic in the area. Another thing that I really liked (and really miss in 5e) was the "exotic" materials that added to the flavor of the world - fabric made out of shadows for use in armor and magic items; things like that. 5e has lots of "monsters" and "magic spells"...but the rest of the world is apparently untouched by this and everthing is made out of "steel", "stone" and "generic wood".
I mean, that makes perfect sense. Same for any other class in which you can basically "smell" in that way. So if someone does necromancy, you don't need to role to sense it, you know, because you know the feeling, or smell, or see an aura, whatever it is.
Unless there is another magic cast over to disguise it, but you'd probably sense that too, but still be unable to know what type of magic is being clouded. I'd say something like "You feel a chill down your spine and smell a familiar smell of death and decay. This zealot member clearly uses necromancy."
Same goes with say someone who is a follower of a deity or god. Others who either have researched it, or are it themselves usually can see it in others unless it's being hidden. "You see a familiar heavenly aura around the priest and hear distant voices of angels. They are definitely a follower of Jarcrine, the holy god of healing" etc etc. No need to roll.
That's something I want fixed as a mechanic in general. If you are proficient in something or an expert, you'd very very rarely fail. IE instead of 10 and below being a fail, the higher you are in that expertise, the harder it is in each dice roll to ever fail and if a 1 is rolled, if you are super proficient you need a critical fail confirm. Most of the time you can just do narrative, but for those moments when it's needed, a level 20 rogue is super unlikely to fail a stealth check for instance.
To be fair, though, this is how I run 5e games. A good Arcana check can intuit magic, cool materials are easy to homebrew with the base game rules, and so on. It really falls on the DM (and to a lesser extent an adventure module) to make the worlds interesting. You don't *need* 10 minutes to cast _Detect Magic_ either if the Arcana fall through, but the ritual can save you a precious spell slot at low level. You can always burn that slot and cast it in a few seconds.
I mean, you can get a _staff of defense_ made of nigh-indestructible, hollow glass in the _Lost Mine of Phandelver_ module, and that's like the simplest thing. Meanwhile I'm over here merrily making a _Monster Hunter_ style crafting system to carve up magical beasts and make cool shit out of them, and it's really not hard to do.
Basically, bring it up to your DMs, and have them step it up.
I say it shouldn't use a spell slot at all. It's a cantrip in Pathfinder
@@Verbose_Mode They had an entire catalogue of materials in 4e. NONE of them got brought over as general hallmarks of the "magical and monster infested world" - all the mystic elements end where civilization begins....rather than being incorporated into it by clever people. And again, you're talking about a low-level character burning an entire spell slot for the "convenience" of a general-use utility function and the "benefit" of a ten-minute stoppage in the progress of the story so you can cast a ritual. Neither of those things was a feature in 4e - you just made an Arcana roll and moved on.
@@nildecanter2419 Obviously as Pathfinder is the best D&D change my mind
0:20 I see why no one wanted them, their covers are backwards.
Glad I was not the only that saw that. It was bugging me every time I saw them
That's a rare missprint. It'll be worth 12 bucks at some point!
Animus Nocturnus maybe even... 12.01!
This will sound like the Four Yorkshiremen sketch from Monty Python.
"You were looky to have COVERS! When I bought 2300 AD (Traveller 2300 2nd edition), they didn't put covers on the books AT ALL!" (Same for Gamma World 3rd-edition.)
What? I don't get it
Puffin: **Complains for 18 minutes** I... STILL LIKE.... FOURTH EDITION...
Me: That's the definition of stockholm syndrome
Fun fact. Stockholm Syndrome was created as a way to justify bad cops
I always like the 4E monster manual. They made interesting powers and abilities.
Hartainia is there anyway I could adapt some parts of it to 5e?
Cortex in the 5e monster manual (or DMG) there is a section on making monsters. That’s a good place to start
@@cortex6065 Matthew Colville has a video on this, as well!
It is here: ua-cam.com/video/QoELQ7px9ws/v-deo.html
@@cortex6065 Crosscheck the section from the DMG with the last page of this document that explains how later monsters from 4e were made.
www.wizards.com/dnd/files/UpdateDMG.pdf
@@cortex6065 Absolutely! I do it all the time. It takes a bit of work seeing how you can reconstitute their powers, but it's a fun way to keep your players on their toes.
Tabletop RPGs are just home-brewed versions of _imagination_
It's organized story telling so you don't have Silver Age Superman running around solving all the problems with asspull no jutsu
I always pitch rpgs as "make-believe, with statistics!"
TIL my imagination is DnD.
@@fidly4 Or "fun taxes".
"The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules." - Gary Gygax
I never played that edition. I've never met one DM who wanted to. I also never played 1st edition or 3rd edition, only 2nd (once), 3.5 and 5th. I understand why 1st is left aside, it's probably like a pilot... then 3rd probably had such a large number of problems that it had to be fixed with a 3.5 revision... but I always wondered what was 4th edition like, and now I'm about to find out.
edit: and now I know, and the fact that I was never subjected to such horror fills me with Christmas spirit.
No, in fact, you don't know. You just know that you do not want the same experience as Puffin. There is more than enough fun to be had with 4th Edition, if it fits your style. Just as with 5th edition, how the DM handles things more than anything else determines the fun a group has with it. It wasn't perfect, nothing is, but it had great balance in classes and monsters and players had loads of cool choices to make for their characters. 5th really dropped the ball regarding that, in my honest opinion. Also, I really hate that they went back to saving throws, but that's just a pet peeve of mine :)
So I'd take this video with a pretty big grain of salt. I started with 4E, and while it's far from a perfect game, I think Ben is exaggerating some of the issues and is just kinda missing details on some of the others.
Combat being a bit of a slog? Yeah, that's a real issue - 4E likes to pile on conditional +1 and +2 modifiers and they can be a bitch to track sometimes.
Multiclassing? Was a thing right from the first PHB, I think he just missed it?
Classes "all being the same"? Really arguable. Classes shared similar abilities... but in 3.5 or 5e, a lot of classes literally share the same spells on their lists! 4E was a little nuanced, all Leaders had a 2/encounter heal, but the Cleric's did more HP while the Warlord's would let you move, etc. Different spins on admittedly *similar* abilities.
Rituals? Really cool... I pin this one on his DM. If the gold was an issue that's 100% a Dungeon Master thing. There's a lot of cool ritual magic that I borrow mechanics from still. A lot of the "utility" magics got moved there, so if Ben's DM shafted them on gold or materials then I can see how that'd get frustrating.
I'd play another 4E game, but what I really do more of is rip off more 4E stuff to stick in my 5E game.
People mostly don't play 3e because there's very few differences between 3e and 3.5; while most of the material assumes you're playing 3.5 as that came fairly quickly after 3e; and all the 3e material can be fairly easily made to work with 3.5.
3rd mostly just had a bit of weird power imbalances and hangovers from 2E (ad&d) that 3.5 patched. The level adjustment system of 3.5 (which they had dabbled with in the later bits of 3.0) in particular opened up a lot of variability in playing monsters rather than specific player character designed races- you could play a baby dragon if you were okay with losing a few levels to being a dragon or just gave up on player character levels and just advanced as dragons do
@@daredaemon8878 Pathfinder also has replaced 3.5 more or cless completely.
If for nothing else, fourth edition had and still has my favorite class: Warlord. I didn't know how much I wanted to play a support fighter/cleric that didn't actually have magic nor any kind of deity baggage. Even now, I haven't found a way to simulate Warlord in 5th edition that felt half as good at it did in 4th edition.
I miss it too. Battlemaster comes close-ish with Tasha's new rules, but it is still no where near as fun or cool.
Yes! 4e has a couple of things that made the Warlord make sense - everyone has Healing Surges and all martial classes have powers, so the Warlord can do healing without feeling like they're supernatural. (Also, the importance of tactical movement goes well with Warlords telling everyone where to go and how to get there) In addition to being a great class for roleplaying someone like Nick Fury or Mal Reynolds, lazylords are perfect for playing a Zeppo like Sokka of the Water Tribe - it doesn't even matter if the character seems to know or do nothing about healing, because everyone's just spending their own Healing Surges.
Ben isn't wrong in his points about 4e, but it's too bad he didn't go from Cleric to Warlord, he might have actually enjoyed it a little bit.
As someone who's only played 4e, I didn't even realize the other versions weren't so damn limiting. I thought that was just how DnD was until today...
I wouldn't say it's limiting, it's just a different type of game. 5e is more of a narrative game, while 4e is almost a turn based RPG like Final Fantasy. If you really liked character optimization, cool gear, easy combat building, then it was a ton of fun!
I am sorry that 4E was your only experience. D&D was and is something that has changed a lot over time, but most of us who played earlier did not "upgrade" into it. A lot of people I know who started with it, either fell out of D&D after the byzantine combat "buff" system sucked the joy from the game, or skirted around those issues, which made the game closer to 3.5 without knowing it. I myself bought my first 5e books, but now that my last 3.5 campaign has "ended" because of adulting issues, I might finally get around to writing my own campaign to check it out. Nothing like a couple hundred dollars of books collecting dust for want of a group.
1st and 2nd ed were about the same for flexibility. Limited or no multiclassing. Punishing rules if you DID try to multiclass. 4th at least had learned the lesson that you try to avoid truly arbitrary limiting character design decisions. Only Half-Elves Half-Orcs and humans could be clerics. At all! No real reason why dwarf clerics were forbidden, they just were. In 1st edition the classes didnt even finish at the same level. Gnome fighters of less than 18 strength are limited to 5th level while a human fighter could go up to 20. The max level of a druid reguardless of race was 14 and only 1 guy could be a level 14 druid at a time in the game world as it was a political position (The Great Druid). The whole thing was a mess.
The kings of flexibility are 3.0 and 3.5 editions. Pathfinder 1.0 is also in the same vein and was frequently referred to as 3.75. Multiclassing? Sure go ahead. Wide choices and variance in potential builds? Yup, more than you can read most likely. Sooo much choice that it all just sorta blends into a massive mush of half understood rules if you don't have a eidetic memory and money to pick up virtually every supplement? Yes. No edition of D&D has been perfect.
5th is a neat blend of 3.5 and 1st ed with lessons learned from 4th ed. Less flexible than 3rd, simpler like 1st but waaaay less arbitrary.
@@kevinschier8765 Older editions had some strange, arbitrary restrictions that mostly seem to have existed to justify the default D&D setting. Non-humans got these weird level caps to "explain" why they aren't the dominant species (and why long-living races like elves aren't all 20 level blokes), and druids and monks used to be rare by design because after a certain point, you could only level up by beating up someone of the next higher level.
Thankfully that older stuff is very toolkit-y in its approach, so you can just ignore stuff that doesn't make sense.
I think the first time you got some legit customization options was when the latter versions of Basic D&D and AD&D 2e gave you weapon specialization.
If you think 4th edition was limiting, you should have seen AD&D. The Hybrid Classes he was taking about WAS AD&D multi-classing. You had to pick it at character creation, and you were limited in what you could pick based on your race.
You couldn't change your class unless you played a human character and "Dual-Classed" your character, in which case you couldn't use your previous abilities from your former class until you reached the same level in your new class.
There were no feats, so if you played a Fighter, you had only one move, Attack. If you played a Thief, you had two moves, Attack and Backstab. If you played a Barbarian, you had two as well, Attack and Berserker Rage. They tried fixing this with splatbook Kits, and then later Skills and Powers, but by then it was too little too late.
If you played a magic-user, on the other hand, you had as many options as your Intelligence or Wisdom would allow in the form of spells; until you ran out of spells, then it was attack with a weapon, and if you didn't have a weapons proficiency with that weapon, you did so at a penalty.
Anyone who hates 4th edition has never played AD&D. It's everything people hate about 4E, but without the character customization.
"We played from noon to midnight."
Ahhh, so THIS was that group!
I played that in my day.
Hey, at least the book has nice art.
Natalie Edwards the only good thing that can be said
@@monokumaprincipalofhopespe8295 It's pretty legit. The 3.0/3.5 art was a lot more hit or miss compared to 4th
If actually bought the core set in a packaged for 10 dollars because I loved a few of the art pieces lol
Reptile boobies
@@monokumaprincipalofhopespe8295 They also bought back Dark Sun without all the metaplot nonsense where NPC's killed all the major villains. That's a big point in the edition's favour.
Something I have to say about 4e: it may sound like an overly complicated system, but it gave me the story that actually made me interested in D&D
4e did have good ideas to it though. The 1 HP minion concept is solid and 5e benefits from it. Enemies having auras, or half HP reactions makes fights more interesting too.
Agreed when I home brew with 5th I draw a lot from 4th to spice up combat because 5th combat is mechanically boring, just like 3.5 and pathfinder's combats are mechanically boring never had a mechanically boring fight in 4th.
@@vepristhorn8278 I like how people say this, but Ben literally says that playing 4e he hated combat because it was slow and boring at least partly because there is so much going on that rounds take forever.
This is actually something I stole from 4 and converted back to 3.5 using a second sheet for boss encounters to give them multiple forms
@@deamongimli I guess its everyones different experiences, because the bad he is describing I always got in PF never in 4th
@@vepristhorn8278 _D&D_ combat is mechanically boring (and absurd)
"Most people started with either 3.5 or later with 5th edition" *Looks over at my 2nd ed books from high school*
I would like to angrily wave my 1st edition books around like a dusty geezer and rant about thacO
@@A.Clifton "Elf is a class, damn it! And so is Dwarf!!!"
@@A.Clifton Do you angrily rant about psionics like my dad?
I do miss thac0, that was my biggest rant about 3E, that and the cartoon art.
@@Bighappykitty The good old days of 2nd edition where we got rid of stupid sillyness like Barbarian being considered a separate class instead of just being a type of fighter...
Ditto
"Apparently no one wanted them..."
Wonder why...
The video will tell you. :D
I can answer the question in your desc.
Its bc your profile pic is cute.
gamer tower I think that’s from overly sarcastic productions
Wow, I started with 4e. I guess I was lucky enough to have a DM that was running a home brew campaign, rather than a module, and must have been fudging quite a bit of the system, because I don't remember a whole lot of these flaws. I had a fantastic 18 months or so on that campaign and it really got me into D&D. I like 5e a whole lot more now, but I have fond memories of that first group.
4th edition was and is a great system with the proper DM. Combat is more strategy based than 5e. I have not taken a look at any modules for 4e as I run a homebrew game, so I can't speak there, but god I do love it. The classes and characters all feel so fresh compared to 5e
"4th edition had a lot of haters, but I liked it.."
*Talks angrily about 4th addition for 20 minutes*
What a bamboozle!
I love 3.x, 4E and 5E but I could easily drone on for 20 minutes about all the things I do not like about each system.
To be fair, it is legitimately hard for veteran players to talk about 4e without becoming a ranting mess eventually, and sometimes a bath of tears. Vietnam flashbacks everywhere.
*I warned you!*
I've played pretty much every edition of D&D, even played the old Chainmail and the D&D Miniature Game that was out during 3.5e. While many of my friends loathed 4e, I've always been of the opinion that it's not a bad system, just a bad RPG system. D&D 4e is a great rules system for a tabletop wargame, their biggest problem was marketing it as a tabletop RPG.
Its a "bad" RPG system, cause for once you don't have a 85 paragraphe chapter on how to talk to the King or the blacksmith, cause WotC thought that people where smart enough to know how to role play.
But we all know people can be dumb as fuck sooo...
@@Mugthraka 4ed introduced a more dice-focused system for rolling out social encounters. You could ignore it, and social encounters will then play about the same as any other system (but with less role-play lore information, as you stated), but the system doesn't get credit for that. It was a bad RPG system because of how possible it made it to play correctly, as intended, without doing any role-play. 4ed made my group sort of feel like role-play was just a house rule we were adding to a wargame.
It was an excellent tabletop board game though!
I agree, Inifus - not a bad system, just not a very good tabletop RPG system - and i think much the same thing could be said of 3rd/3.5/Pathfinder, too - and maybe some of the others as well, though I've not touched 5th Edition at all, or the other editions/versions since the '80s.
Puffin's video does a fair job of describing what, to me, made 3rd-4th Edition "bad RPG systems" just perfectly: too many moving parts, too much record-keeping, too many gimmicky gaming mechanics, too many false options, too much railroading into fixed mechanical roles. As Inifus mentioned, it's all stuff that would have been handled elegantly as a computer system, but at the game table, especially with new gamers or a mix of new and experienced gamers, it was a distraction from the things that made tabletop gaming a rewarding activity that couldn't be delivered by computers.
I don't really recognize that reference to an "85-paragraph chapter on how to talk to the King or the blacksmith" - it doesn't seem to be present in the core rulebooks 3.5 Edition, 2nd Edition, 1st Edition, 4th Edition, or Pathfinder 1 or Pathfinder 2: all those versions seem pretty consistent in the core rulebooks as far as being fairly laissez-faire about the game world and how you're "supposed" to interact with it beyond the core rules, and all those versions seem pretty consistent with a similar amount of hand-holding to introduce new gamers to the basics of role-playing in a D&D game - that is, if any particular edition explains how to use e.g. Persuade/Intimidate/Charisma/whatever to interact with other characters, they all do, and I don't think any of them devote an entire chapter to talking to NPCs. (The non-core rulebooks might be a different story, but selling books of bloat is basically the business model for D&D and Pathfinder both, and 4th Edition was no exception.) I'm always open to being proven objectively wrong, though - if anyone has a verse-and-chapter reference to that 85-paragraph chapter on talking to NPCs in any of the other D&D core rulebook versions/flavors/editions, let's see it....
mechanically it was glorious. as someone who likes min-maxing builds, it was fantastic, in a way that 5e just hasn't hit for me in the core rulebooks (i tend to make my own classes as a result. i did in 4e, but it was more a reflavoring of something that exists, rather than a ground-up construction). 4es only real weakness was a lack of embedded roleplaying rules. as someone who came in during 4e, i completely ignored roleplaying until later on, when i joined a campaign that had roleplayers in it. (i was absolutely a murderhobo on my first character, but i didn't realize until 5e that it existed to a large degree. i had brief spurts of it after about a year, but nothing major. in fairness, thats about a 3 year thing for me?
5e initially alienated me because i got killed about 4 times in the first campaign in it, but in retrospect that was less the system, more the GM. 3 of them were utterly out of my control, and the 4th i had just stopped caring because i died so much anyway it didn't matter to me at that point. the GM put me in a Saw-esq scenario where the girl at the table had to pick between two players to kill off. i was one. and her boyfriend was the other. HMMMMM, GUESS WHO.
Then i was put in a situation where my new character figured out one of the party members was a doppelganger. on its own, no problem. but this was a doppelganger who was also a serial killer, going alphabetically based on name. well, my character, who's name starts with "S", was isolated with him when this revelation came out, by way of him killing "R". the character starts attacking, figuring well either i end him or he ends the character. the party killed me off instead of the doppleganger (even the guy playing the dopple was going "guys wtf") get my 3rd character in (by this point im about 8 levels behind everyone because i keep having to come in lowered in levels) and get critically drilled into oblivion by a fight one of the other party members had sparked. the damage i took anyone else could have survived with a goodly amount of health left. but it dealt over twice my max hp, and i had no window to react to it, because nothing i know of from that character can negate a crit. i think the GM forgot i was that far behind and figured i would be able to take the hit. but funny, a level 4 rogue with a 12 constitution can't take the same hit a level 12 fighter with 20 constitution can.
when i came back (at level because the gm wanted me to not get deleted in one hit again), the group goes to my character's god, in effect flips them off and attacks. my character sides with her god (shouldn't be surprising). apparently in the session prior, which i had missed, one of them got a god-slayer weapon, so my character is pissed, but not in a position to do anything about it. when we got to the BBEG, immediately after killing him, i dropped meteors on the party (aside from one guy who was in on it, he helped me out). i figured im 300 feet in the air (dragon sorcerer wings), i should be safe from retribution. apparently the god-slayer sword wielder also had some artifact to teleport and fly as a free action. so i got aced. i kinda deserved that one, but i had just stopped caring by then. they still have me branded as the one in our group to expect "blind-side" betrayals from. which is funny, considering i have one of the lower PvP instigation counts of the group, and the player(s) it targets did something to earn that attack. or my character was still being introduced and it was planned with the DM. oh, playing a turncoat from the evil empire and actively obscuring your alignment is a really good way to get players to not trust you.
D&D 4e, it was like someone thought "let's take the mechanics of an MMORPS, and slap them into a tabletop game... where there's no computer to constantly keep track of every modifier from the ever changing list of buffs/debuffs that keep popping up and expireing every tick, I mean turn.
Yup 4th edition was basically made at the height of the MMORPG boom and WotC wanted to jump in on that boom.
There's was 4 types of Buffs, Arcane, Insight, Power and Divine, and you could not stack bonuses/maluses from the same source.
So at best and depending on your party composition, you had at most 4 bonuses to keep track off...
But of what i've seen so far, seems like a loot of people who played 4th, simply had no idea on how to read and understand rules...
No wonder that 5th was dumbed down to its utmost for the fish brains to understand how it works...
Wasnt the Cooldowns in 4e just "At will" (no cooldown) "once per encounter" and "once per Day". I dont recall others. The cooldown management was easy. no idea how it gets called hard because its less of a faff than any other system, such as Spell Slots, in D&D.
Honestly, 3rd/PF are even "worse" about this, if you consider this a critical system bug.
Yeah, when I've heard people say why they don't like 4e, they'd always say it's "too much like a video game" without elaborating why. This video did a lot to help me understand what exactly people meant by that.
To this day, my old gaming group from 20 years ago still gravitates towards 4E. A lot of the criticism seems copy pasted from people who never played it. It also doesn't help that WOTC buries their old editions and doesn't really support them anymore. Just some of the things I can think of that are great:
-Powers were a great idea, and solved the issue of the martial vs. caster bridge
-Skill Challenges were amazing (If you knew how to run them, the rules were a bit janky on explaining)
-Second Wind is cool
-Healing Surges are cool
-Short rests only being a few minutes is cool
-Attribute based targeting was great. It really flexed the game beyond "weapon vs. AC" and "Spellcasting DC vs. Save"
-Creature roles is an awesome idea. Bumps up the games tactical edge on both sides
-The Warlord class is cool
-Feats every two levels, and powers offering dynamic choices every level was great
-Level cap being broken into three tiers, and each one having a "advanced subclass" choices was pretty awesome. Reminds me of Seiken Densetsu, or Fire Emblem
-Darkvision was very rare
-Minions. Another great idea for mooks. Let's the players flex their power, while also keeping the enemies relevant
-Radiant damage hurts undead (I really don't get why this is not a thing anymore. In fact... elemental damage in general is pretty weak nowadays)
-Treasure parcels made sorting loot way easier
New player: So what's the most powerful epic spell in the game?
3e player: What do you mean by powerful?
5e player: What do you mean by epic?
4e player: wHat iS sPell?
I don't know man spells in 3e and 3.5e are very cool and very very overpowered I'm looking at you cleric
@@creativemalfunction7100 Yeah, lol, I agree.
I just find it funny that if you ask a 3e veteran about the best option to take, you'll often get a rather philosophical response along the lines of "What is best?"
You know, because the seer number of tools (a spellcaster) have, there are probably highly specialized options for every job, and then there are flexible ones for everything XD
@@TomatoTerminator well yeah it's crazy
1e: I'll let you know if I ever survive level 1
I'm a 1e OSR curmudgeon, but man the life of a level 1 wizard was rough.
Um yeah I've never played 1e I've thought of it though it sounds very hard but rewarding I mean 1e as the game and not playing spellcasters in general I have played those
I literally just started playing seriously 2 weeks ago. And I wanna say thanks to you. It was your videos that convinced me to really give dnd a try and play adventures at my local comic store. So thank you.
Dnd is one of the best games, it can be hard to get into and can get lost easily but 5e simplified a lot and the stories you get to tell and enjoy with new and old friends are amazing and completely worth it for the players who get past the first couple sessions of initial confusion
So what I'm getting:
"I bought it because it was cheap."
And that kids is how I met your mother
@@polkadotalien1 Those are not cheap.
Getting eyecandy for one dollar is fine.
Just don't ever think of implementing the rules.
EVER!!!
I can hear Ben’s hesitation when he says he still likes it. Either he’s hesitating because he does like it and is worried about the online toxicity about it.
Or he’s trying to convince himself to like it for nostalgia reasons
You’re one of the biggest reasons that I started to play D&D. Thank you for making these videos! ❤️
Same
I liked the concept of passive perception . That’s it.
Fluid Funds needs to return, as something less shite.
3rd and 3.5 had something similar. If the scenario is kind of peaceful a player could "take 10" and passively make a skill check.
@@lukoushilsgen6812 in some *exceedingly rare* cases you could Take 20.
@@nullpoint3346 most "take 20's" take into account that the players have enough time for trial and error
@@lukoushilsgen6812 As do Take 10.
"4E was _kind of_ a low point in D&D's popularity."
Considering that one of D&D's biggest competitors, Pathfinder, came out as a direct response to 4E's changes by advertising itself as "D&D 3.75", it may as well have been _the_ low point for the D&D brand. Not to hate on 4E or anything, I at least get why someone could like it (and don't really care for Pathfinder myself).
To use an example for comparison, 4e was kind of like Smash Brawl. It was so bad that someone made a mod that completely revamped it, called Project M, that actually became really popular.
@@michaelbesser5348 Makes sense, the few people I knew who stuck with it went heavy with the homebrews (though to be fair they did that with everything).
Pathfinders Much better than 4.0. nobody I know likes it or plays 4 .o. 5.0 is far better than 4.0. 3.5 D&D works fine, with a few house rules..if you can't multi- class or create a character that you want to play,why bother with it?!
@@aaronhumphrey2009 I'm currently playing a homebrew FFIV-reskin of 5th Edition campaign. I was not at all able to make the character I would have wanted to play. But I am playing it because it's the only option I have. I can only hope that the group agrees to switch to something I can make an enjoyable character in once this campaign is over.
@@CrazaelGood luck with your adventures.. I'm currently playing a Dragonborn Sorcerer- Favored Soul of Kossuth, Lord of Fire.. In between throwing fireballs and flaming spheres, it's quite handy to be able to ' upcast' a simple cure light wounds spell up to your maximum level to increase the healing bestowed and revive the cleric/ guy down in the heat of battle. I like to add ' empower Spell' onto Cure Critical Wounds ( 4d8+50%+ 14) ,if needed,( 6th level spell used up). The "short rest" in 5.0 addition is welcome, taking some of the healing load off the healers and allowing more multiple per day encounters. Combat has been simplified compared to Pathfinder,but still allows plenty of options and class- specific features that 4.0 watered down too far .
From everything I've heard about 4th edition, it sounds like it'd make a really good turn based strategy game. On a computer. Not so much on paper.
The only way anyone would ever convince me to run 4e is if we set it in a world where the characters were characters in a video game and were self aware of that fact.
@@Dalenthas DnD but the AI is Self-aware?
@@Dalenthas 4e is perfect for an isekai campaign change my mind
Which is what most people suspected that it was designed for.
This is when World of Warcraft was HUGE, and every company in existence wanted to make the next computer MMO game hit.
WotC went around killing their entire digital ecosystem of small companies that supported the players, to hoover it up into their Digital Initiative.
When then never really materialized as a small book publishing company isn't suddenly a big computer game company.
By 20th level I had to print out 12 PAGES of abilities. Note: you could get to 30th level in that game. I think it was fun because of all the friends I made, not the system.
How did you have that many abilities? By 13th level you start replacing old abilities instead of gaining new ones.
Don't play a 5e Cleric or Druid then, you'll have to bring the entire spell list to the game.
Paladin as well, they get the entire paladin spell list as well as a bonus list for their oath.
@@JustLooking1996 ehh for cleric you only need, Righteous might/Spiritual weapon, healing word, remove curse, polymorph and a Resurrection spell, the rest is just decor so you dont need the whole spell list
Arc Neo Masato there are feats, Paragon Path feats, feats, Epic Destiny feats, more feats, magical items you're supposed to get every 4 levels out of 5, feats, have I mentioned feats? I tried to make(!), not play, make 21-level character, and ohhhh boy. O finished doing it but after looking over all the shit I decided that those combats must take like 8 hours or something, cause holy crap there's a lot of options before you get to apoint where you start to replace the powers.
I was playing 3.5 when 4th edition came out and i went to a once shot session of it.
Never again i touched 4th edition, for me it felt like the creators were trying to copy videogame mechanics, which wouldn't be strange in a action rpg, but on a table were boring or simply restrictive.
That's exactly what they were doing. 4e came out right in the heart of the WoW/MMORPG craze when 3.5 was...flagging to say the least. The ruleset was ancient and massively over bloated with expansion content. On top of that, tabletop games weren't really popular and everyone was migrating in droves over to the new hottness: MMORPGS. So in an attempt to win back players, 4e was designed to appeal to WoW players with rigidly defined classes, party roles (reminiscent of the tank/healer/dps trinity), and "hotkey" abilities each with their own cooldowns.
Unfortunately in doing so, they managed to sacrifice the essence of what makes tabletop games unique from MMOs: the freedom to do...whatever you and your DM can come up with. In WoW, if you want to climb on the dragon's back and stab it in the neck...you can't do that unless the fight was pre-designed to work that way. In tabletop games, the system SHOULD have a function allow the DM to adjudicate a series of rolls/checks to make it work. 4e failed to make that kind of play possible by basically saying, "if your character doesn't have a power that lets you do the thing, you can't do the thing."
Heh. Having never played 4e, as I was listening to this, I was thinking "You know, all this complexity is what video games excel at, not players."
I bought the PHB and we flipped through it, and my group decided not to even bother. It was like they really wanted to make an MMO, but got stuck in the tabletop gaming department.
4e was literally designed to be in an mmo specificly neverwinter nights the mmo so yea, it was developed in concert with that game
the devolopers actually tried to copy vediogames. but the main charm of d&d is that its not a vediogame which they forgot in 4th edition
I started with 2E, but 4E was the edition I played the most, having a long running game group going during that time period. I enjoyed the version immensely.
My condolences.
I’m so sorry.
Why is that exactly?
@@kholtonthebarbarian2590 such a dumb comment.. its ok he liked 4th, even if you don't..
sal pssst
It's called a joke
Puffin: "I like 4th edition. I'm going to talk about it for a while, and I'm going to try not to be negative because I know a lot of people don't like 4th edition for some reason, and I don't want to feed into that."
Puffin by the end of the (almost completely negative) video: "I re-read the book. I understand why a lot of people don't like 4th edition."
Puffin, I think you also may not like 4th edition. And this is coming from someone who also started with 4th, was sad that there was no multiclassing, the powers were repetitive, and combat would take us hours and hours, sometimes multiple sessions, and every time I had what I thought was a really cool idea I'd ask the DM "Can I do X?" and he'd say "No! But you could in 3.5!" And he was not a good DM so he'd always say it like a snide asshole like "Yea but 3.5 is old so no one is playing that anymore."
But I didn't care about the way he said it. 5 or 6 "You could have in 3.5!"'s later, I left that 4e game and found at least 3 different groups of people still playing 3.5 and played that for a decade until 5e came out.
4e had a lot of cool ideas imo. i love that martial classes had abilities, and not simply just "attack twice." skill challenges were a great system when the DM would run it as allowing the players to do whatever, but still need to fulfill the overall requirements (pass 3 before you fail 3 i think), which i thought was the RAW way to run it but you've said otherwise. leaders existed and they were great. i found there was a lot of customization with feats and such too. the heal system with hit die and such felt a lot better than the healing system in 5e too.
there were definitely some bad ideas too, like just how many effects were going on in combat. usually our DM would keep enemies simplified, save for one special thing that would appear once or twice per combat, except for the bosses who were about the full suite of things. combat would run pretty quickly that way, like it does in 5e when 5e is running smoothly (and 5e can run very poorly sometimes, all depending on the DM; that scene you laid out where everyone was completely disengaged happens a lot in 5e in my experience, since i've played with a lot of newbie DMs). multiclassing was fairly bad as mentioned too.
overall, i like 4e and would definitely like to play more. but what i really want is 5e with martial cantrips and leaders, lol.
Nick Porter skill challenges had a level, which set their DCs and rewards, but had a “complexity” of between 1 to 5, which dictates how many skill successes and failures the challenge would amass before ending (always twice the successes needed compared to failures)
This feature was monumentally great, along with healing surges, engaging monsters designed to illicit dynamic encounters, the only non-stupid multi-class system D&D ever had, and a small pile of other things that just simply SHOULD HAVE BEEN in 5E.
I still exclusively run 4E.
In 5E martial classes don't just have that lol. I don't see why people complain about 5E martial classes when they all have their own abilities and their subclasses even customize them more. Want a fighter with extra abilities? You have one that offers menuevers, one that offers special arrow shots, one that allows you to crit more often / hit more often. Etc. So depending on what kind of fighter you want to be you can specialise hell you can even be a fighter with spells! With barbarian you can be one that can take an unending amount of damage or roleplay a bear or some other animal through totems, etc. With rogue you can me a magically gifted one, a highly effective assassin, a trikster that can trick everyone, etc.
I actually liked 4E. I like 5E too, but 4E has some positive qualities. Notably I felt like it was very easy to make a balanced, effective custom monster from the ground up in 4E. It unfortunately fell into some of the same traps of 3E though, which is to say way too many situational modifiers and overall system bloat. It did some things very right though, like making everything "attack versus defense" instead of SOME things "attack versus defense" and other things "save against DC" seemingly arbitrarily. Don't understand why they went backwards on that in 5E other than nostalgia.
Kinda wish 5E inherited more of what 4E did right, but I suspect that a combination of nostalgia and not wanting to associate with it prevented the designers from doing that--I remember them promising "We'll have every single PHB1 class from all editions in the 5E PHB" but had to walk it back because no warlord (a 4E PHB1 class). Oh well, I suspect no system is perfect.
I get the feeling that the main reason why balanced monsters were so easy to create is because every combination of players was the same. If you know exactly what the players get to the table, you can have 100% balanced fights. Like a RPG videogame that never lets you choose how you level up your characters and scale the level of their monsters to your party.
@@bigstromboli965 I mean, it is inconsistent in some places, though. Like sometimes they are kinda consistent about it--but then you have the ranger's volley aoe, which is attack vs. defense against monsters in an area, or Disintegrate, a single-target spell which is a saving throw.
But that's really not my main point. In 4E, it was always the ATTACKER that was rolling dice, and the DEFENDER had a static defense. This was easy and consistent. Can you explain to me what benefit there is to saying sometimes the attacker rolls, and sometimes the defender rolls? Mathematically, it can work out the same. "Half damage on a miss" as in 4E after all as a mechanic, which is the same as "save for half". 4E's approach makes a lot more sense to me, because it says "it's your turn, you roll the dice". The more "traditional" way is back and forth in a way that is, frankly, arbitrary.
@@Jake007123 I would not go that far. I played a variety of classes in 4E and they had notable differences. What 4E did was make sure that all classes were capable of doing combat well. There were still, frankly, some severe balance/math issues in 4E, but it was a somewhat level playing field. I also feel that the monster creation rules in the 5E PHB are needlessly complex.
I know 4E's monsters can seem a little "streamlined" math-wise, but frankly I felt that just gave me more space to emphasize special abilities and environments (in my set piece encounters, the environment in which players encountered a monster was always a major factor, like tentacles erupting from pools of water or jets of flame bursting from fissures in the ground)--in other words, balance gives me more freedom, not less. That is the approach I prefer, anyway, which I know is not very "old school" and some people call it video-gamey but whatever. It's not like 3rd edition wasn't compared to Diablo when it came out.
@Kuuryo But that's still arbitrary. Because the defender only rolls sometimes. Like, if it was a rule that the PLAYER always rolled, that I'd get. That'd be consistent. Like, monsters have static attacks/static defenses, and players always roll attacks against monsters, and roll to defend against attacks. In any case, it's still not a hard and fast thing, because out-of-turn actions and effects still were a thing in 4E, as they are in 3E and 5E alike. Opportunity attacks, immediate actions, ongoing and triggered effects, etc. I say, let those fill the space for paying attention when it's not your turn. There was no need to make a whole "saving throw" mechanic which is exactly the same as "attack vs AC", except sometimes we use one and sometimes we use the other somewhat inconsistently.
@@AnonSeacat Well, the defender might have different modifiers than the attacker, so who is the one to make the save does make a difference. Also, it does feel better to avoid an attack because YOU rolled well, rather than the attacker rolling badly, and it implies that your character dodged it because he is skilled and competent, rather than just being lucky that the enemy missed. I do agree that saves should be a little more "consistent" though, because you can never really tell when a spell or ability needs a save without actually reading their description, which can slow down combat a bit, especially for new players, but that also makes them feel more unique and quirky, and honestly, players should know how their powers work anyway, so that's not the gm's nor the game's fault. Overall, i like saving throws, they feel more apropriate than just AC, like, it's more focused on your skills rather than just numbers, like you know why you beat that attack, it wasn't just because your defense is higher, it was because your character i very tough, or very dexterous, or very wise, you know? It stimulates my imagination more, idk. I've started with 5e so honestly my opinion might not be very important, but oh well...
"Mom, can we have DnD?"
"We have DnD at home."
Dnd at home: *4th Edition*
ua-cam.com/video/AAx553k7W5s/v-deo.html (Coarse language)
Just go to the library and find the rulebook PDFs for 5e online. Print them if need be.
May I suggest "Open Legend RPG"? 👀
@@janrupertalfeche8959 Open legend is kinda cool, wish i could convince my group to try it.
You're not a very creative person, are you?
I have so many good memories with 4e. It was so good when I was really young because all I wanted was cool powers and hordes of monsters.
Don't know why, But i could listen to this guy tell story's for days on end. Love ya work man.. Not even a Fan of DnD. Have never played it in my life. Ty for your work man.
Cheered me up, been in hospital for a week with back problems. This put a smile on my face when i am miserable ATM. Thanks again.
I still don't understand it im just gonna go back to excom and aa
Sorry that you were in the hospital, but you should try playing dnd 5e
I just dmed my first home brew campaign and it was a ton of fun. Hearing your videos and the confidence (even as things went to hell) was a big help. Thank you.
I was in the same boat as you, I too started in 4e, except I loved it. I loved doing team attacks with my warlord, it was the funnest thing to me. Coming from playing video and board games all my life, I loved all the combat rules and strategies. I eventually switched to the Pathfinder games and play those these days, but I’ll never forget all the fun I had with 4e with my friends. Good times.
Yeah, I think you covered the what I remember about 4E. People I played with would say over and over again, "it's still a new system, just wait til a few more books come out and it'll get better."
I loved 4e back when I was playing it. It was my first edition of D&D, and somehow all 7 of us got the hang of it really quickly so it flowed well for my group. All of my best D&D stories are from the 2 years I spent playing 4e.
WOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
After reading these comments I was afraid I was the only one
Yeah. I think it depends on the people. I had a group of friends that all played 4E and would constantly tell me how good it was...but I started playing with AD&D right before 3E came out, and switched to 3E when it happened... You cant go AD&D to 3E to 3.5, to 4E...That just...it doesn't work. Everytime i read the rules for 4E my brain went "NO. You PUT THAT BOOK DOWN. THATS A BAD NERD! Don't do it again" Which is really a shame because I was REALLY tired of 3.5e's design too. That was a ruleset with some serious flaws. So I basically had no D&D until 5e came out. Bummer.
Same here. I suppose it helped that my experience with earlier editions were never as fun as I wanted them to be. I was primed for something completely new.
My group absolutely loved 4e and we HATE 5e. The reason being, all of us were and still are tabletop mini players. Warmachine, 40k, you name it. So 4e to us was just a natural extention of things, so battle to us was a blast of fun.
Same here. I never had a problem with managing everything. Combat did take longer, but this was mainly due to the hit point spread. Minions were easy kills, other monsters took forever (unless you optimized a striker class).
“This is what we look like.”
YES, been there so many times...so many 😥
8:00
I loved 4th Edition! It was the edition I first started with too and it was perfect for me. I'm am avid wargamer (Warhammer, malifaux, infinity, Magic, etc.) And the combat always scratched that itch so well, I would spend hours building optimized characters, or building something off the wall and unique. The feats especially added so many unique options. It also helped that our DM treated every encounter like a WoW boss fight which is as much a puzzle based around abilities and movement as it is a grind. And I guess our team was pretty good at moving turns along and keeping track of the combat stack from years of playing magic. I also really liked the rituals, but I guess that's just personal taste.
The only thing I felt 4th really lacked was that it separates the combat from the roleplay side.
A lot of the issues Puffin brings up are things that still happen in 5e as well, and are issues that occur because of a bad DM. Players forgetting bonuses, realized they had certain abilities, etc. I've played 5e for years, and have gotten into 4e recently as well, and it's actually a lot of fun. You could have 5 characters of the same class that all have drastically different styles, and your fighter is going to feel just as cool as your wizard. Combat is very straight forward, you have 4 action types. Movement, Standard, Minor, and Free.
-Move Action. Well you move.
-Standard is gonna be your abilities, (ie; weapon attacks and spells)
-minor are certain abilities that are easier, akin to bonus actions. Sheathing/Drawing a weapon, applying poisons
-Free actions are things like talking, certain abilities, just things that take little to no effort or time.
You can standard and move actions can go down, so you can take 3 minor actions, or 2 minor and a standard/movement. Combat is only boring if your DM makes it boring. I've never once found 5e combat fun aside from when my DM throws in so much homebrew mechanics it's barely recognizable as 5th edition. In standard play at LOW levels, sure there's not much to track player side, but at high levels, there is tons of spells, magic items, abilities, auras, etc to track player side. Then not to mention DM side is hell in 5e. I've played quite a few sessions of 4e now, around 10, having several combats, and it's all riveting. Each action is meaningful, and you plan and strategize around it. When you know a fight is coming, you scout ahead and gather info on your enemies to know what they do so you can counter them effectively. Enemies actually have tactics and goals in a fight. The things to keep track of are your powers, which are worded very well.
Combat is not an issue in 4th edition, and it is much more fun than 5th edition in my opinion. Skill bonuses are a bit of a non issue as 4e was meant to be digitized, but that received backlash from the community, which I agree with. They get crazy high at some points, but in 5th edition, you have so many spells, abilities, and bonuses as well. The amount of times I've had a rogue in my games roll a 30+ on stealth, or a barbarian roll a 30+ on athletics, or other stuff is insane. I had a rogue get a 54 on a stealth check. She got a nat 20, had +14 stealth, PWT, and a few other buffs from magic items. These are not things that 5th edition resolved.
For those few of you who see this 3 years after this video, don't discount 4th edition based off of the words of people who didn't know how to play it. Not to mention, if the DM was bad, then that can ruin any game from AD&D, to Call of Cthulhu, to Zweihander, and even 5th edition. Give it a try yourself, there's a discord for 4th edition play with a decent following. But 4th edition is extremely fun, and if you wish to give it a try, I'm looking to run a game on Tuesday afternoons CST. Just reply to this comment and ask for my discord tag.
I might be three years early, but I wouldn't mind lurking around some 4E servers. I might actually even join to conversations and report of my ongoing/past campaigns if the server feels ready to hear the tales of how my players escaped from a disguised lich by putting on a play.
Does this make 4e part of OSR now?
Ahhhh, the 4e debates. The Greatest War of our time (so far). I remember listening to a bunch of 4e sessions DMed by Chris Perkins, and I could never figure out why people disliked it so much. Then again, Perkins is particularly adroit at running games, so it is possible he smoothed off a lot of 4e' s rough edges.
Michel Javert Mostly because it’s written and plays like a war game. If you ran the campaigns as written, the lore and character motivations were regulated to side notes and the stat blocks were the whole page.
@@92Roar Combat was heavily drawn from wargaming, I think its one of the reasons I really liked it and why my friends and I could run it smoothly
Vepris Thorn and for war gamers I think it was a great edition. It just wasn’t what the community really expected
Rory More
Please describe the characteristics that make 4e a wargame no one else has ever managed to do but I’ sure you’ll find a way.
Reading through this is starting to make a lot more sense because it's like D&D has always basically been a war game, but the roleplay aspect was the one people really liked the most. So if you want to tell a story with each action then that's one thing, but if you just want a BUNCH of factors everywhere influencing the battle then it's just like "Oh, +2 and +5 on this minus these things and this is what your attack does."
I could see people jumping into 5e, rolling 1d8 for damage on a cantrip, and then being like "Okay. But why don't I have more things to stack to that?"
I'm at least getting the impression that this is very much sort-of more like turn-based combat compared to MMO combat, generally speaking, in terms of one's more for just picking a thing and making choices and the other one's more for appealing to people who want just all the numbers happening everywhere all over the place.
Am I off on this?
Well, that explains why I don't hear many talking about 4e
Because lies like this video pop up?
@@PataHikari take it from someone who's played 4th and 5th a lot, nothing in here is a lie
@@apersonwhomayormaynotexist9868 Nope, you're lying. And if you've played 5e you should know it's a bland, uninspired, unbalanced mess made by a bigot.
@@PataHikari you dont just get to say I'm lying just because I disagree with you, 5e is certainly better than 4e, and this is the first I'm hearing of either being made by a bigot
@@PataHikari also 5e is plenty balanced, super fun, and the inspiration of a tabletop RPG is mostly based off the group you're in. I'm sorry if your father was murdered using the 5e players handbook or something, but to the rest of us who played the game (I seriously doubt you've played with a good group before, did you just have a terrible DM or something) 5e just is more fun
As a 4E DM for the duration before 5E came out, I just chucked out most of the stuff enemies could do and reduced their HP and increased their damage. Worked great. I would focus on one or two elements of the monsters in the combat, enough to theme the battle. I don't think you were intended to run _everything_ a monster could do. As far as out of combat, I actually really loved 4E because it treated out of combat as an afterthought. Gave me complete freedom to run it however I needed for the moment. The stories my 4E games delved into were vast and interesting, 5E tends to get in my way because if I forget any of the things my players can do, it can bork the whole narrative. I've gotten better about it, but I definitely had those skill atrophy in the 4E era.
Funny, part of the reason I started playing D&D in general, and 5e specifically, was because I was looking for inspiration for my stories. Of course, didn't want to spend $50+ for a game I wasn't into - funny how that turned out - got $300+ worth of books (got all the player-related ones up to Theros), and a lot of dice (like $100 for just that, along with $40 for the Crown Royal Regal Apple - wanted the green bag, but the whiskey was good when mixed with apple juice, and was useful for "medicinal" purposes - lol!).
Anyways, there's a guy I go horseback riding with, and he too likes D&D, being a veteran of 3.5e, although he's trying to get into 5e. Turns out, he has the 3.5PHB, and he let me borrow it. Been a little bit, and perhaps it was because the type was smaller, but I had issues with it. One issue I had was how everyone had some sort of racial penalty (don't get that much in 5e, and with the revised Volo's, no one gets it), with certain weapons meant for specific races (I can understand racial Martial Training as a culture thing, to have the ability to use certain armor/weapons regardless of class) and how certain races "should" be "certain" classes and not others (granted, given that certain races have bonuses to certain stats, still got a mild bit of that, but there's no real issue making "sub-optimal" race/class combos), and I might even argue about rolling for stats without an alternative stat array for those who just want to make a character real quick (but I know that's just Tradition).
Of course, I like to talk to him about the different races and their abilities. For instance, I mentioned the Aarakocra and Winged Tiefling, who can be above the main action. He was like, "Sounds a bit unfair to the DM." I point out, "Yes, goblins can't use melee weapons against flying PCs, but every creature tends to have access to some sort of ranged weapon, and since goblins are at least smart enough to recognize a flying threat to be dangerous, some leader will go 'You two, use bows. Bring down bird-lady. She taste good!' so a good DM will will set at least one or two dedicated to such foes." I also point this out about any other PCs that might just run over an encounter, like using a minor fiend to mess up a Yuan-Ti Paladin or a good Bruiser-type to mess with a satyr (I know how to work around magic resistance.)
I had my best memories wih 4th ed! i had a charater called mozi mc bug (a swarm of bugs inside a human skin) hybrid wizard rouge, i think he got to 12 level, and i just remember him being so powerful with all his feats sunk into magic misiles (i called them bugs that acted like missles made of fire and force), added fire damge to magic missile and increased fire damge to that, and the house rule we had we could throw out all our attacj encounters to recharge a dailie we used. and mozi always did that to get the dailie to double his magic missile every round! basically all i used and used the rouge powers to move hide run away lol. also i remember we had so little magic items to. i just remember it being so much fun!
Puffin: This was an amazing game! I'm going to tell you all why I loved it.
Also Puffin: THIS IS THE WORST GAME IN HISTORY OH MY GOSH WHY DID ANYONE EVER PLAY THIS GARBAGE AAAAA!!!!!
Also Puffin: But I still like it.
Me: This guy can't get his story straight.
@@ianbraun271 he liked the roleplay. The combat was what sucked to him
@@thomastakesatollforthedark2231 ok
4e: The reason Pathfinder was the dominant RPG for almost a decade.
Probably it was also the 3 and 3.5 edition of the time because it was only one pathfinder until this year
@@Agreus-WolfsbaneYT I bought the 3.5 books but was never able to play the game with someone. My first actual game was Pathfinder, but I liked it a lot because it took the 3.5 rules and upgraded them a bit to make each of the classes a bit more unique and simplified some of the rules that were a bit overly complicated in 3.5. In fact, I still play Pathfinder to this day.
@@wordforger so kinda similar to what I did but with the older edition. How is pathfinder by the way? Ive heard of it but never played
@@Agreus-WolfsbaneYT I love it. Each class has some unique features none of the other classes get to make them worth playing, and feats make each one even more customizable. There's also no such thing as an "empty" level because every level in just about every class your character will get something nifty. The Pathfinder lore is also pretty cool.
@@wordforger oh nice i hope i can find someone who plays it so I can check it out
Would like to see a part 2 with all the stuff on the cutting room floor.
I loved 4E back in the day, especially the artwork and all of the classes and Lore.
My friends and I would do a weekly 12 hour session. Combat was a breeze for us and quick.
I miss the Nentir Vale setting.
This is like trying to remember the good things about that weird shadow in your room you thought was a monster when you were 2.
Started with 4e. It’s still my favourite. I love going into gaming stores, announcing this fact and then watching people’s reactions.
No
Yes
I’ve played 5th and I still do for two of the four games I play in. I don’t hate it but it’s really not my jam. 4e was and still is a good system (at least I think so).
Edit: Noticed a typo
Do you tip the fedora when you announce your love of 4E?
David Burton something like that 😂. I don’t just announce it when I walk in though, I wait for the right moment to come up in conversations.
Thank you, Puffin, for always going over this...Breaking down and analyzing this, and then its relation to the rest of D&D and RPG development and history is useful for discovering of greater game design. My thanks, for Truth, sincerely!
I can't believe you stuck with DND if this was your introduction.
Going by his description, he liked the role-play aspect of the game. It was just the mechanics that were such a drag. And he was in a 3.5 game concurrently, so he got a view into a system that wasn't...4e, let's be tactful.
@@Bluecho4 If i go by his other vids, his group is pretty terrible at playing by the rules...
And the mechanics where'nt much of a drag, even compared to 3.5 or 3rd.
Yes there was a lot of bonuses and maluses to keep track off, but also a lot din't stack, you Had Divine, Arcane, Primal and Insight bonuses, and you couldn't stack bonuses coming from the same kind of source.
Some of the numbers could be staggering to see, since hte game had a leveling curve on 30 lvls, with your AC been in the 40's for a squishy to medium character, and Attack bonus been +37.
But in the end its the same has having only 22 in AC and +15 AB in 5th
I was introduced to DND through 4e and now I remember why I didn’t stick with it
@@andrewseaman97 bad at everything her does? Care to elaborate?
Pokerface ✅✅✅✅✅✅
I started with fourth edition too! The sleeping bit is awfully relatable.
I look back at 4E with positivity. I need to reassess those memories.
Whoa, hey there JX👋 Had no idea you watched this channel too😊
Mollie Thomas Hey Mollie! Love me some DnD!
No not really. 4E has some cool stuff. 4E was fun to play depending on your group and DM.
To be honest, his DM was a newbie and they played a complicated crunchy system.
4e had problems, but a lot of problems Puffin mentioned sounds a lot like DM issues.
Nah, me and my group are still playing 4e to this day. A good DM makes a good game. A lot of what he said in this video was either objectively wrong, or a super easy fix with a halfway decent dm.
We all have memories that will last a long time, like the time one shows the DM the info on a Celestial Warlock, and he just freezes. That was a fun moment, as prior to that, he mainly stuck to the Core rulebooks, and then I came in with Xanathar's Guide to Everything. Then there was the time we (the group) were trying to figure out what to make my mother, who had decided to join the group, and we realized that we didn't have a monk, and this other player was like "Tabaxi Monk!" and the DM was like "Tabaxi?" and I go "Volo's" and get that book out and show it to him, and thus, Tabbitha the Way of the Open Hand Tabaxi Monk came to be, and my mother loves being the crazy cat lady of the group. (Can't wait until the DM gives the "Go Ahead" and we can play again.)
...That's 5th edition.
Not that your comment isn't relevant but you're replying to "D&D 4e was a game || Memories from an older D&D edition" with memories from 5th edition without prefacing them as such.
@@nathankurtz8045 Interesting. I have a friend who played 3.5, and we like to compare the systems at times.