What Happened with 4th Edition D&D?
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
- Episode 80! I had a patron ask request some insight into why people dislike 4e so much. So I made a video explaining some of the changes that happened.
Forgot to mention Helm died, which made a few people upset.
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Mike Mearls twitter thread
twitter.com/mikemearls/status/1039023845145894913
The ''nostalgia'' accusation is bunk. The rules of sports games being changed will be bucked by fans and not because they are ''nostalgic'' for the old rules. You change the rules of baseball, you are no longer playing baseball.
Mike Mearls is the worst game designer Wizards has had.
I'm going to agree with Trevor Cormier and ClandestineOstrich. Jorphdan, you say in the video that "people were holding on to nostalgia." Yet your own entire video up to that point is an outline of the ways that the change to 4th edition sucked. You noted real, tangible problems -- such as the over-reliance on a battlemat and miniatures, and people not wanting to play a MMORPG simulator at the table. You also hit on the fact that 4th edition classes are "samey," although you didn't use that word. It's the idea that they all have powers, all roughly doing the same damage, all roughly behaving the same way. You can't outline all these issues and then say, "but really it's just nostalgia." People had very plain and obvious issues with 4th edition. Your own video shows this to be the case.
And yes, I also agree with ClandestineOstrich that if people were just nostalgic and refusing to change, then 5th edition would have failed too. Instead, it's wildly popular. People are open to change. They just want a game that fits them, feels right. 5th edition did that.
The real thing that happened is they kinda pulled the curtain back to far to show the nuts and bolts of what game design actually is. If you game design, you stop thinking of things in terms of this is a Arcane Lightning to destroy the dragon, but more like this does 25 dmg on average and most monsters have 40 HP at the Level character gets the spell, so all spells need to do about this 25 damage but have some effect added to it. 4e was pretty blatant about that for all classes, and the illusion was blown.
@@LordSathar the real issue is the clumsy nature of the similarity, you can achieve 25 average damage with multiple die types combined with modifers & 'damage over time'. they'll all do 25 average damage but have a different feel. Also every class having a once a round/turn/day power sure makes things EASIER to balance (and reduce whining from unimaginative players about balance, just look at any response to any balance patch made to any RTS game for type of comments i am talking about, humans exist on a spectrum) but it reduces the richness of the possibilities, and in an effort to make D&D accessible to 'the-every-person' it was homogenized into blandness.
5th Ed Fixes some of this but casters are still too boring, i don't care if my wizard can cast fire bolt every round (despite most gamers complaining i just want to be a wang-rod player and geez i'm not satisfied with being able to cast so much.?..) when what i WANT is wizards to be interesting again, give me variety and adaptability and reduce my damage - if all i cared about was killing monsters i'd play a fighter like most murder hobos that complain that wizards are broken (when , with variety and richness to spell descriptions like in 2nd ed (the Descriptions, not the power necessarily, magic & the world characters are allowed to interact in is such low rez detail its like experiencing d&D in 4k (2nd edition), 3rd shook thing up and added complexity but also clarified many things, and then 4th brought resolution down to 360p for bandwidth purposes to broadcasting/sell to as many people as possible , and with 5th edition we're back to around 720p - i am still very under whelmed. tired some adventurer league and some online 5th ed games and the world feels like i'm in a house where everything is covered in hard plastic except for a few things that i'm allowed to interact with.
another way to put it
4th ed = A Michael Bay Film (lots of explosions and action, not a lot of plot)
5th ed = M. Night Shyamalan film ( supernatural plot, some good scenes can be found, but generally underwhelming but markets well to general audiences looking for 'an experience' 'because it happened to be playing near by')
That was THE slickest plug for something that I didn't know I really wanted.
The reason they jumped to 4th edition so quickly is because for some reason they made the 3E OGL so open that anyone could make their own game based on D20, which allowed their biggest competitor Pathfinder to make a better game based off Wizards system.
Pathfinder was a reaction to 4e, not the cause of 4e.
It was when WotC janked the licences for Dungeon and Dragon magazine from Paizo, and excluded them from 4e, that Paizo had to scramble to come up with a way to survive.
That attempt at survival turned into Pathfinder.
The way that WotC killed the entire ecosystem supporting the hobby in the run up to 4e, with Gleemax and the Digital Initiative, make that 4e was hated before any books hit the shelves.
What do you mean quickly?
That doesn't make sense. Pathfinder was literally a counter to 4e
I read this statement a number of times, but it makes much more sense in 2023, after thr OGL debacle.
What fewer people realize, was that 4e felt very “gameist” because WotC were making their first foray into VTT. The game was designed around the fact that it would be accompanied by a money-making VTT, but the lead designer of the VTT (who came from Microsoft I think) had some personal/mental issues and had a complete breakdown during which he did some very bad things from what I understand, and so that half of the project came to a screeching halt. Without the other half of the game, the difference in mechanics from previous editions didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and so were criticised by many players of previous editions. I wonder if the same will happen with OneD&D? Hopefully without any designers having mental breakdowns of course.
I started playing with 4e, and I had a good time with it... for a while. After a few adventures (all of which I DM'd) I stopped playing. A few years later, I joined a new group that played 5e, and I was a player for the first time. In my experience, It doesn't really matter what game you are playing as long as you have the right group. I do want to revisit 4e with a better group, and more experienced players. My biggest problem with 4e was my group. No matter what game you are playing it's no fun if half of your group doen't want to be there and you end up in an unhealthy relationship with one of your players.
About FR i remember that in interviews back in the day developers mentioned how they didn't see a central theme in Forgotten Realms. They had a lot of pressure from players to release an update of the setting but the whole setting didn't fit with their design philosophy for settings resulting on what was almost a reboot of the whole thing.
In my opinion the big problem was an inability to understand the draw of sandbox settings and a focus on settings with a central theme and a concept that separated them further from classical fantasy. Dark Sun, Eberron and the Nantir Vale (the sorta official setting for 4e) all fit into this design philosophy while FR did not. To make matters worse the decision to soft reboot setting was very badly received by the original creator Ed Greenwood and by arguably the best selling author of D&D novels R. A. Salvatore. Salvatore would stop working for Wizards entirely during that time and was understandably enraged at the company for killing 90% of the cast of characters from his books and completely changing the setting. In the end the new version of FR was badly received by fans of the setting and was only moderately successful with the minority of players that subscribed to Wizards design philosophy.
Needless to say, when both 4e and it's FR reboot undersold heavily and they changed their design philosophy for 5e the first thing they did was calling Greenwood and Salvatore back to lead the return of the setting to the older sandbox philosophy.
Basically Hasbro did to FR with 4E what JJ Abrams/Alex Kurtzman did to Star trek Cannon and Johnson did with SW Ep 8? lolllll :P It might have peeved older fans, but got new ones interested in those universes. I thought the idea of Mystra being killed on her own plane where the god of Divination also lived and should have seen things coming was idiotic. But hey. If some had fun with 4E FR, good for them. I created my own timeline from 1380 + without the sundering and my players love it. To each his own. :)
What is Nantir Vale?
@@donkeysaurusrex7881 It was sort of the official 4e setting. It was a really smaller area fitting on their whole ideas of points of light in a dark world that could be used independently or just dropped into any other setting if you want.
I've only played 5e but I have a whole load of 4e books that I inherited. The 4e books are far more interesting to me; it provides a _lot_ of flavour and has suggested strategies for enemies, and is just better at helping you with worldbuilding and scene setting. 5e is extremely pared down by comparison.
Ive felt this too, 5e stsrts me off woth a making a multiverse and bmstarting out i wanted to know what kubda wirld dnd itself was, forgitten realms
Give 4e a try, it’s still my favorite edition of the game, flaws and all.
You will probably never see this reply, but I love 4e and my players love it as well (although, I haven't given them much of a choice in the matter). Two of the many things I like with 4E are the survivability (if this is even a word) of each character and "Roles" that they play.
Roles pretty much make your character shine on whatever they do and in combat one can actually tell the differences.
Survivabilty is huge in 4E, as a DM i'm not really afraid of throwing a few level 6-7 monsters to my level 3-4 party members knowing that with strategy they can overcome the challenge and survive the encounters.
I'd say give it a try, you may be surprised of how fun it can be (encounter can be long but with strategy and good positioning they can be really fun).
4E books are great especially for lore and flavor
I agree
I have played through every single change that D&D has had. (Yes, I'm that old.) I started Arneson and Gygax's first rule set and went to the boxes, AD&D, and so on. The 4e rules were the least D&D rpg like rules yet. They were a great game, but the weren't D&D as it was back when. That is what I feel so many didn't like. I played 4e and 3.5 at the same time with two different groups. The 3.5 group were more 'traditional' roll-players, where the 4e group were 'gamers.' I think many of the points made in this video were spot on. It's not that 4e was bad: it's just not what a lot the D&D players liked or wanted in the game.
I fully agree. I am an old timer myself though I started a little later than you with the AD&D version when it was the only version there was.
I'm right there with you!
As some one who started on the Red Box with Basic D&D, when you were pretty much just playing Lord of the Rings under a different name, I agree with you wholeheartedly. 4th ed was for "Gaming", 3.5 for "Role Playing".
What do you think about 5e?
To be offensively hyperbolic I tend to think of DnD 4e as the DnD for people who didn't like DnD. It killed sacred cows, often needlessly, took balance as a religion as opposed to a general goal, then ripped apart the lore. In fact the last one was the coup de gras for me. I was a Planescape fan in a major way, and the move away from it to what I saw as a boring and inane spin mix of existing mythos with the character assassination of certain deities into Greek/Norse god expies just disgusted me. That some of that stuff boiled over into 5e with gods like Kord being tempest still bug me. In fact 5e's rather lackluster attempt to rewrite certain things is my biggest beef with it. Their fill out of Hags and Giants is interesting, but their butchering of Kurtulmak and kobolds, the continued perversion of aasimar and tiefling, and the stuff they did to the daemons (Yugoloths), by far the most interesting fiends in 2e, all are marks against the edition for me, although I enjoy other aspects
There was also a bit of backlash from moving away from the open gaming license to a game system license that while on the surface was just a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo actually alienated a lot of fans and developers. This in turn set them up with a great deal of negative press from the word go. 4e didn't fail because it was a bad game but more due to the fact that some higher ups misjudged the community and our loyalty to certain elements within the society. There were more than a few that even saw it as nothing more than a cash grab and a power play.
Except 4E didn't fail. It was hugely successful.
4E did fail. That's why Pathfinder and 5e exist. Otherwise, there would still be 4e.
@@trevorhanson6295 4e literally split the fan base and we the reason Pathfinder exists. 5e exists to get those lost fans back. I've been playing more than 30 years, every edition, and 4e is the only one I don't like, and won't play unless it's the only game available. I was burned by the lack of backwards compatibility and easy conversion, the focus on tactics and video game like combat, and powers. Powers with magical-like logic for classes that aren't magical. As well as codification of roles for classes. Don't tell me what role my cleric has to play, or my fighter, etc.
When I started to play 4th it often had the emotional impact on me as playing D&D for the first time in '78
Dylan Black
what happened was wotc has always been child molesting cunts who think we exist for their benefit. I remember when 4e was just "a vicious rumor spread by trolls" and banned people from the forum for mentioning it
than it became "ok it is true but don't talk about it as it could compromise play tests" which made no sense at all as how could speculation affect a secret game system but again, ban ban ban.
than they released it and expected us to all go out there and spend money on a system when we saw just how little wotc thought of its base and mind you this was a decade before sjws.
all the meanwhile the system wasn't even bad but i wouldn't piss on a wotc employee if he was on fire
I like 5th Edition enough to where I can't actually see any meaningful updates that warrant an entirely new edition. Spellcasters have their at-wills as cantrips (my primary gripe with 3.5 and why I love 4), non-casters are still very relevant at higher levels, prestige classes/paragon paths are now core parts of their respective classes (no needing to bend over backwards for at least five levels to do what you want), races are more relevant than before. The only thing I have against 5e is the clunky CR system and the fact that I find most monsters in the monster manual to be boring.
With regards to monsters, its why I plan to use my collection of monsters going back to 1e an converting using online 5e monsster stat converters. This is one of the upsides of being an old grognard DM from the 80s. From the original monster manual, to the fiend folio and various sourcebooks aquired you have craploads of monster reafy to inflict on the party.
My personal suggestion would be, if you can find it at a good price, get a copy of the 1e Fiend Folio and use a converter. I guarentee many modern players have never seen some of those monsters.
Love 4e.
4e didn't stop roleplaying.
The weekly encounters adventures did. The weekly encounters made the game feel like a board game session.
We played as a group of friends and loved it. Still do. Not a fan of 5e at all.
Weekly encounters?
Joel Miller I have never once had a problem with people role playing when i run 4e. People not liking certain game mechanics I get, but most of the 4e hate I hear is just people who don’t like it because it’s different or because they where basically told to.
I mean I think it kind of depends on what one you were introduced to. I love 5e, but I mean its the only edition I’ve played, and I’m not changing, since I have all of the books. I think its the same with you and 4e. As he said it might of been your first edition.
@@mr.vercotti9509 probably a bit but I've played 5e as well, a lot of it, and I think it's fun, hell it's probably even a better designed game. I play a lot of different RPG'S not just D&D and I find 5e to be fun in short bursts but bland. It isn't really good at anything except being easy to learn/play. For lack of a better word it lacks a gimmick, and I mean that in a good way. I had fun with my time with it but from a mechanics perspective it's,eh, it lacks it own identity. The longer I played it just didn't pop. I found myself in 5e games (in combat) walking away from the table more frequently to like make coffee or whatever because once your turn is over most of the time you don't even need to be around, the positioning changes and that's about it.
@Phillip Alleva-Cox Im not disagreeing cuz I haven’t played call of cuthulu or pathfinder 2e, but I think blandness is kinda the gm’s fault. I don’t really understand how one system could be blander persee, but I, most* disagreeing cuz I don’t have the experience. Explain por favor
*Edit: I’m not disagreeing
I think people should stop being mean to each other over editions. Just go play D&D and have fun, don't wage the pointless "Edition Wars".
The setting wars are far more fun. :D
Spoken like a true 4th'er! CONSIDER YOURSELF CHALLENGED SIR!
@@ballelort87 never played 4e so nah i dont feel myself challenged ;)
If you ignore Forgotten Realms 4e lore is really interesting. And oh how I wish 5e would ignore Forgotten Realms a little more.
Yeah that Nentir Vale stuff was actually really interesting :D I'd like to see what WotC could come up with for 5e as a new campaign setting.
My first dabble in dnd was 4e, but i could not get a grasp on it. 5e is considered very simple, but what i love is its easy for new players to jump in. 4e lost me, 5e brought me back.
8:08 yep that's me, 4e was my first love, coming from video games into 4e was a fun transition. these days I play the Pathfinder series but i'll always remember the fun I had playing 4e with my friends.
4th edition for me. I wonder why emo like pathfinder.
I started on, and still play 4e. I'm a DM and very lax on the rules. I think the rigidness of the rules is what confused a lot of players. A Fighter in my during our first game was surrounded, he had a large sword and wanted to try and spin around to cut as many people down at once as possible. As a new DM and not familiar with the rules i said "You can't do that, you don't have that ability.." The warrior does have access to "Cleave" a similar technique, but the player never picked it. So he ended up choosing a different thing and we went on.
Now as an experienced DM more familiar with 4e's ruleset and balances, reading through the pathfinder and 5e rulebooks (and some of my father in law's AD&D books) I'd probably say "Sure, make an attack roll on the first, and if you do well we'll see if it goes through into the second. making him take a strength check or something, but punishing him for a failure, maybe he slips and falls prone.
A Lot of what people didn't like about 4e was rules lawyers, its a framework like everything else, the DM's job was to build on it.
Funny. One of my friends didn't like any D&D edition except 4th. Mainly because 3.5 and 5 didn't work for her style of DMing - combining anime-esque style of over-the-top stylish combat and environments and, at the same time making players feel absolutely miserable at the same time because things were getting progressively worse during campaign. Like every good decision of the party felt not significant enough in comparison of how many things were getting worse around them. Still, that skill-challenge and role-play based game was played for years by core party. Which I need to give them credit, I wouldn't do myself as I'm more traditional D&D player and DM.
4e was made with the assumption that you need codified rules for resolving the tactical side of D&D, but you don't so much need them for the role play side of D&D. So when people look at rule books heavy on tactical rules and light on role play guidelines, they think it's a heavily tactical game. But, just like all other editions of D&D, it's only as tactical as the players make it.
The rule set of 4e means that the burden of tactical play can be distributed across all players at the table, not just playing "DM, may I?" but empowering clear, game-codified answers to that question. And with creating and running combats made simple, the DM can spend less of her energy on futzing with combat and more on beefing up the role play.
I am that person who 4th Edition was their gateway into D&D, and you know how my buddy sold it to me? "Dude, they made it easier, it's like WoW, only in person with your friends and you can do ANYTHING...within reason." I loved 4E, the combat was amazing, monsters were balanced but difficult if deployed well, and characters were balanced. I STILL tell stories to my players about the Pacifist Cleric I made.
I also love 5E, and DM two weekly games. But yeah, 4E was my D&D gateway drug. ;) No regrets.
Joshua Kammert my friends used the same WoW explanation to get me to join their party for 4e
0:45 1D&D was just announced and this section feels like dejavu. We're right back in this state with 5e into 1D&D
I'm actually one of the people who got their start in 4th edition, and in some ways I actually still prefer it over 5th edition, mostly down to a few specific combat rules I really think should have carried over, and especially how much I HATE the levels of cross reference you need in 5th edition. In 4th, I can fully run a game just with a monster manual behind the screen with me, all their stats and abilities are right there. 5th? Nope, I have to have a player's handbook at all times to see what the spells actually are, cause the MM only says what spell they have, not even a simplified version of what it actually does. There are just too many things I have to dig up from too many different books, as well as the game being too easy to break outright with one magical item that did more than I expected.
I'm curious what magical item broke your game?
That actually is a fairly reasonable problem, the fact that you have to look up their abilities in another book does bog down.
On another note, have you seen this? I use this as a basis for converting 4e monsters to 5e and I've had a lot more fun with the monsters.
songoftheblade.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/improved-monster-stats-table-for-dd-5th-edition/
If you had had your DM start in a version previous to 4E you would actually have learnt how to prepare for a game session properly and not have those issues at all. 4E was the worst version for new players and DMs to learn about RPGs. It was however fine if you wanted to basically run Diablo on a tabletop.
You might like the Rules Cyclopedia. Everything in one book.
@ Clark. I hadn't seen that before actually, I've just been transferring some of my 4th ed monsters straight to 5th. lol
@ Ishla. At this point I've prepped for multiple games, not just 4th and 5th Edition D&D, and 5th easily has the worst cross reference. Clearly I have all the spells set up ahead of time, so it's not like I'm checking mid game, but no other game I've tried requires me to keep a players book around in order to set up most encounters.
@Raymond. Do they make that for 5th edition or is it just the classic edition? Cause if that's a thing they make, that'd be awesome.
I remember reading a little preview pamphlet at my local game store right before 4th came out. It talked about how DnD was changing and went into what the devs were thinking. They talked a lot of being influenced by modern MMOs (modern at the time) and wanted to attract young players that only knew RPGs through PC games. They felt it was time for DnD to evolve with the times.
BTW, if you drop all the role-playing, 4E makes a really good fantasy skirmish miniature wargame.
Yes it does, I was able to pull a lot of wargamers into RPGs with 4th
There are also a lot of people who absolutely loved 4th Edition. Most of them had been driven from D&D by the power gaming aspects of 3 and 3.5. You have to look past the 3rd Edition to the larger RPG community in general to get an accurate perception on how forth was received.
I'm in that category of loving 4th, in fact the return to a more 3.5 style of things with 5th and the fact that 5th feels so lackluster compared to 4th pushed me and many others away from DnD
The biggest problem with 4E for my groups was that combats took forever. It went from the lethality of 3E where a single saving throw missed could spell death and went to an extremely boring slog as you whittled away at oversized monster HP pools while having tons of combat healing options yourself. Results were very boring and predictable and even simple combats lasted an hour or so. The end result is that other than climactic battles, there was hardly any tension. If the monsters were outmatched (and being an RPG, most of the times the PCs held a significant edge), there was really no chance of them winning. Even if they scored several critical in a row, the extra damage wasn't all that much, and a few heal powers would negate any actions the monsters took. Unlike prior games where you'd have an orc with a greataxe scoring an x3 critical that would instantly turn the tides of battle, or ghoul paralysis and a few bad saves leading the group to sweat as members are knocked down, in 4E I found myself almost always confident of victory because combats were so long that luck was largely factored out of it.
Easily the most valid complaint about 4e. And honestly, none of the hacks I've done quite worked
i see what you mean but i find that it takes forever in 5e as well. ive been in my share of boring drawn out 2 hour combat sequences at 5e games and it do have to say thats one of the reasons i like lower level fights in all editions because the hit points and ac's are lower so things die faster and it crates more quick and brutal combats.
artistguy99: Well it's not purely a matter of speed. There's nothing inherently bad about a long drawn-out combat so long as its exciting. The big problem I had with 4E was that the outcome was basically already determined 2 rounds in, it was just a matter of grinding through the monster's hit points, and how 4E worked, combats didn't escalate as they went on, they deescalated and became more lethal. Monsters that died couldn't heal so monster damage went down. PCs expended encounters and dailies and went down to low-damage at-will attacks. So pretty much after the first few rounds if the monsters didn't make any headway you knew the PCs were going to win, it was just a boring matter of waiting for them to grind through all the enemy's HP using weak attacks.
You realize that a lot of us don't like playing with people who find the "perfect combo" to one-shot the enemy, right? What you call "slow," many of us call, "oh jesus, I actually get to take an action, since MinMaxy McPowerGamer didn't kill it."
I remember 3.5 days where we hoped we'd go before the Cleric or Druid of the party so we could do something fun before they rolled in super-charged like a Comic book hero and decimated the entire scene in 1 round. Yeah not fun for the group's Fighter or Rogue who only brought Hit Points and a decent attack modifier to the table...
I started with 5e then went back to 3.5 because in the opinion of more experienced in the group, 3.5 had a good balance between gameplay and roleplay.
I thought you were going to talk about how 3e became Pathfinder and 4e became 13th Age. And 2e became Hackmaster (KOTDT). Nothing ever dies as long as someone loves it. True, they reworked each of them to give them a new paint job, but mechanically they are still D&D. I also played 4e, but it wasn't as fun as 3rd edition so I'm glad they made the switch to 5e.
I personally ran 4e for about a year and a half before I gave it up due to combats taking FOREVER. The problem was inherent in the math. Monsters just had WAY too many hit points and as you leveled there were way too many "I interrupt his action to do this" followed quickly by "And I'll give you a reactive action to do something else" followed by the DM saying "As a reaction to your interrupt and reaction..." you see where this is going.
Great video. I bought one 4e book and our group played one evening of it. Since then we have moved back to 3.5, and mostly Pathfinder. You should do a video comparing Pathfinder to 5e.
That'd be a great video. I'd have to probably play pathfinder first to make a fair comparison.
Wow, I stopped playing when it was still second edition. Wish I still had people that played it. 44 now, I miss playing but I enjoy your videos. They bring back plenty memories.
Roll20 works, or go to your local geek shop and find fellow players.
46.just started dming again after a 36 year break. Having a lot of fun.
there are people wanting to play all over! at least in the USA. I play it entirely over the internet with friends in multiple time zones using discord. Almost all 3.5 books nearly ever can be found online as well as the newer 5th edition books Anything is possible! I'm sure there are also forums where players look for DMs. as mentioned above, roll20 is very common, and there are other programs for playing online too.
So I have been introduced to dnd by 4e when i was a kid. I played it for years, we did 90% of the time theaters of the mind, because for example squares are simpler using than fricking feet as a measure of distance for anyone who isn’t in the US. And overall made it simpler to visualize. “Dm how far is the door ?, 3 squares ok cool”
D&D 4th was amazing. The largest thing holding it back was it being called D&D. I felt way more awesome as a character in at level 5 in 4E than I do in 5th or did in 3rd.
I have, since 1st edition, stated that D&D characters need to start at 3rd level (although way back then I called it 5,000 XP). 4th edition characters DO start at 3 level; they only call it 1st.
Then you seem like a minmaxer who doesn't actually try to RP.
@@herbivorethecarnivore8447 No its just that in every edition but 4th you start as a farm-boy fresh off the farm, in 4th you started as a capable adventurer that didn't die from the strong sneeze of an Orc
I've always just taken aspects of each edition and shoehorned them in to a hybrid anyway. No edition is perfect but the components for a perfect system do exist, only spread out throughout the line.
Actually, 3rd edition also had a Players Handbook 2, as well as Monster Manuals II through VI (Trust me I bought SO MANY 3E and 3.5 books as a teenager)
Yeah, that reasoning in the video made no sense.
I've been playing D&D since AD&D and I liked 4e for what it was. It was a good game, more balanced than previous editions. I don't buy the complaints on it losing on the "role-playing" aspects of the game; that's mainly on the players and the DM, not the ruleset. But I understand why people didn't like it's more "gamey" approach.
In the end, I was the sole pro-4e voice in my group and the shift towards Pathfinder was inevitable.
Thank you, I keep saying this to people who claim that 4th took out the RP.
It wasn't that players hated change. It was that 4e specifically changed what D&D was. The classes weren't what they'd always been. Suddenly they were MMO archetypes, and very obviously so. WotC could avoid talking about it but that didn't make it any less obvious. The fact that WotC also completely ignored all the howls of outrage during the open playtest from the people saying this wasn't D&D. which far outnumbered any other comment made about the playtest and eventually the WotC mods simply started deleting them so as to be able to pretend they weren't being made at all, proved that the decision was made at the very beginning of the design process. Further when 5e was announced the brand manager gave an interview, or made a blog post, which included a mea culpa about his part in 4e which basically admitted 4e was a mistake without saying what specifically WotC got wrong.
One of the great things about 3 to 3.5 is it was a free upgrade. They published a giant list of errata that let you use your 3.0 books to play 3.5. Honestly most people bought new books, but the fact that you didn't really need to was nice. Also 3.0 was when they came up with the open gaming license. There were a lot of people who had D&D as their main game but had some random d20 wrestling game, or reality show dungeon crawl game for random one offs. The open gaming license made RPGs feel open.
I don't have a source for this, but early in the development of 4th Wizards held a panel at San Diego comic con, one of the things they were really enthusiastic about is how 4th would come with it's own virtual table top. If you wanted to play D&D with your friends, it would be ready out of the box, they could sit down at their computer just like they sat down at your table. It's my understanding that that never happened, but if it was a design decision from the very beginning it does explain it's "video game feel"
I've played a number of the D&D board games that have come out lately that are based on 4th, those work fairly well.
As for the massive changes when 4th happened. It's a long standing tradition, especially in the Realms, that an edition change is celebrated by smashing the world. 1st to 2nd edition had all the gods get kicked out of the heavens, Mystra was killed by Tyr I thing, Cyric killed Myrkhyl, and picked up the portfolios of him, bane and Bhaal. Midnight also got Mystra's job. This is what explained all of 2nd editions changes and wild magic.
One thing 5th did to sooth the hurt feeling of us old timers, a really subtle thing. 5th edition looks a lot like 2nd edition. Not in the rules, but in the fluff. Particularly the magic item lists. They are actually pretty close to what you got in 2nd, where as 3rd was incredibly different and I assume 4th was as well.
And this is only tangentially related but I don't have any place to put it. There was a lot of great material in early Forgotten Realms. The Azure Bonds books, Pools of Radiance series. The old gold box games. When everybody wintered in the Dale lands and most of the characters from the books had much smaller stories that left a lot more room for the players to run around.
My longtime gamer friends (like, all the way back to college - wow I'm getting old) started implementing a collection of 'house rules' after having played 3.0 for awhile. (to smooth out some rough edges). We called it 3.5.
When 3.5 edition came out, we renamed what we did as 3.25, tossed it aside & played 3.5. After awhile we realized that 3.5 hadn't really 'fixed' 3.0 as much as advertised & brought back most of our house rules.
Now we called what we were playing 3.75 edition.
Now we play Pathfinder (1st ed) or as we jokingly call it; D&D edition 3.99! (because it was about as good as 3.0 could get)
We DID initially call it 4th edition D&D as a nickname, but then Wizards came out with an ACTUAL 4th edition, so we changed the nickname to avoid confusion. (not to mention it's Wizard's property so they have 1st dibs on naming stuff) lol
Those saying 4e killed roleplaying have not yet tried dnd 5e. 4e was great in that you had a huge amount of character customization and actually made it feel like you had a real role in a group. Sure all classes had the same basic structure (at-will, encounter, daily) was that much of a jump from all classes having the same saves or the same actions each round (standard, move, swift)? Never understood the hate of 4e outside of just people not able to grasp it.
What saddens me, is that this whole video is 100% Forgotten Realms specific.
Forgotten Realms, thanks to writers like RA Salvatore, has become an overdone world, where the lore is so well known that it actually has started more than one mid-session fight at our gaming table between players. As such, it has been banned from my table in favor of a completely uniquely created campaign setting, outside the TSR created or even WoTC created and published worlds.
It is really disheartening that so many players these days do not realize that Forgotten Realms was only one of a plethora of campaign settings, and due to intentional removal of emphasis of the other worlds by WoTC, they have made the LEAST interesting world the standard.
Before WoTC there were worlds of such vibrancy that the PHB today still has reference to them, for instance, look throughout the spells, find anything with a person's name in the title, and you can guess that arch-mage was either from Dragonlance or Greyhawk. Barovia, home of Castle Ravenloft, of which the campaign setting took its name, resided in THE DEMIPLANE OF DREAD, and had nothing to do with Forgotten Realms. Anyone that would have gone there would not have been able to return, if entered from Faerun, as it existed as a plane of imprisonment, meant to contain and isolate specific elements deemed destabilizing to the rest of the multiverse.
The "One Setting" method of marketing is probably really simple for WoTC, but we are not talking about products that even need marketing. Just stop making lore changes to 40+ year old content, and publish rule books that have been adapted to the existing lore. Otherwise you drive away your older, wealthier, and more apt to spend money player base.
I'm fairly sure they lost the license to some of if not most of the worlds they don't support so much anymore, like Dragon Lance. So it's sorta understandable.
Some people like 'knowing' the world because of all the stories they have read in it or because it has huge maps and defined places, while others like new worlds that you can discover and can have lots of things that are new to everyone. Sadly the latter just doesn't have much place in D&D unless you play in home brew worlds, unless you do what I like to do, take a setting that's not been over done to death, like Eberron, and just don't read the lore, get a feeling for how things run, the unique rules for it and then home brew all the places and things in it to your liking.
Honestly I wish I would stop seeing the same 3 towns brought up in anything relating to Forgotten Realms. Listen... Baldurs Gate is cool. Neverwinter has a lot of history. Waterdeep is huge. But what about the other 90% of the map? There are areas of Faerun rarely touched at if at all. Not to mention on the world map of Abeir-Toril, Faerun is like a 10th of the world.
As soon as there are authors willing to write for those regions, I am sure you will find them more prominently represented. Back in the 2nd Edition Era, the Moonsea and Dalelands were the central focus of all things Abeir-Toril (with some noted exceptions in places like Evermeet), I am sure it is not long before the Swordcoast becomes boring, both for the writers and readers, and the focus will again change.
worlds change, time goes by and things happen. you cant expect lore to remain static or things would get boring even if it takes place in the same setting. the good news is that 5th edition seems to be popular which means it will be longer before wotc decides to begin on 6th edition. this means 5th edition will be around longer and they will have more time to write content for additional worlds kind of like how they are now close to releasing ravnica and eberron. they will probably have more soon too since in dungeon of the mad mage, skullport is a known location which is a known access point from which planar travel can take place. this means wotc is gearing up for more settings.
While I am personally not interested in Ravinica (never really enjoyed CCG's, and the crossover is not likely to produce sufficient new players to have been worth the development time) and I never played, but am intrigued by the concept of Eberon, seeing additional settings receiving attention from Wizards is a move in the right direction.
I've just started the video, but I'm going to give the real answers and see how informed of an opinion the video maker had afterwards:
#1) When marketing 4e, WotC made it a centerpiece of their marketing just how bad of a game 3e was. This left a real bad taste in the mouth of many of their current customers, since those customers and not only been playing 3e for some time, but many had come back to the game for 3e, and had been loyal customers. Now they were told the product they supported was crap, which had a worrisome indication that 4e would be radically unlike a game that they enjoyed.
#2) The withdrawal of the OGL from 4e combined with WotC failing to renew the Paizo license to produce the beloved Dragon and Dungeon magazines not only created a bitter taste in the mouth of fans, but meant that the numerous beloved small publishers were left in a huge lurch. Paizo and WotC were practically family, and they had as families do a really nasty divorce - one of the nastiest corporate divorces I've seen since Ford and Firestone broke up. The result created a lot of partisans that lined up to defend the small publishers against what was seen as anti-fan practices by WotC.
#3) When designing 4e, WotC acted in strict secrecy and did not seek out fan feedback. Instead, they spent a lot of time theory crafting and attempting to create a game that they thought people would want that was mostly based around negative feedback of their prior gaming systems. In other words, they were mostly listening to people who were not fans of D&D and who were not customers of WotC when trying to design a product to market to its customers. In fairness, they actually succeeded in creating a product that many people who never liked D&D before actually liked, but this came at the expense of being a product that many existing customers hated. This is a classic corporate blunder that you see time and time again from market leaders. They decide the only way to grow their market is to appeal to the people who don't like their product. McDonalds did it. Microsoft has done it. Most famously, Coke-Cola did it with the 'New Coke' product. It always ends disastrously because the truth is that if you change a market leading product, chances are you'll change it in a way that reduces its market share.
#4) WotC had decided that part of the cap on their growth was the need for a DM to run a PnP game. They were looking at the success of properties like World of Warcraft and wondering whether the reason PnP RPGs had never caught on was the huge burden in time and skill imposed on the player who has to run the game. WoW didn't need a DM, and so WotC sought to create a PnP game which as much as possible did not depend on the DM. But the result was an overly mechanical game system that felt too much like a board game or a video game, and too little like what players had come to expect from a PnP system.
#5) WotC tried to reinvent itself as a software company despite having absolutely no knowledge of software development. Part of the reason for going to such a mechanical system was to create support for D&D as a computer game which could be played online using DM tools that facilitated play. Unfortunately, owing to the general incompetency of WotC with respect to software development, these advanced tools never actually materialized. The result was a thin PnP gaming system missing all the rich software and environment that it had been originally designed to thrive in.
#6 ) To a large extent, it felt like someone's fantasy homebrew heartbreaker. Over 2/3rds of all D&D tables play in a homebrew setting that is usually inspired by D&D's decades of lore and intellectual properties. There was simply too much change for these independent highly creative tables to absorb. Not only were the mechanics changing rapidly, making it nearly impossible to adapt existing world building to the new mechanics, but 4e with willy nilly abandon changed almost all preexisting lore regarding alignment, cosmology, monster motivations and origins. The new lore was creative in many ways, but it simply could not be easily rectified with the vast majority of existing settings. You pretty much had to play in the setting imposed by the game, which was radically different than any setting anyone was playing in. It was like one highly creative DM had been allowed to impose his rather esoteric interpretation on the whole community, throwing out decades of consensus canon in favor of one guys opinion.
I think that mostly covers it. So let's see where the video maker is coming from.
Ok, I've watched the video. He wasn't egregiously wrong about anything, but he does strike me as being an outsider trying to piece things together. For example, I have seen the articles where former WotC employees talk about how they were motivated to emulate WoW.
He ultimately settles on simply, "People don't like change", and that's largely bull crap. What they don't like is change that is forced on them. All the radical changes in canon and lore and mechanics was costly, in that it forced them to change the game that they had been playing in ways that they didn't want. Many tables have been playing on consistent worlds and with consistent stories through 1e, 2e, and into 3e. Material simply could largely be converted between editions with only mild problems (like how to handle demihuman gestalt multiclassing in a system that didn't really support it anymore). But 4e created radical continuity problems for virtually every DM, and forced changes on his setting that he didn't want.
And ultimately, no D&D edition is going to succeed if it doesn't win over the DMs. WotC tried to create a 'player's D&D', but it didn't win over the people that have to make the worlds come alive. They didn't want to be excluded from the game, or see their role in the story change solely to the guy that made tactical choices for the monsters. They didn't want their creative vision dropped for that one guy at WotC's vision. So they went to Pathfinder or just stuck with 3.X.
+ Matthew Reynolds
Finally! Someone remembers how snarky & dismissive WOTC was towards skeptical players. They arrogantly told us we were stupid haters of change playing an inferior version of D&D. They pretty much said we were going to be left behind as unwanted, stubborn trash. Well, Paizo was only too happy to gather up us trash customers and make silk purses out of us.
I was one of the people who made their start in 4E. My friends played for about a year and a half, then i asked if we could try 5E or switched because it looked so much more fun. While i did enjoy combat and the tactical parts of 4E, the roleplaying lacked. Eventually we switched our game to 5E and were still going strong (3.5 years)! I'm glad to have experienced it but i enjoy being able to 'just do more'. Now what i REALLY want is a Planescape setting, i LOVE that lore and actually started DMing my own campaign using 2E/Planescape Lore but 5E mechanics. I hope WotC releases more content for that setting! Thanks Jorphdan, always great and always boosts my Wednesdays!
I don't find anything in 4E stops you from roleplaying. It's just 5E has much better materials and extras that help you flesh out your character such as the more detailed backgrounds and tables to roll on if you're stuck.
So can you explain that?
Because, obviously, you should play whichever edition you personally enjoy more. But I just don't understand what about 3.x or 5e as a system of mechanics promotes roleplaying in any way more than 4e does.
Is it really just that Lost Mine of Phandelver is so much better at telling a story than the terrible Keep on the Shadowfell and that poisoned the well by presenting the first intro adventure as a more or less straightforward combat-sequence?
There is a theory that the obelisks that keep showing up randomly will lead to players being sent back in time a thousand years or more. Either starting in that time or rewriting history altogether, which is theorized to lead to 6th edition being rewritten history of some sort, with time shenanigans.
Going to be honest, I preferred 4th to 3/3.5/5. Doubled damage dealt and cut hp in half when using monster manual, and homebrewed, and called it a day.
Jesus the game was clean, balanced, and made me want to work with others. DnD and PF are still
Plus, these new terms and conventions were so transparent for players to understand function and play.
I also ADORED the powers frequency with encounters, etc.
Anyone who says they didn't "emphasize story" is full of shit. PF is the clearest example of not being about RP. RP is what you make of it.
I also never cared for DnD's lore, as I homebrewed most of my stuff. Now I'll say that I actually like story systems. I play Dread, PbtA, WoD, and oodles of indies.
We all have different tastes, and maybe it's because in the end I just don't like DnD (especially 3/3.5/PF) as an rpg system.
I hated 4e...until i started playing it. In the end, I was very sad to see it go. It's by far the most DM- friendly edition and the system I most prefer to run a game in for the overall ease.
Yeah, because as a DM, you're worthless. You do nothing but provide a list of encounters in 4E.
Yeah! And NPCs. But other than that, it's just a list of encounters!
Oh, and plot hooks. But apart from the plot hooks and NPCs...
Well, yeah, you have to provide a backstory and plausible motivations. And descriptions and atmosphere to create a fantastical and yet believable world for your players to live in for a little while.
But other than that, that's it!
I mean, of course you have to provide forward momentum for your story and make sure that action scenes do more than just provide bags of hit points for the players to reduce to zero. You have to make sure that action drives the story and that there's more at stake in a combat scene than simple "kill or be killed" stuff. That goes without saying.
And of course you have to make sure each of the players gets a decent amount of spotlight time and that their individual stories matter just as much as the larger story.
Okay, okay, and sure, you need to make sure to keep an eye on pacing and rhythm between bigger and smaller plots, providing relevant side quests and personal moments carefully spaced out between the bigger epic beats of the story.
But other than that, you're just providing a list of encounters! That's it!
You also might want to think a bit about the wider themes of the story and how they're reflected by the conflicts faced by the protagonists, their relationships with NPCs and the wider fictional society of your campaign world, their place in the cosmology and history...
But aside from NPCs, dialogue, story construction, plot hooks, pacing, momentum, balancing player/character involvement, establishing the stakes from scene to scene and adventure to adventure, and the larger picture of heroes in an ancient and marvellous world that isn't going to save itself, what is there for a 4E DM to do? Nothing! No wonder people hated this edition!
+WeAreAllGeeksHere
I think you're confusing being a good DM with being a DM.
To me, 4E is the system with half a page in the DMG saying "this should be a magical world full of wonder" against a couple of hundred pages giving detailed instructions on how to build a cardboard paint-by-numbers world.
It's the system where every character class has pages and pages of powers to choose from as they gain levels, but no Wish spell.
It's the system where a routine level-appropriate combat encounter reliably takes an hour or more.
Where trying to negotiate is reduced to a series of die rolls rather than something role-played.
Of course a good DM can bring the world to life, but that's true in any system, and happens largely independently of the system - or even in spite of it - not because of it...
I found a lot of useful material in the 4E DMG about how to be a good DM. Chapters 1, 2, 8 and 9 were dedicated entirely to that, and no other edition does it so well. DMG2 expanded on this with lots of indie-rpg inspired material about shared storytelling, vignettes, dream sequences, what it means to succeed or fail, and so on. The combat stuff takes longer to lay out in rulebook format, but that doesn't make it more of a priority at the game table.
If some people played 4E as a combat-centric game, that was their choice. We played it as a roleplaying game, and the combat scenes were more cinematic, exciting and challenging than in any other edition. Terrain mattered. Teamwork mattered. It wasn't just "stand back and wait for the spellcasters to do everything" as it had been in every other edition, both in and out of combat.
The main difference between 4E and other editions was that the combat in other editions was so intolerably boring that it forced everyone to be much more inventive if they didn't want their games to be completely dull. You could play 4E strictly as a combat game if you wanted, and it would be a decent miniatures skirmish game, if nothing else. Or if you wanted, you could add in all the rest, and get the best of all possible worlds: a rich and rewarding storytelling game with tough, exciting combat, where every party member mattered.
Take for example the idea of a die roll to determine the success of negotiations. This has been a thing ever since 3E, and rightfully so. Not every player has the confidence and skill to make an inspiring speech off the cuff IRL. But every D&D player should have the chance to play a character who has that ability, if that's what they want to play. So the die roll determines success or failure, and then different kinds of players will proceed as appropriate. Those who are comfortable with it will proceed to speak as their character, deftly adding elements to their speech that will make it clear why their character succeeded or failed. Players who are less comfortable doing so will instead describe the speech they attempted to make, perhaps with help from their fellow players, until the group has a clear enough idea in their minds of what they were going for, how it was received by listeners, and why.
If that is "reducing roleplaying to a die roll," then I guess that's what my table does. The stories we devise are rich, engrossing and unforgettable to us, but what the fuck do we know, right?
I will readily admit that "skill challenges" were garbage though. We tried to make them work and we just couldn't do it. An interesting idea, but fundamentally flawed. We dropped them in favour of a more freeform indie RPG style approach to noncombat challenges, and we used skill checks when it was uncertain whether or not a character would succeed at a particular task they were attempting.
I can tell you some forum posters also criticized 3e (when it was new) as "too video gamey". Maybe it was because in 3e you could roll dice or take feats to do things that older players were instead used to roleplaying, or that there were combat ability trees, or even the paradigm that the DM must follow certain mathematical formulae when creating new content to ensure “game balance” (see 3:45). Anyway, I can agree with some of these critiques while also resenting "video game" being be used as an insult; I got into D&D because of Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda.
When WotC moved towards 4th edition they did everything possible to alienate their existing user base.
The way they mishandled the end of 3.5e both towards their players as well as the whole ecosystem of small companies supporting the hobby, made that people disliked 4e before any of the books would hit the shelves.
I remember Gleemax, the Digital Initiative, how they treated Paizo, Dungeon and Dragon magazines, Code Monkey Publishing and many, many more. It was vile.
As someone who started playing D&D in the '80s, this video made 4e sound less aberrant and atypical than 3e, since it grew out of wargaming and explicitly involved the use of miniatures, terrain, and battlemaps/grids. Theater of the mind was for the interaction with NPC's and RP in civilized areas, whereas combat involved the things 4e brought to the table. I realize this comment is narrow and simplistic, but this stood out to me during the video so I thought I'd share the thought.
Something I find interesting is that, with the rise of Virtual Tabletops like Roll20 etc. You're actually seeing more of this sort of mentality. Theater of the Mind is usually reserved for NPC interaction but once combat hits, bam, you're transported over to a battlemap that the DM has (hopefully) spent some time working on (or at least gotten decent assets to use) and because there is a grid there that is 5ft square it works more like a wargame with the ability to go "well, what if I run off this wall and try to drop kick that Goblin in the face?" and not be met with "we're trying to play Warhammer Age of Sigmar, the rules don't allow that Jerry" and more, "eh...make a skill check for me to see if you pull it off..."
@@luketfer True enough. D&D started with Chainmail, and was zoomed in from third person/army perspective to fist person/character perspective. Thus was born the tabletop rpg. So the battle terrain and minis are there from the beginning. Apparently the people who launch these complaints don't know the history of the game. It's ridiculous.
@@dougpridgen9682 I also think that battlemaps and tokens/minis help people understand the combat better IMO and decreases the workload on the DM, pure theater of the mind combat means he has to basically keep the map, all the bad guy positions, all the player positions in his head which can be kinda hard to keep track of.
By contrast having even a just a basic battle map with tokens slapped down and the terrain drawn on makes life so much easier for both players and DMs.
I played AD&D (aka 2nd edition) on collage and it never occurred to any of us to use miniatures. I think if it had been expected, we'd never have gotten into it because we were poor in collage.
The main complaints our group had about the game were
A - Removal of non-combat-relevant skills from the rules, like professions and crafts. Sometimes it actually could be important to know exactly how good your carpentry or smithing work is, and we had to house rules all of that stuff.
B - There was no difference in the complexity of the classes. In 3.5 there was a distinct hierarchy of complexity in the classes, noobs usually got started on a simple class like a fighter, and you could gradually ramp up one character at a time until you could handle a core spellcaster or a prestige class. In 4e there is no such thing as "a simple class" and that made the learning curve for some of our inexperienced players very steep.
C - The necessity of having a deck of cards in hand for every class. It just added one more thing to keep track of at the table, and that's something nobody needs.
The best thing in 4e in my opinion was the tacked-on, half-baked ritual magic system that made almost any noncombat magical effect accessible by nearly any character. It's the lack of magic's out-of-combat versatility that really hamstrings lower-magic classes.
I loved 4e. With a fistful of house rules (mostly from 5e) still do. What grated on me was the high-handed, "This is what you're getting and you WILL like it," approach Wizards seemed to have.
Objectively, 4E as a game isn't that bad. My biggest problem were the core books were terribly written and leading to some ambiguity with the rules. I eventually picked up the Rules Compendium which basically combined the rules sections from the PHB and the DMG into one $20 paper back. The writing was much better and the rules were clear. If Wizards had written the other books the same way I wouldn't have hated 4E as much.
As a guy who runs several 4e games I completely agree with the ambiguity issue.
The majority of abilities and actions are simple and easy to understand.
There are a few outliers though, that were written so ambiguously that you have to google them.
Commander's strike, the at-will ability from the warlord is a good example.
Agreed. They needed more play testing, if anything to clarify the rule set.
@@trevorhanson6295 little late now. Its been out for friggin years. The majority of the answers are on the internet. If not, i make my own.
4e is a really fun tactical game, and it introduced a lot of great ideas that ultimately benefited 5e, like short rests and healing surges (now hit dice), simpler enemy statblocks and enemy creation, death saving throws instead of negative hit points, resources for off-the-cuff decisions (like appropriate damage amounts by level), etc.
Where it failed in my eyes were (a) you pretty much HAD to have miniatures and grids, even for small fights; (b) you had to craft battle areas, which took back a lot of the reduced prep time that simpler stat blocks had given; (c) battles took longer; (d) D&D Essentials (aka 4.5) felt like a slap in the face after their promise not to do that again; and (e) it was completely inappropriate for low-powered campaigns.
There was also the matter with feats and character options proliferating out of control, but (i) some people really like that, and more power to them; and (ii) it didn't seem to affect it as badly as as it did Pathfinder, where any attempt to reduce the rules' complexity invalidated some feat or class/race feature. To my mind, feats were a great idea in 3e but by late 3.5 and on had turned into thousands of tiny pinpricks through the rules, and I'm glad they're both optional and more restrained in 5e.
Also 3.5 / Pathfinder was a very very good edition of the game. It was over complicated yes, but the fan base loved that, and if you took the time you had a huge away of options as to how to biuld your character.
It's difficult moving on from that.
Ironically "6th" edition is literally just 4e remastered
I think something more akin to D&D 5.5 would be the next iteration. They could easily fix the problems with 5th edition and tweak the action economy. Mike Mearls has stated multiple times that he does not like bonus actions and would tweak the system so as to remove them.
Edit: To further clarify, you would be removing the bonus action and moving the things that used them to become a part of an action. It is not the things that use bonus actions that seems unnecessary but rather the bonus action itself. This would not screw over any classes because they're not losing anything. It's just getting condensed instead of having a bonus action that some classes may or may not use.
yeah and screwing the paladin over majorly.
That sounds awful
I was thinking that a 5.5 release should be made before a major new release like 6. It would just tidy up the existing rules in a way that would be compatible with all the existing modules, maybe with a little conversion that you can do in your head so nothing too complicated.
BlackLotus30 for the most part as long as the paladin has the spell slot and can choose to smite on a success, why even make it a bonus action to initiate the smite? I usually allow it as long as they have the slot.
Because a lot of the Paladin spells need bonus actions to activate. Especially spells that does damage like the "smite spells" searing, banishing etc....
In 3e, those with magic trumped those without
4e levelled the playing field by making the arcane, divine, and martial act the same.
Without units to weigh power, the only way to balance is by symmetry.
I really don't think it was "holding on to nostalgia" and "people do not like change". I think that a lot of people would be willing to accept 4e as a system, it is just that to *a lot* of players, 4e simply wasn't D&D. It didn't play like D&D, it didn't feel like D&D, the focus was different from D&D, etc., etc., etc. Of course, a lot of this can be attributed to people thinking about what D&D is in a certain way, but I don't think that can be called "nostalgia" per se, but rather the issue is that something that was established and had an established appeal was dismissed in favor of something fundamentally *different*.
It is much like you liking croissants, and then someone is trying to sell you a donut, but they're still calling it a croissant. And sure, donuts can be good too, but *they're not croissants*, and you happen to really like a good croissant. Similarly, I'm not a huge fan of 5e, but at least it is, in a manner of speaking, a croissant. 4e simply wasn't.
And this is the first time I use an analogy in which I hate donuts, which just feels wrong, but I think it gets the point across.
The people that started with 4e seem to complain about it the least. The people who have a past experience with how D&D should be seem to hate on 4e the most. So I 100% think that nostalgia for the older system conflicted with trying to learn and accept a new system. Having a preconceived notion of how a product should feel or be stops an individual from accepting change. I think it's the same reason people are upset with the new Thundercats Cartoon, it isn't how it used to be so it must be bad.
I see your point though and I enjoy your croissant metaphor :)
@Jorpdan As a gamer whose demographics were aimed at with the creation of 4th Ed, I'd like to chime in. I cut my teeth on 2nd Ed when I was 13 in 1997, and went on to 3.0 and 3.5 later on. I tried playing 4th ed, but it wasn't nostalgia that drew me away from 4th Ed, it was just a conglomeration of issues that the game had. It lacked a lot of things that made roleplaying enjoyable in 3rd/3.5 Ed. As one poster and you in your video pointed out in several places, it was hard to figure out how to build things in the system like new races, items, even monsters, it had much more of an MMO feel to the game, and it really lacked in the true way a tabletop RPG game felt. I hate to say it, but if I were going to play an MMO-style game, I'd just boot up my computer and play WoW or SWTOR or something like that, more or less a mind-numbing bit of enjoyment that I just play to see how far I can get before I grew bored.
I haven't played 5th Ed yet, but that's mostly because of money/time constraints/no one in my current gaming group having the books. I'm not sure I want to play it either, since I migrated away from D&D and went over to Pathfinder. For me, I could easily go back to AD&D and still enjoy the same game since the same feel's there as from D&D 1st Ed and 3rd/3.5. It just didn't feel like the same game with 4th Ed.
I really don't get where people get the MMO feel from 4e. I am an MMO gamer and a 4e player, and they're wildly different. Like, at this point, it's not just disagreement, I genuinely cannot see how it feels that way, other than the fact the powers are in cards instead of text boxes
It did feel like dnd, and played like dnd
@@bonnecherie that's more so you're own fault. I role played the most in 4e.
You uh... You left out the murder suicide that completely tanked 4e's online applications, which were meant to be something like 50% of the editions content. The edition was designed to depend heavily on it, and losing it pretty much put it to screeching halt. 4e was the only edition where we had at least a year long gap between it last published material and the first published material of the next edition, and it was due to that.
I’ve been playing D&D for years and 4E is a great game!
3.5 had many MANY books. It wasn't just the 3 core ones. Whoever said this started in 4th is sorely mistaken
True, but you could play with just the basic 3. The additional ones I don't think added much, except for the FR campaign setting books. I was just mad they half-assed Dragonlance, compared to FR.
I got away from RPGs when they started doing the "Now buy the revised version and now buy the new system and now buy the..."
BAH
That and work
4th was also the first time they tried tinkering with the OGL and monetizing third party creators. This is when Pathfinder rose and actually surpassed DnD...
Rewriting the lore and systems made converting old systems difficult, essentially negating your collection and forcing all the new books to play what were once core.
I began playing AD&D just as 2e released. The story was fun but the system always felt punishing. 3e fixed that, and made you awesome, and allowed a breadth of tasks to be completed in interesting ways using equipment, skills, spells, magic items. Then 4e came out, and it said you can do these few things in this incredibly stringent way, sometimes only once a day. It was a shock. To go from fully booked out 3/3.5 to a brand new system with no splat books and a return to a kind of hostile mechanics system of course bothered people. As they game went on, and probably mostly when essentials started, enough new content and mechanics and changes to those core classes addressed the stringent system question by giving a lot more options to work with within those limitations. It actually became more enjoyable as it aged, and now I run 13th Age, which is a 3rd party F20 made by the 3e and 4e design leads, and makes even better use of some 4e mechanics and ideas.
If someone thinks D&D 4E was less focused in storytelling…then your DM sucks or you are playing it wrong. What about an RPG’s rules makes a difference in your acting sitting around a table? Some of our group’s best storytelling and roleplaying were in 4E.
3.5! 3.5! 3.5! We did use miniatures. Just a large laminated grid paper from the back of the DMG/PHB. I don't remember which one it was in.
4e did help the DM do a lot more with creating a personalized world, though. 5e murdered some of the most interesting aspects of the 4e world and somewhat forces Forgotten Realms lore into everyone's universe. You have to do a lot more "work" explaining that the books aren't the same as the world you want to build, basically.
Well, I started playing D&D 3.5 maybe 2 years before 4e came out. I remember wanting to at least give it a try until I found out my favorite class Monk was missing from the first released players handbook. I still thought I would give it a try later, but I would wait until a bit later, and just continue playing 3.5 for a while longer, I was a poor college student anyway and couldn't afford getting new books. Then I remember all of the 3.5 material gone from every place that I bought it, I felt like I was being forced to play 4e or nothing. And then when I was introduced to Pathfinder, thats when I decided I was never giving 4e the chance. Can't say I regretted my decision either. I love 5e tho.
4e was not a bad game. The powers system made it the most well balanced D&D ever made. However, it just didn't feel like D&D. As you said the classes all worked the same.
One thing that's important to include: they actually planned to release an online version of 4e. However, they tried to make it look like a MMO but work like Roll20. I don't think they ever got the software to work successfully... or maybe the community just wasn't ready for it.
Which is ironic considering the popularity of Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, Twitch and UA-cam gaming nowadays.
Big agree
I was always hoping they'd release 4e as a PC game, Just feels right and would be a ton of fun
they actually kind of did and it is called neverwinter online.
4e as a co-op PC game dungeon crawler is about the only way I could see 4e being genuinely *good*. It's a pity they didn't do that. Hell, they should've done that from the start, and moved 3.5 on ahead to 3.75 in regards to the PnP.
I'm not entirely sure, but this digital 4e had a lot of problems during development, and when it got ready to release it was too late.
I am really curious about this edition and would love to play it one day. It's a bit weird that there isn't a video game based on the 4E ruleset though. As it was maligned as most video game-y of the editions thus far.
Of all of WotC editions, 4e was by far the worst and farthest you could be from playing D&D. You hit the nail on the head. They tried to make an online MMO style tabletop RPG out of D&D and it failed hard. Now in 5e they have tried to make a medieval superhero game and while it has succeeded, that has more to do with it not being 4e and the success of online D&D streamers than the game itself.
None of the WotC editions have been an improvement on D&D or AD&D. They have been grossly inferior products, but WotC will never acknowledge that, or really ever go back to the old style of play, which is why so many old style game systems have popped up to fill the gap that WotC refuses to see.
Every single negative that people present about 4E seems more like a positive. Balanced characters? Seems good. Tactical gameplay, seems like a better system for combat. Gameified, no one is forcing you to focus the game around combat. Convoluted lore, it’s a game for the imagination, a good reason to write your own lore.
i think these people are complaining about pre-made dungeons
A lot of comments on here already, but I don't care. I'll tell my story anyway. Read it or skip it.
I played Basic D&D back in the 80s when I was in high school. I played with a pair of brothers, so it was 1 DM and 2 players. We started with 2 characters each and eventually added a couple more. We didn't use minis or a battle map. We used graph paper to map what we encountered as we went along. "Theatre of the mind" (as you called it) was how we handled combat. The focus was on storytelling, exploration, discovery, and interaction. We had combat of course, with some campaigns being heavier than others, but we didn't count every 5-foot square on the graph paper. We had a blast until it was time to graduate high school and go our separate ways.
Fast forward 20 years and I'm itching to play again. It didn't take long to find a group to play with, thanks to something we didn't have in the 80s...."teh interwebz." I was warned ahead of time that the Basic of my teenage years bore little resemblance to this new 4th Edition I would be joining. The description I was given was "It's like comparing a duck with a dinosaur." They were right. Everything was very specific, very cut and dry, and very carefully measured out. The biggest difference I saw was the combat. It was much more cinematic, and the more powerful we became, the longer combats lasted. I mean like, really longer. I genuinely enjoyed the combats, I loved the strategy involved and the way I could build my different characters. Using my Dragonborn Warlord with his reach weapon to pluck a melee enemy off one of my ranged squishy allies and forcefully move him away, without having to disengage from the foe who was right next to me, made me feel tactically brilliant for choosing a "Power" that could do that! But at the same time, it just didn't feel like D&D to me. All those ridiculously high Defenses as you got to higher levels (AC of 35?), with the equally ridiculous high bonuses to hit (+20 to attack?). I thoroughly enjoyed 4E, but with the combats gradually taking over the bulk of the gaming....if they were going to keep the D&D name, I think it should've been a stand-alone game separate from "regular" D&D, and call it "D&D: Tactics." I thought sure it was going to be turned into an online video game.
And now I'm into 5E. Everything feels much more like traditional D&D, only streamlined & simplified. I like that. My only complaint is that while combat is fun, I'd like a little more of the tactics from 4E....not an overwhelming amount, just some.
You didn't talk about how wizards lost their spell books in favor of daily powers or a base fighter couldn't wear plate mail. What about the fact that every single class felt the same with flavor changes. How about the online app that was supposed to launch with the game but never materialized. (sort of what D&D Beyond turned into but much more tied to game play) What about if you wanted to take your party on a plate hopping adventure? Well you couldn't, because they didn't exist anymore. Got a favorite god? Their gone, they never existed. Greyhawk? it gone. Krynn? it gone. Hell all of that I could have gotten behind but having played D&D for close to thirty years at that point, 4E didn't feel like D&D. It broke verisimilitude with everything that came before. 4e could have been a great game if they hadn't called it D&D
therealGibralter I absolutely disagree about all classes feeling the same.
I'm with multieyedmyr. I really don't feel it either. I played 3x from release to about the time of Complete Mage. Then played 4e from around the time of phb2 to the release of essentials. And I still don't feel like the classes play the same. Nor do two members of the same class within the same party feel the same. Invokers and Wizards probably have the most parallel, but that has a lot to do with not dialing in on a strong enough creative direction for Invokers beyond "uhh...Divine Source Wizards??" But beyond that? Warlocks play differently from Rangers, both of which play differently from sorcerers, all of which play differently from rogues.
Now if you run two characters from a similar archetype, with a similar build focus....of COURSE they're going to be similar. A two-weapon fighter will see overlap with the two-weapon ranger or two-weapon barbarian (notwithstanding the dual-wield fighter's somewhat arbitrary restriction that he can't target the same target with multiple attacks, though even that serves a mechanical/role-based purpose; marking). That's not a flaw restricted to 4e, though. That exists in every iteration.
I agree about the online apps. There were supposed to be a suite of tools released with 4e, which only kind-of materialized. The initial character builder was awesome. One sub bought you like 6 licenses, meaning your entire party could use it, you downloaded it, and you were good to go forever. Then they made it online-only. Then they made it a web-tool. The character-visualizer that Shelly Mazzanoble teased us with in her d&d blog never fully materialized. The monster builder came out, but didn't get the continued support it needed, as wizards was desperately struggling with their direction; unsure whether they wanted to cater to the 3.5/pathfinder crowd and go back to the ogl that the lawyers told them cost them a shitload of monies, or continue with 4e as planned. And as a result of that, we got essentials. A kind of in-between half-measure that opened the game up more, made it more new-player friendly, but also removed the buffet-style character building of base 4e and replaced it with a more directive class-path with fewer choices, and hoping that each choice had a more meaningful impact on your character which then paved our way back into 5.
+therealGibralter Never played 4e, I was one that went to Pathfinder so I can't comment on the ruleset, but the uploader specifically mentioned the godawful retconning of Faerun.
Except wizards did keep their spell books, giving them the unique mechanic of, firstly, doubling their repertoire of Encounter and Daily powers, and secondly, letting them choose which powers they had available on a daily basis - something no other class in the game did.
And just because the powers use all the same formula doesn't mean that every class "felt the same". Only if you boil it down to the most basic of basic definitions does the swordmage, who dishes out elemental damage like it's going out of style, teleports and attacks multiple targets at a time, feel like the sword & board style fighter, who cancels enemy attacks, tanks damage and counter-attacks.
And you never went to "planes" before in the Great Wheel, you went to spots of interest amongst the infinity of infinities that each plane consisted of. The World Axis simplified the planar map and focused on filling it with interesting places. I would rather go to Hestavar, where I can engage in dragon-back high speed races through an eternal pissed-off cyclone, have running rooftop duels with the souls of bored duelists and engage in spy-games with devil ambassadors, than I would to go to Arborea, the plane of infinite suburbia full of an infinite array of arrogant elitist self-righteous jerks.
We had different experiences with the planes, I have to say. Between saving an ally who fucked himself with the Deck of Many Things and landed in Pandemonium, having to troll the planes for materials to hurt an Elder Evil (quests from gods for their support pretty much), trying to get a piece of a demon lord so that I could cast a powerful reality sundering spell (and the Abyss tends to be a real "wtf"-fest of environments beyond the 4e elemental mess), a taking of a Githyanki fort, and another character visiting a Mechanus gear to speak with a Guru, I did my share of plane hopping and found them way more interesting than the 4e cosmology's settings. But I like alignment too. I tend to think the games were very much not made for the same people and it was a shame to try and cram one game that could have been marketed better without the D&D license under it, imo.
Dresden Files author Jim Butcher was asked to give a review for the 4th edition. He used two words. "New Coke"
4th edition main world was the *Neather vale* also known as *The World* if my memory serves me right .
The forgotten realms ( Toril ) was not the focus but had a little support .
However Eberron & Dark sun had more support in 4th edition then Forgotten realms .
What happened to 4e D&D? Short answer Pathfinder.
The idea that 4e was trying to appeal to MMO players is a common misconception. They used some gamey terminology, because it's a game and they simply didn't realize that people wanted the sourcebooks to try not to break immersion as much. With different terminology, I feel like it would've been a lot more accepted. It was a lot of fun, and I think 5e would benefit from taking a few more of its features into the game.
3.5e had the greater customization, but 4e had far better balance, allowing me to play as powerful characters without having to be a spellcaster and dealing with pages upon pages of spells to try to sift through. 5e takes some of the best of both (and I do like it best of any edition thus far as a result), but in their rush to placate the older fans, they left behind a little too much of what made 4e great. Hopefully the 5.5 book they're releasing in 2024 will back some of those fun elements.
And yes, they clearly wanted to sell more minis in 4e... but I find "Theater of the Mind" completely unplayable personally, as I can't visualize everything, even when I tried 3.5e, so for me this was irrelevant. One of the people I played 4e with had his own big box of minis and some Tact-tiles, so we didn't need to spend on new ones.
Tactical tokens? I've been working on making my own and someone's just going to sell them and save me time and headache? Wish I knew this a few weeks ago!
Happy to help! And if there's something you'd like that I don't offer yet, let me know.
Consider continuing to make your own. I took to stripping playing cards and making my own tokens for Magic. I prefer them to the point that I even stripped the tokens I did have so they matched.
No offense TT. Didn't realize you were pitching in the comment sections.
None taken. And that's a great idea using playing cards. Another popular thing I've seen is people punching out Magic the Gathering cards to use as homemade tokens.
I would be very interested in these tokens How much and where do we get them again ?
I hate it when people say that 4E wanted to compete with MMOs. This is because "all of a sudden" there were roles like tank, healer, damage dealer and controler. But people forget that these roles were always there. Fighters were always supposed to tank the damage. It's just that in 4E it was explicitly stated AND they got the rule support to properly fulfill that role. Also 3.x also strongly implied that you should use a grid and tokens for combat, but 4E was the system that outright demanded it.
Why 4E is criticised is easily summed up:
- it plays more like a skirmish minature wargame rather than a RPG (the reason, why I love 4E)
- the rules changed too much
- with the new ruleset and it's combat ballance, some people felt that D&D lost it's "creative solutions" aspect
- they changed the lore too much (again something I love in 4E)
It's also because WotC employees said they were designing 4E to compete with MMOs. But what did they know?
I really prefer the 4e cosmology to the great wheel - and I say that as someone who's played since 1980. Never cared for FR, so that whole thing was no skin off my back. I also enjoyed the balance of the system.
There were still some issues with the math: the skill system in particular, and the encounter building math. But that could have been tweaked.
No, the only real deal breaker for me was how long it took to play out a fight.
This is one of the only legit criticisms of 4e that is backed up by evidence and not just an opinion people try and PRETEND is based on objective fact rather than just their own preferences.
I loved 4e's combat engine, but it did objectively draw out fights much longer.
Me and my brother just stay with 3ed. Yes there is a lot of side rules but it also allows you to customize the way your game is played out. We also use some of the items,spells,and monsters from the1st,2nd,4th,and 5th just to keep it interesting.
4e is my favorite because my group loves combat and they just like killing stuff and we loosely use the rules
man that was one hell of a transition to an ad at the end, color me impressed
When D&D went to 4e I went to pathfinder mostly. I cut my teeth on 3e and well 3.5 was much needed. 4e as a balanced combat system was good, but it never felt like D&D. I played lots and lots of different role playing games, from Traveler, Space 1889, Ars Magica, Paranoia, and GURPS and many other systems.
And I think that the biggest thing that failed 4e was it was too focused on combat. Most of the other systems I've played have combat, but combat is a last resort because you are less likely to get injured and more likely to die if things go wrong. You role play to get what you need and to succeed. I think it was the departure for roleplaying support that really hit them hard.
I guess I'm not sure how the rules of the game somehow emphasized combat over roleplaying?
Like, I AGREE that Keep on the Shadowfell certainly did. It's not a very good module, ESPECIALLY as the first one they released. It's focused primarily on combat and skill challenges as a way to teach players how the system has changed but it DOES end up being very combat heavy.
But...The mechanics around roleplaying are largely identical from 4e to 3.x. Other than just...having a more balanced combat system (whether you like that system or not--it IS more balanced) and really needing a grid (I do get why theater of the mind players don't like it) I don't see how the game focuses on any one aspect more than others. Surely that's the GM and the players, not the mechanics, no?
Jonathan Grant
Exactly. I have never received a good answer to the question, "What exactly was it that stopped you from roleplaying in 4e?"
Mostly, it seemed that it was the GM, not the system.
Oh, and D&D's needed a grid since 3e. What people (incorrectly) call "theater of the mind" is playing on an imaginary grid. Really, the only edition that didn't have fairly precise rules governing the imaginary space the characters were operating in was 2e.
my ideas on how to make 4e better (i play 4e, as I don't have the 5e books)
1. fix the HP system. there's just too much HP regen for the amount of battles players would take part in in a day.
-regain half of total Surges at long rest.
-long rest provides no healing, only surges
2. change up the pace of combat.
-borrow something from 5e: multiple attacks/round for melee classes, and have 'points' arcane people can spend to take extra actions (like the 5e sorc). The rules only give one action point per encounter as is... so its not TOO bad...
3. Progression?
-Add one or two small leveling bonuses, eg at lvls 5, 15, maybe 25. Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies do give bonuses, but I feel classes need more diversity.
and a couple other house rules like advantage (roll x2 instead of +2 or +5, etc.)
4e was less accessible than previous editions and having started at 5 editions release, I find that I don't want to go through the 8 books and play with the mildly wonky combat system. That said, I picked up the MMs from a garage sale and the monsters are 10 times cooler in 4e than they are in 5e. I find myself using the 4th edition MM to build more challenging and dynamic enemies and surprising players. 4e might not have been poorly designed for existing D&D players, but the huge number and detail of the books, as well as the changes in lore and abilities, made it less accessible to new players and less appealing to old players overall.
I don't think it was so much a bad idea as a poor implementation.
4e would've made an excellent tactical board game, akin to Descent: Journeys in the Dark 2nd Edition - albeit with a game master instead of an opposing player playing the overlord.
It just wasn't a great *RPG*. The combat system and the balancing was great, however.
@@Luckmann I agree 4e felt more like a board game.
I think the number of books is largely a function of the difference in how long the editions were out. 5e will get there, I imagine.
@@villainvoice5143 don't forget with 4e they were producing a book almost every month and i think it affect the quality of it as well. With 5 e its like 1 every 6 months
I could see that. I don't know what the release schedule looked like, but from what wiki tells me about 5e's release schedule it definitely looks like there's a MUUUUUCH longer timeframe between release, especially for books that players are meant to draw on.
People didn't hate 4E, the Chans did. Plenty of people hated 3X for being a garbagefire, and loved 4E for being a functional tactical game with great balance and accessible rules.
What are you talking about? The chans *always* hated 3.X for being a garbage fire, and the issue with 4E *was* and *is* that it's a "functional tactical game with great balance and accessible rules" rather than an RPG. In many ways, these things are effectively mutually exclusive.
Sorry, but I fail to see how having a functional tactical combat system in an RPG makes it less of an RPG. Can you elaborate? Because last I looked, 4E was the first to even introduce skill challenge rules for roleplaying encounters, while earlier editions didn't even have rules for those at all and were essentially just combat/magic systems with a tacked on sticker saying "oh yes, and if you want, you can also roleplay while hacking your way through dungeons."
It's simple, and if you played AD&D-AD&D 2cd edition you'd understand, the emphasis is on role playing and less on combat. 3 and up are all about the combat. In the original games you didn't need figures or a map, in 3,3.5, 4, and 5 they are really needed. Why? Because combat is basically based on maps and figures, the games were made for it. Not the original games. The original games required your imagination and not just playing advanced chess. Combat was much quicker and required more thinking and less depending on the rules. The rules in the 3-5 actually limit your character. Instead of saying, when that orc runs pass me I'm going to attack, now it's "I get an automatic attack of opportunity because the orc is running by me.". The game tells you what you can do, instead of thinking about it and making a choice depending on what is going on.
4th edition was not at all a bad game. It did add a lot of new interesting things to D&D, but it was less like D&D and more like tabletop XCOM. :D
Great video. I was semi retired from RPGs during the 4e era. When the gut of terrible 3.0 products and the 3.5 update caused me to basically be done with D&D. When Pathfinder came out I bought that mostly because 3.x products were relatively cheap. I mostly ignored 4e, but bought a used PHB. The changes made it not feel like D&D to me. If it was titled any other game I think it would have done well. Thankfully 5E is a good blend of all the editions and feels like D&D.
This was really reminiscent of the problem Star wars fans had with the prequels. I can find the video if anyone's interested. Nostalgia is a powerful thing.
"4th edition felt more like a table top MMO, focused on combat, tactics and gearing up. less on story."
4th edition WAS a table top MMO. Combat was based on miniatures, tactics were based on "flanking" having characters on opposite sides of your target plus the (I think is was called the)Minion mechanic. where a monster had just one hit point but could only be killed by direct attacks. Then there was the gear. the Players Hand book had 50+ pages of magic items based around level. 4th edition was built on the premise that a player at a certain level would have a particular amount and power of magic items.
Plus there is the MMO Neverwinter. Neverwinter uses 4th editions' exact mechanics. At will powers that can be used any time, "Encounter" powers that, while in 4th ed you got to use once per encounter, recharge on a timer and "Daily" powers that get used when you charge them up, usually through combat.
4th edition wasn't a bad RPG, it just wasn't what players wanted. Players wanted 3.75, which is why a lot of people started playing Pathfinder. 4th edition just changed too much too quickly
I agree that players wanted 3.75. Book of 9 Swords and Complete Mage were, to the best of my memory, well-received books that did a lot for players who felt like they wanted their character to be more reflective of the archetype they were trying for. Moving all the classes to that system and enhancing it while trying to fix the combat (CR was a running joke)...it was probably more than people were ready to take at one time.
However, I would complicate the mmo analogy, as someone who played Neverwinter because I really really wanted a 4e Mmo.
It's really not. With Neverwinter, you don't have the really great novas and players teeing each other up that I like about 4e. You don't see things like setting up a wall of fire, then the fighter and rogue bouncing a monster back and forth through it over and over with forced movement. You don't have the invoker or wizard doing a self-nova to ping some monster with a DOT that they can never save against. It's fast, it's actioney, and it has the power names. But it's not a great representative of 4e in videogame form. A better representation of that would be a game like Final Fantasy Tactics. Still not a perfect parallel, but I think it comes across as a more fertile ground for how 4e could be envisioned as a game.
To be fair, basing character progression that way was done intentionally to fix the class scaling problem that has been plaguing the game since OD&D.
And it worked.
But it wasn't fun. That was the main problem. Mages went from bursting 5 fireballs in a fight to 1 fireball per encounter, while fighters stayed pretty much the same with 'use sword on monster' just a few fancy techniques got added. 'balance' happened, yes. Everything was balanced so precisely that you weren't creating a character, just picking an attack type. Spell casters got nerfed back to the stone age while melee classes went from bronze to iron and, somehow, every one was EXACTLY THE SAME AS EACH OTHER. That's not balance, not a balance I want anyway. Where's the fun in meeting your clone on every street corner?
I mean...I disagree?
Which is fine, of course. We're ultimately talking about a pretty subjective point. But I would argue that while classes mechanically played the same in 4e, the roles they took and the things their powers DID were very different. The RULES were all unified but not the ROLES.
A Controller (Psion or Wizard, for instance) may mechanically have At Will, Encounter and Daily powers the same as a Defender (Fighter or Paladin). But what those powers DO and how they effect the combat are all pretty different--even within the 4e roles as later levels added more unique flavor within the individual classes within the role archetype.
As for the nerfing...Wizards and some other casters certainly got a nerf. But they still possess some of the best AOE and debuff powers in the game. And it differentiates them from some other classes.
You argue that the RULES are identical but the ROLES are different. I would say that we're arguing the same point, just from different directions. I agree with you that the mechanics worked the same, just the powers differed. You may recall my comment about players just "Picking an attack type". My meaning was more of trying to say that, with every ones mechanics being the same within a group, even though every one was different, you just got more of the same!
Yeah, I'm trying to properly structure my thoughts here.
I think it comes back to HOW every one does things. 4th ed tried so hard to make the power levels equal, and it succeeded. But, I think, the problem was we didn't want equality so much as equivalency. (Or the other way round.) We had powerful Mages busting spells out like crazy, but the fighter had no equivalent Nova Powers. Even with a high level fighter you were still just hitting things with funny shaped bits of metal. In 4th the fighter got AOE attacks, every one did, some were better than others. You just selected the range and damage type, THAT was the difference between classes. The range at which you attacked and the kind of damage you did!
people don't actually "hate change" only when something is truly awful.
the way i see it is that people embrace change if it feels like a natural progression.
For all the hate that the 4e Spellplague got, it did help set up a lot of conflicts that can be explored in 5e after the Second Sundering.
4e was a tactical miniature game, but it wasn't an rpg
In what way? What mechanic did 3.x have that made roleplaying somehow easier or more rewarding than 4e?
Like...obviously you're allowed to like whatever edition you prefer. But I just never understand this argument. If the players and the GM want to roleplay all the same tools are there. Is it just that Keep on the Shadowfell is bad and railroady and it gave players the idea that all of their games needed to be that way?
You can roleplay when playing Monopoly. That doesn't make it an RPG.
Okay...but that still leaves my question.
What mechanic was it that was present in 3.x but missing or changed in 4e that made 4e less of an RPG?
Like, the new Pathfinder 2 playtest is probably closer to 4e than 5e. Is that less of an RPG for it?
Like I said before--I have no problem with someone liking 3.x more than 4e. I just don't understand the mechanical basis for the common "not an RPG" or "can't roleplay" arguments when those systems seem largely unchanged or even expanded IN THE ROLEPLAYING DIRECTION (through the Skill Challenges mechanic).
I have never played 4e and haven’t looked into the system, but I really like the idea of putting all the classes on the same level balance-wise.
I’d love to play it some day.
4E was great, granted it had issues. My friends and I played for 10+ hour long sessions
10 hour long sessions? What did you do with the last hour after combat was over?
@@MDMDMDMDMDMDMDMDMD what are you talking about? We had multiple combat sections per session and several investigation or simple roleplaying moments.
8:26 I don't think that's quite accurate - you are correct that 4th edition is actually quite a good game, but it's NOT what a lot of people thought of when they thought of Dungeons and Dragons.
As you said it was more a tactical miniatures game, and honestly a lot of people who are into those games tend to play things like 40k, Infinity etc, where as the RPGers liked the rpg aspect of DnD a lot more.
When you couple that with the changes to the Lore AND the profiteering of requiring multiple books the edition was always going to have problems.
But yeah, as a game it's surprsingly good. In particular the 'at will, Encounter, and daily' powers were a really really cool way of playing the game.
I was put off 4E because of the lore. A big reason for that is... I have never tabletopped. I read the novels in the 90s, I played Baldur's Gate in the early 2000s, I bought 3E and 3.5E manuals, and I hung out in fanfic forums (for BG). When I wandered off into other fanfic fandoms I kinda missed the change to 4E and when I did start looking into it... well all the dead gods and rewriting certain races I'd taken a liking to annoyed me, so I decided to put all my love of fantasy into LotR and then Dragon Age.
It was a side effect of fanfic that drew me to look at wiki pages again and find out things were... improving, at least on some fronts, but it wasn't until recently when I started to stumble across D&D UA-camrs that I really started to understand the changes brought in by 5E. More lore was fixed than I expected and I found other issues clarified to a point where my enmity was soothed away.
I now have a collection of six 5E manuals - two larger than my modest 3E collection! - and I go through them using them as partial inspiration for my own world.
I'm sure there are people who liked 4E, but as an old hand who saw 3E and liked it's lore, I am glad for the restitution 5E gave.
4e was my introduction, not because I was super into video games or whatever, but that just happened to be what was in stores when I got interested in middle school. We had a ton fun RPing, and skill checks did make for some good social encounters as well. Dragonborn, Tieflings, warlocks, and maybe even the paragon and epic paths are all fantastic additions to the game, though the power usage was a bit of a downer and made play too repetitive with people just using their powers in decreasing order. To often Fights had no RP, and rather the player just said I use this power. When I tried getting them to RP they would read the fluff text under the power. I'm in 5e and currently struggling running with a group of newbie players who tend to only swing their weapons at enemies, even the bard only rarely uses her spells or inspiration. But when they fight they say things like "I aim my axe at the Dwarf's neck, hoping to at least get the beard!" I'm never going back.
My biggest problem with 4e was how split the characters' aspects were. You very much had a combat character and then a Doing Everything Else character. Didn't like the lack of skill points. Didn't like the WoW feel to the powers. Didn't like the lack of build diversity. As you pointed out, it had boiled DnD down to a tactical combat game.
Regarding the idea presented at 1:40 - Wizards of the Cost should have *known* that this was the bad idea that helped caused TSR to implode. "Picture it this way," Slavicsek says, "it's raining money outside and you want to catch as much of it as you can. You can either make a really big bucket or waste your time and attention by creating a lot really small buckets -- either way, you're never going to make more rain." ( pc.gamespy.com/articles/539/539628p2.html ) Heck, TSR had tried with with AD&D 2 with the Complete (whatever) series and _that_ went over like a lead ballon. Why WotC thought it could make an idea that had failed twice before work is beyond me.