I found D&D 4e's goofy promo videos
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- Опубліковано 15 чер 2024
- D&D produced a series of online promos for the launch of D&D 4e, and some of them aged... like internet videos from 2008. ▶️ More below! ⏬
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00:00 these vids don't help dnd 4e's reputation
01:34 the only helpful dnd 4e video
04:13 wotc making fun of older editions
06:49 great dm tool for every edition! (sponsor)
07:42 ahh flash animation :)
09:54 wotc making fun of FANS!
12:09 this vid should've stayed in 2009
14:45 and this one was ahead of its time!
#dnd #dungeonsanddragons #dnd4e - Ігри
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The gnome quote about saying "I'm a monster" and "I have a lair" is still something my wife and I will say to each other. It's been a running gag in our marriage.
Haha that's awesome! I had no idea these had such an impact
Yeah, I remember it being a meme for a while. Hilarious, still.
I thought these were fan videos, though. They are just so gonzo...
I also find it kinda funny that in Critical Role C1, Grog keeps encouraging Pike - a gnome cleric - to say "I'm a monster".
@@Srioll totally a refrance to those videos.
Completely unlocked a memory that I had lost to time. What a weird time that was.
The reason the 4e VTT never came out is because the developer/programmer was one guy. And then he tragically killed himself and his entire family before it was done. It was really hard for them to come back from that and it basically never fully came out as a result.
Yeah fucking horrible :/ I wonder what d&d would look like if this hadn’t happened
Came to the comments to say this. May have been a good coder, but guy stalked his [ex-]wife before committing murder-suicide. A *lot* of failures there, of cops, courts, and management, but at the very least, it's a classic "single point of failure" project mgmt f*ckup.
In the WotC parking lot, no less
WHAT. JFC
Joseph and Melissa Batten. Both were video game devs for Microsoft, and Joseph moved to WotC. After being threatened at gunpoint from an affair, Melissa moved out, filed a restraining order after Joseph broke into the Microsoft campus. Just 8 days after the restraining order came into effect, he shot her multiple times in her apartment’s parking lot as she left to work, then shot himself. Investigators believe his plan was more elaborate after they found “fuzzy handcuffs, hardcore pornography, an 8-inch cutting knife, plus $6,000 in cash in the trunk of Joseph's car”, possibly abduction. The worst part is that Melissa basically did “everything right” and was starting to get her life back on track.
The complaints about 4e werent really about complexity but about the "gamey-ness" of it. Everything is based around combat and it is extremely tactical. People have compared it to MMOs at the time like WoW.
Yeah I misspoke there. I've heard about it being "like a video game" way more than being "complicated." I think those ideas have conflated over time
Those same comments are made about 5e, too.
@@BobWorldBuilder No problem! I actually really like 4e, but combat is admittedly very slow, especially at the later levels. Regardless, I highly recommend to try it to at least expand one's TTRPG experiences. Some may disagree, but ironically I think that Pathfinder 2e took quite a few pages out of 4e regarding how they run combat and view character features, though PF2e is balanced much better. If you've ever tried PF2e, that may give you a slightly better idea as to how 4e plays.
@@BobWorldBuilder4e combats were insanely long. Maybe that's why you thought it was complicated?
The "complexity" complaint may also have come from all the new rules one had to learn for 4e. (As opposed to the reams of rules one could only look up in 3e.) Powers were a radical departure from any previous mechanic, and new rules are always branded as complicated until one learns them. Which is why I get stuck playing the same games over and over: "A new game? Sounds complicated."
Because it was 2008 and web comedy was still in its infancy. They were trying to do what all corporations do and hang on to a trend from three or four years earlier, and then failed to do so.
I still love the gnome monster quote, though. It's lovely.
Whoever told you 4E was more complicated than 3X and had more floating +1s lied.
As someone who wrote Living Greyhawk modules (WotC's 3.x RPGA campaign), I can tell you that statement is 110% distracting bullshit, but also kinda right.
You were *supposed* to have ridiculous bonuses in 3.x , so much so that there were tables of 'expected bonus/equipment gold value/etc." but 3.x didn't TELL YOU what they were, and also hid a bunch in penalties.
4e's greatest sin to a lot of the Timmy types (Magic: the Gathering player type, WotC marketing specifically adopted them and used them in the construction of 3.0) was that 4e just put the numbers out there and also said "this is what we expect you to have at x level if you're bad/OK/good at this"
There is no way 4e is more complicated then 3e. I have always said if you wanna play a "super hero", high fantasy type of game there is no system better then 4e
4e was a breath of fresh air after how heavy 3.x got with looking up 5 rules across 3 books for a simple task. 5e also has refreshing simplicity, but it has a lot of baggage from the editions prior to 4.
I absolutely enjoyed it for exactly this. Imo the fact that 4e was marketed as "d&d" was it's worst trait. The fans expecting one thing and getting another. It's the other side of the coin from my original 2e experience and I loved it.
3e started simple -- a single mechanic for everything? radical! -- but then the game designers just piled in rules upon rules to try to cover every situation. 4e established its explicitly game-like reality and stuck with it.
4e is a system designed to re-enact fight scenes from Berserk and I think it's beautiful.
@@WouldbeSageYeah, the previous edition baggage was what people apparently wanted sadly. I think 5e took things too simple, and now has the issue of every new thing they make becoming more complex and unbalanced, making the 3.5e bloat effect come through again. 4e's new stuff tended to be balanced better because everything followed the same structure, so it really came down to playstyle more than "must pick" subclasses/classes etc.
I learned to play 4th edition when I was 9 years old. It was very simple for me and my friends to understand, especially with things like standard array being default and no spell preperation stuff. We never played with minis, but it felt more tactical than d&d has ever felt since. It was simultaneously simple and easy to follow while also having tactical wargame-y combat. We loved it!
Unrelated but you have one of the best pfps i've ever seen.
When I was first introduced to 4e, I found it 'complicated'. But after sinking my teeth into the system, realised it was because it so different from the previous iterations of D&D. The system is ten times simpler than Pathfinder. It can be played without minis with a bit of description from the DM, but it plays like a dream on the grid mat. It really brings out tactical teamwork. But that does not mean it's not a roleplaying game. Indeed our DM had us running around a city trying to solve an intrigue - lots of Skill Checks - and putting clues together required. It's just that when it came to the encounters, the tactical depth was par excellence.
You had a great DM, that is exactly how 4e was intended to be played. It's a shame that more people didn't have a good DM, a lot of hate comes from DMs that though they could just run it and not ready anything because they've run 3e before.
I love the gnome and tiefling animation. So much fun.
If all the promo videos were like "Tiefling & Gnome," 4E would have been MUCH better-received.
That one was the most popular by far according to the YT views!
@@katherineberger6329 They were hilarious, and yet people complained! Nowadays I guess they'd call it "cringe". IIRC some folks complained about the jokey tone, as though D&D has never been tongue-in-cheek. Others were still mad about the idea that playable races & classes were being split across multiple Players' Handbooks, over 3yrs. I still think that was one of the few valid complaints about the edition rollout.
@@mandisawTo be fair, 5e's pretty much done the same (over a much longer period of time), but also never really came up with new classes, only subclasses.
@@Mercadian I didn't follow the 5e rollout as closely, but it seems in trying to avoid the splatbook traps of 2e/3.5e/4e, they've just recreated them in a slightly altered fashion
I actually paid a subscription for that and the dragon magazine it gave you access to all the monsters across all the products released with the ability to scale any creature to whatever level you wanted . You have a 4 th level party and you want to fight an adult black dragon , just select it and click the scale to level 4 option and bam it would produce a monster stat block that would be a “fair” fight . It was way ahead of its time and really helped me as a Dm figure out how to challenge my party.
And you could do mix-ins, with monster templates, or grabbing interesting powers from A and applying them to B, with the Builder sorting out the math. But you could still fiddle with the stats, to give more/less challenge, depending on what you wanted. I used to export to Word, and add some nice flavor descriptions for the monsters & powers - essentially my own box-text.
I really miss my dragon magazine subscription, I looked forward to it every month. I know that there's ton great content out that I can access anytime but the Dragon stuff just seemed more "official."
From now on, all of my gnomes will go around saying "Rawr!" or "I'm a monster! Rawr!"
I definitely remember "requires minis" and "too simple" being common complaints about 4th edition around the time it came out. I would see it constantly on the WotC forums at the time and repeated by people IRL.
The "requires minis" thing was because D&D 4th rules assumed you had a battlemap and the rules were written that way.
The "too simple" thing was because D&D 4th rules absolutely cut away a lot of the fiddly bits from the rules. Like every class having their abilities homogenized into powers (as opposed to features and spells), saving throw bonuses being converted into AC-like values (attack rolls being made in place of a player rolling a save), and being viable at later levels if you stat dump. A lot was streamlined between 3.5 and 4th.
1. 4e is why we have Acquisitions Incorporated. Love 'em or hate 'em or whatever one feels, it was originally a promotional podcast to sell you on 4e and almost every episode was/has been targeted to sell the latest module/adventure.
2. In the process of making 4e, WotC updated a lot of lore and style guides which remain a part of the game to this day - including the current state of the cosmology and "The Great Wheel". Want to know more about that in greater detail than anything 5e ever published? Go read 4e books. There are SO MANY 4e books on the subject.
True-we can thank 4e for the Raven Queen, for example.
1e/2e cleaned up (then complicated) the cosmology and monster ecology, but 4e IMO struck the right balance of "easy to explain to players for combat/exploration", and "deep rabbit hole that DMs can keep expanding at-will". Bob never got to the DDI Monster Builder app, but that made it so smooth to mix-and-match lore to monsters. Want a tribe of zombiefied goblins working under a hobgoblin necromancer? Just add some templates, lift some background info from a Dungeon article, and go to town.
Still the best lore books ever printed. Sadly most of them were made non-canon.
@@gothicshark - I don't know anything about that. I do know that when I watch Live Play and listen to pod casts, DMs reiterate the 4e lore. I have those various books on my shelf and have read through them, often more than once, and recognize it all in the 4e form.
Yeah, I was a bit surprised to find out how much information about the gith for example was from 4e.
Oh man updating our characters with the D&D Insider online subscription and the program auto-generating your powers as cards you could print and then cut out was phenomenal! Also, it was so easy as a gm to go on D&D Insider and find a monster that fit your current scenario and just bumping that monster up or down to the level you needed for the encounter and the program changing its' abilities and hp in mere seconds was amazing. You could really fine tune any monster to the level you needed that quickly.
3.5 was a lot more complicated than 4e IMO, not just because of the rules, but also presentation. That meme about grapple was real though, we actively avoided grappling so we wouldn't have to bust out the flowchart!
4e is the best presented ruleset of all the WotC D&D rules in my opinion. The layout was clearer, it made different assumptions about the reader which made for a much nicer reading experience for a new player, and it used actual gamified language for it's mechanics.
That last part is what you hear a lot of people talking about as being their problem with 4e, that it felt "like a video game" in large part because the language of the game mechanics was more clear and technical, and less of the "natural language" than 5e uses. But the result of that was you could read a rule and understand it because it didn't have a bunch of non-rule text muddying its reading around it.
Most of the homebrew and 3rd party rules that people love in 5e are lifted or adapted from stuff that first showed up in 4e.
Funny to hear about the grappling thing being true! I appreciate this level headed take on 4e.
@@BobWorldBuilder finding the 3.5 flowcharts now is pretty hard, but there are still PF1 versions floating around, which are _simplified_ compared to 3.5 and still make me want to curl up into a ball and cry when I look at them.
Oh, and from what I know about it - 4e is meant to be an excellent game if you're looking specifically for tactical miniature combat between heroic characters and monsters ("rawr") and don't mind an extremely gamey feel.
I also hear good things about its skill-challenge mechanics compared to 5e's equivalent.
The "gamey" aspect of 4e is entirely up to the table. Have seen/played/run everything from every communication has to be in "story" terms, to all in "game" terms, to some mix. It's a bit like cabbage or eggplant - delicious if handled well, but so many people boil all the life from it, that it gets a bad rep.
Some of these advertisements show or are a representation of popular TV programs at the time: reality shows, sit-coms where characters break the 4th wall, as well as early Flash animations and many others.
It was a very common complaint that 4e was over simplified back then. 3e being more complicated was a badge of honor for 3e purists at the time. Who remembers the different names fans had for those who like 4e - 4vengers
Those troll comments in that video were pretty accurate, for the time. Honestly I thought the 3e/4e and eventually PF edition wars were way more nasty than anything today.
The 3e/PF vs 4e edition wars killed many a community forum back then. I'd argue it's why the hobby took such a hard dip down before Stranger Things & Let's Play/Critical Role streams boosted it up. There are still a lot of oldtimers who may play, but they aren't as engaged in the community discourse anymore.
@@mandisaw Completely agree as someone who was a Forever DM at the time but liked to explore new systems. Some 3e/PF players were so dug into and invested in the system (Owning dozens of books, knowing every feat to take to make giant sword wielding fighter, or Minotaur with a Ballista, or a wizard with a Spell Save above 22. ).
It really tore apart and divided a lot of groups in my community.
The edgy early 2000s d&d animation was created by Adam Phillips of Bitey's Castle who was famous for his Brakenwood series of flash animation and the Transdermal Celebration music video for the band Ween. He currently works on the show Bob's Burgers.
4e is definitely simpler than 3.5. There used to be a blog back in the day called something like d&d kids or d&d dad about a guy teaching his 9 year old and 7 year old how to play 4e and how easily they picked it up. I think a lot of the complexity came from it being made for online and tournament/ game store play ( a thing people were asking for back in the day) so it presents itself as a game first, and it's way of expressing those rules in gameist terms really rubs some people the wrong way.
I think 4e was a great system that a lot of people didn't want to give a chance. As far as D&D editions go it's still my favorite. But knowing your preference for rulings based systems ( aka rules lite systems) I don't think you would enjoy it.
I appreciate this take
Yup, exactly this. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with the game. But a combination of angry nerds being angry and people listening to angry nerds completely screwed its chances.
We lost a lot of good game design when wotc threw out the baby with the bathwater.
Agree with every thing you stated
As someone who learned to play with 2nd edition in the early 90’s; Yes, Thac0 was confusing. I could never wrap my head around why I had to roll a higher number in order to hit a lower armor class number.
The character sheets we used always had a Thac0 chart across the bottom, so you rolled your dice, added your bonus, subtracted your penalty, then referred to the chart.
Same, Thac0 was not something I would defend about 2e.
I appreciate your honesty!
It makes more sense when you just accept that armor class is a penalty, not a bonus. Which is why AC0 is the baseline, since it tells you the accuracy of your attacks against an opponent with no penalty. Historically THAC0 came from wargame with ship to ship combat. Larger ships would be less maneuverable and have a higher cross section, which makes them easier to hit. While guns/cannons would just have a given accuracy rating based on the range. In that context armor class as a penalty makes more sense.
But it's still really easy otherwise, since all you do is subtract the AC from your THAC0 and compare that to your roll.
Benefit of THAC0 when you're subtracting AC from your THAC0 is that if you need to make many attacks against a set of creatures with the same armor class, you only need to recalculate your THAC0 once for the creature. So if you have THAC0 15, and the enemy has AC 5, your new THAC0 is 15 - 5 = 10. Now you can toss the D20 half a dozen times and just count the number you get equal or greater than 10.
It actually really annoys me how it is now, since players roll a dice, and add their hit modifiers to the roll. Meaning they have to do way more mental math to give me a "hit number." Might not seem like a big deal, but it does add up across a session and a campaign.
You can still get the "roll to hit" number in the modern system (subtract hit modifier from AC), but I feel unless you're familiar with how THAC0 worked and how it could speed up the game you're unlikely to even stumble upon this hack.
I'll grant that this does require everyone to know the target's AC, which is presumed hidden from players by default these days. If you wanted to hide a creature's AC with THAC0 it would become more confusing. Since you would have to tell the DM both your THAC0 and your roll. But I've always been confused why AC is hidden, I can somewhat understand the dexterity/dodge element. But shouldn't I just be able to tell from the size and armor or hide of a creature how tough it will be?
There was no bonus.
You definitely did not roll, then add a bonus, then subtract a penalty, then check a chart.
THAC0 existed in two forms.
The first one, you rolled a die and checked a chart, no math involved at all.
The second one, you rolled a die and subtracted that die from your THAC0 score. That's the full process.
There was no +2 for this or -1 for that, and there was never a version where you both did math and referenced a chart. AD&D 2E only and always used the second version.
I never found THAC0 hard. It is not intuitive, but most things were not in d&d. THAC0 - AC is your target number. In practice it all went away at the point when you knew you hit on a 12 or better on the die.
I find it easier because you only have to do the calculation once for every monster player interaction than the current because in 5e you are adding d20+mod with every roll instead of just once. Sure, 12+5 is not hard math, but if you are doing x+5 up to 15 times a combat versus 12-2 once it is easier.
I was a D&D Insider subscriber back in the day, and the character generator was fantastic. Having access to the entire repository for 4e was wonderful. The GM Tools were really solid too.
The 4e VTT has a very tragic story as to why it never launched, and I can see why some folks at WotC were perhaps a little hesitant to bring the idea back until very recently.
The monster and character builders were awesome and I was really looking forward to the VTT, but honestly, it's best that they chose not to move forward with it after what happened. If they had just hired a new designer and moved forward it would have felt really gross.
@@cassymarks6646 And yet, here we are, and they're doing it again. I remember seeing the 5.5/6e VTT launch video, and some of the language might as well have been lifted from the 4e one. The cynic in me says they just waited until most of us who remembered were no longer in the hobby, or rather, were no longer the most vocal.
4e deep dive please Bob, the myths Vs the reality of 4e lol ✌🏼
Idk if I'm qualified for that xD
Knights of the Last Call and MCDM do have great in-depth breakdowns of good parts of 4E and why those systems were built the way they are. KotLC doing several in-depth live-stream breakdowns. Listening to Bob talking about 4E, it's pretty obvious he doesn't have much experience with 4E.
@@Bowinja will definitely check out knights of last call thanks ✌🏼
Yeah, it would have to be a conversation/interview, ideally with someone from the old days who played 4e *and* earlier editions. At the time, many of the loudest, angriest anti-4e folks were the ones who came in with 3/3.5e, so that was their "first D&D", and as you've seen, people are very much attached to their initial edition. The ones who'd weathered multiple edition shifts were more chill, whether they liked 4e or not, and were more open to adopt, examine, or ignore without feeling personally attacked.
Draven Swiftbow had the most in-depth edition retrospective series I've come across, and he did 4e in about 2-3 parts. There's also Colville's great take on specifically 4e combat features to pilfer, particularly minions, and monster roles. Skill challenges have been covered better in blogs from that time than in newer videos, IMO. Many YTers today honestly didn't play much 4e (if any), and skill challenges were definitely one of those "you had to play it" things - on paper it doesn't make much sense LOL
I think the part of the video where Bob touches on the monster roles, and says it sounds intriguing and then pulls back highlights a lot of the feelings about 4E. Back-pedaling to say experienced DMs won't need this and isn't this too complicated for new DMs? No, give everyone the explicit tools to make DMing/playing easy was one of the design goals of 4E and they made great strides towards it. Making effects in game explicit, monster stat blocks clear and condensed, most class/race/item abilities expressed as powers. Designing monsters with interesting and memorable powers and assigning them roles was a single layer, giving guidance on interesting mixes and setups of different roles making combat more engaging took it up a level, then talking about how to setup encounters, thematically, environmentally and narratively to make them above the top? Chef's kiss. 4E gives you the tools and advice on how to do all of that.
I think a lot of people didn't get it and to them, 4E was "hard", but I think to most people without pre-conceived notions of DnD, 4E was the easiest to run and prep the game. Needing next to no prep if you had even the basic tools of the time, i.e. the encounter builder.
4e was the edition that made me cross the screen. As a working-adult, the return-on-investment of prep time was amazing. Much of the tedium was removed, and I could focus my limited time on worldbuilding, encounter-crafting, and coming up with ways to make my players go, "That was so cool!! 😍". Even if combat took 2hrs, it was a thrilling adventure unto itself, with narrative drama woven right into the spell-slinging and monster-slaying (or befriending). 4e Encounter Builder was like trapeze with a safety net, allowing you to soar higher and do more complex tricks, since you could be pretty sure you were in the sweet-spot of party-challenge.
I like a lot of systems, but will probably never run any D&D other than 4e.
One of the most useful things I learned from 4e monster design was, that if they don't do anything better than swing a weapon, they better do something else memorable or useful. I always give my monsters spells or quirks about them to make them unique in combat, and if I don't then their tactics, weapons, mannerisms, etc. will be what my players remember from the fight.
@@TheTruthx58Yes, making sure combat doesn't just lock into a line of PCs and monsters rolling dice at each other without movement is huge regardless of edition.
As a 95% DM, almost forever dm I do get to play sometimes, I completely agree with this statement. All the hate for 4e was from people who didn't play. The players I had in 4th edition was a mix of OG 1e players and new players, on of which was 6 at the start.
...I like the gnome, and by accident or design. "I'm a monster, rawr" in the first video, "I'm a monster, rawr" in the second and then "I'm a barbarian, rawr" after getting back into the PHB in his third appearance is actually solid, if barebones, comedy writing. There's something in comedy known as the rule of threes, where you have a joke and a punchline which you play once as itself, twice without really changing it up to establish a pattern, and then alter it on the third time to subvert the audience's established expectations. I'm not sure the joke is really strong enough to do it with (though it did make me laugh all three times - I think it's the child-like delivery of rawr?), but... On paper that's good comedic writing.
I was on the outside looking in at the time but no one on the GURPS forum I was on could figure out what WotC was playing at, with a marketing campaign that was seemingly designed to alienate both the 3.5e audience and potential new audiences, but the 'simplification' they might have been a reference to the complaint that I did see from a lot of 3.5e players (who were moving to PF1e in response to D&D 4e) that the thing they _liked_ about 3.5e was less of a focus on combat and dungeon/hex crawls, and more rules support for activities about town, urban adventures, and the like, compared to TSR versions of the game, while 4e felt like it was going backwards, with even more of a combat focus than any prior edition, rather than giving that aspect of play equal weight within the rules like they were hoping for. (There were also some complaints about 'gamey' feeling terms that had zero context within the fiction from what I recall), but seeing it as you present it certainly puts in perspective the folk going "...Yeah, apparently WotC didn't learn it's lesson from the 4e transition"
I have mentioned in previous videos, that I loved 4E, my Campaign ran for about 7 - 8 years. It resulted in many hilarious moments including complicated relationship entanglements between the characters and also some of the NPCs. The combats did seem to require minis and Battle mats as positioning was particularly tactical, and sure the combat could become incredibly slow, but that just turned into many sessions becoming rp only sessions which in turn really encouraged some amazing RP from my players. My 4E collection is all stored away safely these days but I still have so many fond memories, including the Grell from Hell, which some of my current group still have PTSD when I suggest a Grell encounter. I noticed the Matt Colville is also a fan of 4E so Kudos to him.
I definitely remember a complaint of 4e at the time being that it was "oversimplified" it was often referred to as too video game like as well. Which is really funny that the narrative has flipped to it being too complicated these days. That "gameification" criticism was pretty true and I do think thats where the "requires minis" comes from as well but I liked the more tactics based approach it was definitely more boardgamey. 4e had problems but a lot of really great ideas as well. I liked skill challenges and at-will powers and the way they divided the class fantasies into power sources like martial, divine, primal and roles like leader, controller, striker. It made very interesting design space for things like a martial support/healer which is why people continue to talk about Warlord to this day.
It's probably because combat took forever.
4E was significantly less complicated than 3rd edition, and 5e was even more streamlined. :) I've never had an easier time getting folks to play than with 5e!
D&D insider was great. Mostly because it granted you access to all of the Dungeon and Dragon magazine content. 4E was a wild time but I kinda loved it.
4e was ahead of it's time in a lot of ways I feel it was the natural progression of D&D, not just WotC chasing the trends of MMOs. I think 4e is a great edition it's just very heavy on the gaming/tactics side of TTRPGs. There's still room for RP in 4e it's just not the main focus. I highly encourage you to give it a try Bob.
in 4e you were encouraged to use cards to demonstrate what powers you had and what remained. All the maps were created by using the tile art and they were incredibly bland. The only thing I keep from 4e is the idea of the skill challenge, which worked pretty well! Oh and it was much easier to build encounters that were balanced. As a DM who had to relearn the game, that was also a good thing. But these animations...whoa.
Huh, never heard of the cards at all! It's amazing how much of this was common knowledge, but then it disappeared and no one talks about it anymore. I started playing around 2015, so even though I've been in the D&D hobby for almost a decade, I never heard of much of this stuff!
@@BobWorldBuilderyeah, 3rd parties make similar cards today especially for spells.
The gist is that every class had "at will" "per encounter" and "per long rest" powers. You never attack, ever. You always use one of your powers that have an attack built-in. So a rogue would not attack and add a sneak attack bonus damage die. Instead, the Rogue's at-will sneak-attack power might have a precondition (enemy is flanked or you are hidden), and then just do that.
The cards were color-coded by ability type, and if everybody had their laid out you could basically see at a glance what everyone's combat options were. It was a super-simple and elegant system, once you purged all your prior D&D knowledge.
If WOTC and Chris Perkins ever part ways, my money says he makes a 4e clone.
@@BobWorldBuilder Power cards! Everything gave you powers - races, classes, powers, items, even gods/faiths - so if you had a DM who was generous with loot, and/or a campaign at 4th level+, it wasn't unusual to have a short-stack of powers to consider, on top of "universal" abilities like trip, grapple, etc. The character-builder software included them with your sheet PDF. I used to make nice 4-per-page size ones in Excel for my players (or for myself when on that side of the screen).
I believe Wizards did sell some laminated cards reflecting powers from PH1/2 and a couple of the power-source & item-listing books. But the ones from the builder would update the math to match your current level, and reflect homebrew changes. (DMs could homebrew the f*ck out of the builder then. Powers, races, items, gods/faiths, even whole classes could be added - or restricted.)
I mostly played 4e in Paizo's Golarion, so I either used Paizo/Pathfinder AP art, or made my own maps in Photoshop, with paper markers (binder clips ftw!). But there was a tidy 3rd-party business back then in table aids, from the classic dry-erase mats to some pretty fancy modular dungeon tiles. I still have the stackable, color-coded magnetic status/elevation markers from Alea Tools, and my late hubby had some nice clear-film area-of-effect overlays from the XDM Kickstarter.
The cards make things *easier* - that’s why people used them
The character builder could also print all your powers easily enough
I tried out 4e with my friends shortly after getting into dnd from 3.5e. It was a pretty fun system, even if it ultimately wasn't my cup of tea. I think it's a bit of a shame that wizards threw the baby out with the bathwater when they did 5e since there were a lot of neat ideas in 4e that would have added a lot to 5e.
I think the way monsters were designed with having specific roles was a fun idea. Daily and encounter powers were also a lot of fun, even if they didn't make a whole lot of sense for martial characters. The way the books were layed out was really good as well, I think it's the only edition that I didn't have to force myself to read, I just picked it up and casually read through it without much issue.
I mean, saying that “limited use” abilities don’t make sense for martial means you must also hate 5e, yeah?
Because that’s exactly the same haha
@@Jabberwokee Oh to be clear, I don't hate that kind of implementation of limited use abilities for martials, at the table they're usually a lot of fun.
But my gripe with it is that it works off of 'game' logic since it's tied into the game mechanics. Again, I don't hate this since I do understand it is in fact a game, but I do share those same gripes with 5e as well.
I actually think the warblade from 3.5e had the best implementation of encounter abilities for martials. You had to prepare your maneuvers by exercising each day, and after they were used in battle, you could recover them by either doing nothing on your turn, or just doing a normal attack.
I kinda hope they implement something similar for martials in the next version of dnd, but given what we've seen so far, I don't think we'll see any drastic changes.
Albino Blacksheep was an animation website that came out around 2000
I remember those! I also remember the the protest for the lack of the gnome, necromancer and other option. Anyway, I quite enjoyed 4ed, remember how convoluted was 3.x on some rule, and always struggled with the costant switch between high and low roll in Ad&D. You could play it without mini, as any editions, but it pushed harder than the previous edition, and yes, the consensus (at least in italy) it was that it was more a semplified and semplicistic edition, with less option for the characters, especially if you liked playing casters in previous edition (also, many protest came from 3.x player/munchkin used to crunch many many number and options)
There's a great joke about these in the Gravity Falls episode "Dungeons, Dungeons and more Dungeons"
Some of the complaints 4th edition got besides "trying to be an MMO RPG" was that the combat mechsnics took prescedence over the role playing, even more than other editions before it.
And I would argue that its combat design, while trying to balance the power scale between martial characters and spellcasters, had very unclear rules whose interpretation varied widely from one gaminh table to another.
Also, some people point out that WoTC spend a huge amount of money (by that era standards) to market 4E instead of letting the player advertise the game within their communities.
Just wondering what where some of the unclear rules?
Unclear rules? Are you serious?
Bro, that is the absolute *opposite* of what 4e is, seriously
And on top of that, if 5e’s equivalent system came out in 2008 then they would have ALSO advertised it the same way, because that was the era
Super weird take my guy
@@Arkenald For example: The Spinning Leopard Maneuver said: "shift your speed and make the following attack to everyone you pass"
What does that mean to you? For some people it meant a character could leap forward, spin and kick everyone on the way. To another it could mean just moving carefully, and punching everyone passing. And since comunication with the creators / designers would be slower than today, getting a confirmation about what those rules meant could take a long time.
@@Dracobyte I don't see a problem with either of those interpretations. Are you upset that people can flavor or describe their actions differently? Could you please elaborate the issue or perhaps have a better example?
@@Arkenald that when you add this kind of rule wording to psuedo-magical abilities, special actions, crazy reaction powers, over the top interrupt abilities, and multiple item slots that add more powers you could end up with 2-3 hour surprise / casual encounters.
You ended up either wasting too many times looking for what could your character do or doing more things in other player turns that in your own.
And there was the role playing aspect , which was not given enough attention.
It's very interesting to see all these videos! I remember seeing the gnome and tiefling one. I have no idea where I watched that thought. That VTT is WILD because it's one to one compared to the miniatures and dungeon tiles that were released physically! That is really interesting that they decided to go that route. Imagine how many times that Hasbro troll sculpt was reused for different miniature releases and then it shows up virtually too! I remember being very confused about D&D insider/online tools. I think I used the online character creator once through someone else's account to print off a character sheet. 4E was all about miniatures for me. Personally it was pretty much the only saving grace of that edition. The combat was incredibly slow and a lot of the new mechanics just artificially extended combat encounters.
To me this comment really brings out the idea of how 4e split up the community: some folks going all in on minis, some using the digital suite, others sticking with 3.5e! It offered a LOT and in a way made pockets within the D&D community.
@@BobWorldBuilder More of a 2D spectrum, really. Like I used the mechanics and cosmology (Feywild, Shadowdark, Abyss & Astral Plane) but applied it to Paizo's Golarion setting. D&D Insider sub, but played & ran strictly in-person tables. Gave homebrew files to my players to load in their Builder. They gave us more options & freedom then, but that also meant the community could take or leave what they like.
Back in my day, AC0 was every characters dream Stat, gelatinous cubes lurked in every corner, AND WE ONLY HAD ONE SET OF DICE THAT WE SHARED BETWEEN THE FIVE OF US! That's after we colored in the numbers with a crayon. and we liked it! You kids today don't know how easy you have it..... (end old man rant)
Kids today don't even have real crayons 😅
@@mandisaw Health and Safety. They'd be eating them thinking they're gummies even if there was a warning on the pack.
@@FrostSpike Nah, most little kids age 3+ until about 8yo are pretty good about food / non-food (barring neurological or behavioral issues like PICA). It's once they get into the "I dare you" ages that things become complicated 😩
@@mandisaw I wasn't talking about little kids... 😁
@@FrostSpike 😆 Oh man, yeah we're so f*cked
Dude the gnome and francis are amazing !
THAC0 was hard for i or 2 game sessions ( about 8 hours back then ) and then it was automatic thinking. It still holds in my head more than ascending AC. * I know what -1 AC looks like easier than AC 21.
I maintain that the complaints parallel the decline of basic math skills in the [US] population 😓 Subtracting & negative numbers are more challenging than adding / positive numbers, and 4e (and 3.5e's) reliance on stacking modifiers (+/- 2) got flattened out to Advantage/Disadvantage. There's always been a math- and reading-nerd component to this hobby, but what happens when people don't find math fun?
I actually thought you already knew about 4e. I would recommend reading up on it, there's tons of great rules you can borrow for your other games.
For more info on 4e, please look up Matt Colville's videos on the topic.
I remember the gnome videos but at that time my friends and I were playing d20 modern and/or were happy with 3.5. So by the time any of us wanted to switch, Pathfinder was around to take us in.
I loved those videos when they cameout.
4e was not really that complicated. The problem was that the fights were just so long and there were lot of things to remember. There were a lot of on going effects.
You could run it without minis but it was way too complicated to do that way. It was made to be place with.
Insider builder was soooo good. Tho it had problems when it was updated.
The trifecta of [offline] Character Builder, Monster/Encounter Builder, and the Compendium database was the best damn TTRPG tool after dice 💜 They wanted to go to an all-online, Microsoft Silverlight version of the Character Builder instead, and that killed the stability and homebrew-ability that made it great.
As for bookeeping, two big faults. 1- Many 3e players jumped in assuming they could transition directly to the Level 10-15+ playstyle that they liked, with all the "my guy is awesome" that 3e was [in]famous for. But 4e made you learn not just your character, but how the party fits together. It prized empathy & listening at the table. Folks who only paid attention on their turn, or who never asked other players about their PC, were doomed to have a kind of crappy time.
2- 4e didn't require minis, but I will grant that table aids of some kind were needed. Even if you kick it old-school with pencils & graph paper, needed something to note down not just positions, but statuses (& duration/expiration) and AOE & terrain effects, which were lifted from obscurity in some 2e sorcerer kit.
The idea that you had to spend a bunch of money though was BS - I ran a very visual-oriented table with 98% stuff from Staples.
@@mandisaw sure. Like I said. You did not have to, but the rules were made in a way that it was mutch easier with a grid. It was made as a tactical game and was in my opinion easier on a grid.
Also I hate autocorrect.
@@jaakkosippola7191 We can agree on 2 things for sure - 4e sang on a grid, and autocorrect sucks 😆 I read on a forum once of someone who preferred hex grids running 4e that way, and they swore by it. So end of the day, it was whatever kind of fun you wanted it to be.
A blast from the past! I remember watching these well before I actually played D&D and finding them funny, as well as being entertained by the weird 4th edition drama fights in the comments I had no way of understanding (barely do now). The lines from the kobolds in the Red Dragon skit come to me way too often and I suspect will affect how I play kobolds as a DM or player, basically forever.
The animator who did the D&D interview series also did an animated short called Bitey of Brackenwood. A lot of the humor of that and other videos of his can be seen in these D&D interviews. Especially when the Tiefling kicked the badger.
The ‘grapple’ portion of that skit is literally my experience tryping to grapple in 3e. Pathfinder adding CMD/CMB was a GODSEND.
Into tabletop RPGs since the 80s, but always an outsider to D&D. It was just never a game I played much or enjoyed when I did. So, take that into account when I say that THACO didn't make any danged sense back then either. In the 90s, when I worked in a game store and D&D was considered an "old game" that few played anymore (this was the era of the death of TSR for a good reason), people often made fun of THACO, so that joke has been around for a long time.
And yes, I'm sure that THACO does make sense if you really look at it, but the way it was explained and the way folks talked about it, made it seem like the game designers were creating a problem to fix.
Yeah I think with many of us technically being "outsiders" to the ways of THAC0 today, it still seems unclear. But yeah, overall I think it's probably just an extra step or two.
The digital character builder for 4e was a really good piece of software for its time. All the resources, player options and magic items, were integrated in it, and it was easy and robust to use. Ahead of its time.
Great homebrew support too. There were community pages where folks documented how to add basically anything to it, and you could share downloadable files for DMs/players to use. I used to homebrew the heck out of my games, and just give my players a plug-in file - displayed my options right alongside the RAW ones. No microtransaction, no premium tier, it was just included with the magazine sub.
Unquestionably a great builder
I may never recover from that. I never played 4e but I steal quite a bit from it thanks to Matt Colville. Minions and skill challenges in particular.
4e is not complex at all, but it's VERY different from 5e, so more to learn...
Dragon Fried Orphans sounds like a great franchise opportunity.
The 4e vtt story gets really sad and bizarre. The guy who was working on it murdered his wife and then killed himself
Hi Bob! Just wanted to say I really enjoy the klezmer music in the background of your videos. As a huge fan of D&D and klezmer it brings me immense joy!
Thanks! Honestly that name for the genre is new to me, but some of my favorite bands incorporate this sort of style
Holy shit! I remember these videos. You just unlocked a memory.
My friends and I weren't happy about 4e, especially since we made the switch from 2e to 3.5e.
Many years later I played 4e at a con, it was a part of Adventurer's League, we didn't use miniatures.
So if they didn't use them at an official game event, they probably weren't required.
To be honest though, I like those old style videos. I grew up with Newgrounds in middle-school, highschool, and early college. So them advertising that way was right up my alley, but, we didn't have an interest in the system.
One of my players turned up one evening with his own copy of the Player's Handbook. It was 4e and we were playing 3.5e. In terms of complexity, I'd rate them about the same but in different ways. I managed to run a few sessions of 4e much later and I liked it. But my players didn't. We went back to 3.5e and then moved to 5e.
The two DMGs have good advice and guidance which should've made it into the current DMG. That seems to be a recurring theme. AD&D 2e had a couple of good DMG resources/splatbooks (DMGR). The DMG would've been superb if roughly a third of it was replaced with some of the guidance from the splatbooks.
THAC0 isn't hard. It's one of those little things you get used to.
Yeah if there's one thing everyone seems to agree on about 4e, it's that the DMG was great!
@@BobWorldBuilder The 4e DMG2 particularly - it has some of the best advice on TTRPG & worldbuilding across any system. And I say that coming from 30+ years in the hobby.
I remember when we got mad in the days of 4e when we went from the free character builder that you could buy additional content and make your own to the subscription character builder. Everyone at our local shop that played adventure League hated it because they made us use it to have legal characters to play. One of the dms was nice enough to let us each build a character on his account so we could print them off and play.
That was the offline Character Builder to the online one. And yes, it was a d*ck move on Wizards' part
As a total 4e Stan I loved all these promo videos. We still quote the gnome all the time. As to 4e being complicated. It's complicated in the way a trading card game is. That is to say the rules themselves are simple, the complexity comes from the powers, but reading a power tells you what it does. A lot of my friends who wouldn't play 3.5 because it was too complicated played 4e, one even dmed two successful games for us. To this day, 4e is the only edition of d&d that I've had a game actually come to a satisfying conclusion in. I also personally must have taught 30+ people to play 4e at my college, many of whom I'm still friends with today. So when I see people, many of whom have never even read a 4e book let alone played it, dunk on 4e as being bad it really makes me sad. Don't miss out because the internet is full of dickheads with shitty opinions, go try 4e!
"4e Stan" LMAO 😆 Agreed that 4e was very easy to teach newcomers to TTRPG. We did have some folks who came from video games - same challenge as always, getting them to understand they can do *anything* in TTRPGs, that the rules are just a jumping-off point, not hard rails. Very glad Bob's helping spread the "Good Word" of 4e 📖
4e is so increasingly easy to teach and understand
A lot of people forgot/didn’t bother to look into Rituals Spells, which is where all the more esoteric and less “gamey” spells and abilities where kept
@@Jabberwokee Rituals, plus Utility powers & Skill powers. I think one of the Martial Power books had a class path that was essentially "You are Errol Flynn", so you could do acrobatic swordplay, charm the literal pants off of anything, and still not immediately die in "hard" combat. A lot of folks flipped through a couple chapters of PHB 1, or played in one 4e game at a less-than-stellar table, and made up their minds forever.
Man, you are unlocking some primal memories for me. I remember these! I didn't know they were official. Man
These were here on baby youtube way back when. The Tiefling Gnome thing was actually pretty popular if I remember right, despite the general negative comments about moving away from 3rd E, and they sort of doubled down on those for a while (thus the recycled gag). I wish I knew when those videos were released, would make it easier to see if there are archives of the videos anywhere. Was thinking about the lair one not too long ago, I guess it made an impression even if my experience with the actual game was more complicated that just good or bad. Never seen the DMG2 cartoon though... huh
I will say there were streamlining efforts for 4e which at the time felt like they were addressing stuff, but the number one complaint I heard is that they sort of obscured the toolbox of 3e and made things more interconnected/harder to alter.
As for the mini thing, the way the rules were written sort of assumed miniatures and positioning. Taking five foot / one square steps was sort of standard for a lot of abilities. It felt that way for 3e for me, frankly, but in 4e it was much more explicit. I have to say leveling in 4e was fun, though. Always something new to fiddle with. I just wound up struggling with how blocked off the rules made things seem
Yeah I found them on UA-cam but they were on a couple random channels, not official ones. Then I did find an unlisted video on the D&D official channel because it was linked in an article somewhere. It was a tutorial for using the online character builder. Mabe worth checking out in a future video!
@@BobWorldBuilder There was this channel called GamerZer0 that had some of them, they were like the links the official page linked to when talking about the introduction to the mechanisms. It's still up. I don't know if it was part of that Gleemax pivot or not. Not the cartoons, though, I don't think. (snip, see below)
EDIT: Found the original flash animations hosted on a prior version of Wizards, linked by an old enworld post. Sound's a bit off on the dragon one even there, so maybe that was an accident. Original artist was Adam Phillips, Bitey Castle. Has a channel on here, the Gnome and Demagorgon one is on their channel but not the others
EDITEDIT: There's a seventh?? "Redbox Ninjas"
Knew at least one person who used Insider so it was a thing, not nearly as big as the more recent one, though.
@@nutherefurlong I remember the Red Box Ninjas!! 😀🥷 The interconnectedness applied to both your character, and between characters. I remember in one of those pre-4e design books (Worlds & Monsters??) they wanted to break the hard link between "game effectiveness" and roleplaying whatever you want, essentially so there were no "trap builds". Any concept you want to play should be viable and able to keep pace with the rest of the party, no matter how fluffy or hardcore.
Weirdly, this actually pissed off some optimizers, although I'm an optimizer (when on the player side), and I f'in loved the character-build theorycrafting in 4e.
Other part of it was encouraging party empathy & synergy. You couldn't "solo" your way through a campaign, leaving everyone else at the table on the bench. AEDU system may have sounded like "cooldowns", but it had the effect of ensuring that everyone gets a turn to shine, and encouraging truly cooperative playstyles. 4e meant you could easily do Legolas & Gimli learning to be better fighters *together*, rather than the party as a collection of Conans.
That also ticked off some folks who I guess enjoyed trying to single-player a co-op game LOL
@@nutherefurlongOh yeah, as for Insider, "subscriber churn" was a thing back then too 😅 People would subscribe for one month, update all their Compendium data, errata, & magazine issues (all stored locally), then unsubscribe for the next 5mos to a year. I couldn't be bothered, and just kept my sub active, but nearly everyone I spoke to back then just dipped to get data, then "dipped" LOL
@@mandisaw I guess it showed there was no perfect way to do everything at once, because I was more about concept than stat effectiveness, I created a Ranger that had minor spellcasting and that stretched my point-bought ability scores to the point where I wasn't as effective as everyone else in fulfilling my role as combatant. I had more utility, but because the game had a hard line between combat and noncombat it made it pretty clear where I wasn't doing great (I did manage some cool things in the game despite this, but I was a bit at odds with my own to-hit etc, which had me wondering why ability scores were there at all if all it meant was I was reducing my basic ability for the chance to fire off a thunderwave).
The min maxers coundn't be maximal relative to other players, but there was definitely a better way to do things for each class. Like you could pretty quickly figure out what was best, but there were plenty of options for making your character worse, which I guess I wound up doing by trying to fulfill concept first, something I'd do in 2e without worrying so much since the walls between types of play didn't highlight one's lack of effectiveness so readily, at least when in a non-competitive party
All that said, having all the characters sort of be equal allowed for synergistic combinations that were pretty fun. It was certainly more of a board game feel but it let you do some cool things.
Upon rewatch I *may* have seen Redbox Ninjas, the king's hands were very memorable for some reason.
We loved the gnome monster videos. Still use the line “I”m a Monster, Rawrr”! LOL
Grappling rules were a mess in AD&D (1 + 2) as well... :D
Same in 3.5
I started dnd with 4e. It actually really helps to be a DM: 4e gives a lot of information in structured ways just to write a game and to control it.
Oh, and another I just remembered: 4e' DMG and DMG2 are still *the BEST* DMGs I've ever seen for D&D (and for most other games too). There's a lot of *actual* advice about how to run a game, methods of planning campaigns, how to handle different player types, how and when to use puzzles and traps, how to edit adventures to suit your own world, how to make terrain interesting for combat (paraphrased quote "terrain that doesn't make characters want to move around is bad terrain"), how to write quests (both linear/web-style), how to handle adjudicating rulings, and so on. The 4e DMGs are some of the only DMG-type books I go back and re-read for actual help and advice (unlike 5e's DMG, which I looked at more as a player than a DM because it's where the magic items are listed).
Damn, I want to go get 4e now and try it out...
Also, MCDM just released a new monsters book that has a lot of 4e type stuff in it.
Also again, I'm loving those little cartoons. WOTC just got back some points in my book...
And thanks for the video. It was entertaining.
Yeah I hear that a lot of MCDM's work is influenced by 4e. Glad you found this inspiring! haha
The Dnd 4e system has a fairly active discord
They did a lot of work with foundry if you have that
I would go as far to say that 5e mostly 4e pretending to be 2e
@@Thenarratorofsecrets thow me the Discord link and I'll check it out...
The 3e Manual of the Planes had rules for Tieflings and Aasimar (and other "monsters") as Player Characters. They did have an "ECL Adjustment" of +1, which meant they were treated as 1 level higher (I forgot the details, but in effect they have an extra "level" and need more XP, and possibly you can only use them when other characters are also created at a higher level). Dragonborn as they are now originate in 4e. There is a "Dragonborn of Bahamut" in the book "Races of the Dragon", but that is ... different :P
I was just watching these commercials yesterday! thats hilarious, i love this old goofy marketing, the 90's to mid-2000's were a golden age in advertising.
No way! Haha yeah it was kinda peak-TV before online entertainment took off and then streaming services took over. Such a cool time.
Grapplings really not that complicated in 3.5. Its just an opposed roll every round. And sure, to initiate the grapple you need to make a melee touch attack, and that triggers an opportunity attack, but to be fair, MOST actions in 3.5 will trigger opportunity attacks (and 5e also has AoOs because AoOs make combat actually interesting). Other than that you just make an opposed roll each round.
I'm seeing both sides of this in the comments xD
You forgot the /s tag LOL 😆
Ahhhh 4e nostalgia. I remember quoting "Rawr I'm a monster" so often! Especially because my boyfriend at the time had a shirt that said "Rawr means 'I love you' in dinosaur".
Anyway, as someone who played both 3.5 and 4e, 4e was simpler BY FAR. It's actually still one of my favourite D&D editions (above 5e even). The problem I think that WotC had was that the language in the book was very video-gamey/grid-like. For example, there's literally no difference between 4e's "Encounter power" and 5e's "recharges on a short or long rest"; no difference between "Daily power" and 5e's "recharges on a long rest"; and no difference between "move up to 6 squares" and "move up to 30 feet", besides the language use. Mechanically, they're all the same. "At-will powers" are just cantrips, but for martials, it was more like "battle-master tactics that you can use at any time".
Combat in 4e was slow, but personally, 3.5e combat wasn't actually any faster for me (and had a LOT more rules to look up/adjudicate for the GM). Having your powers/spells listed as an actual card format (and colour coded for at-will, encounter, and daily) meant it was so much easier to play without looking things up. The character builder was by far the best thing 4e ever did (especially when it allowed offline building, and all you needed to do was log into D&D Insider to update it every now and then so you could access all the new classes/races/feats etc that came out). It was better than D&D Beyond because it worked faster, and you didn't need to pay a subscription AND buy the book online. You paid the subscription and got everything for every book released. And the subscription was cheap too. I think it worked out to AUD$7/mth or so.
Monster types (minion, soldier, solo, etc) actually helped a lot with encounter creation, and minions especially were something that you could throw at players to seriously threaten them AND also make them feel badass. Minions still did regular damage, and could easily overwhelm you, but them having 1hp meant that your use of powers would take out a huge chunk of them as well. Calculating bonuses to attacks and such was actually simpler and less granular than 3.5e by far, and rolling to hit target defences (AC/Reflex/Will/Fortitude) instead of saving throws actually simplified things in a way I preferred.
Other things that also got converted to 5e are bonus actions, ritual spells, and healing surges (as hit dice), further showing that the majority of peoples' issues with 4e was almost purely about the language used, as well as legacy involvement (such as casters outpowering martials etc). Skills were less involved than they were in 3.5e with spending points and such, but were more granular than 5e's "not proficient, proficient, expertise" system. The game was much more balanced, and still worked well at higher levels, but combat was definitely slow, MUCH slower than 5e's combats. I think it was slower than 3.5e at higher levels, but that's also because 3.5e after level 8 was so broken that a party could pretty much take out a dragon in 1-2 rounds.
Overall, I think 4e was still one of the most radical, original, and better versions of D&D. That said, I prefer to play and run other games than D&D nowadays, and all D&D combat feels slow to me now.
*_"Bring it, Scruffy..."_*
Wow, I'd never seen these; they are amazing, in a very 2008 way. The flash animations... I can't believe how tame they are by the standards of the time, and how _not_ tame they are by the standards of right now. Things really do change, eh?
As for the individual points:
- Yes, 4E required a battle-mat (for its combat module, where about 90% of the game's mechanical heft existed), but so did 3E if you wanted to run combat and didn't want to use dividers and other 19th-century mapping tools; as for miniatures, Wizards would very much have _liked_ people to buy lots of theirs in their conveniently-distributed-to-game-shops blind booster boxes for the D&D minis combat game... but they weren't necessary; you could use tokens or chits with numbers on them, and most people did. And graph paper has been the battle mat of choice in many circles for decades. So you could play the game with the same sort of stuff most people played 3E with - but 2008 was not a time of selling people on 'make your own fun'.
- The 3E grapple rules were a meme since before the word 'meme' was in general use - not that grappling was actually _that_ complex, it was IIRC about two or three rolls, but that was two or three rolls _every time_ you wanted to take a very basic and very common action in melee combat. Casting a spell in melee was fewer dice rolls than attempting a combat grab - which is counterintuitive and silly, so people made jokes about it to the point where even Wizards's marketing department was in on the gag.
- Yeah, 4E was a very, very different game from 3E, both in terms of detailed design and overall design philosophy - 3E was a game made for hobbyists running custom campaigns at the kitchen table, 4E was a game made for official 'league' play at organised events. But you can't say 'we've made massive changes to D&D' if you're trying to trade on brand recognition.
- People did indeed complain that 4E was too simple. Also too complex. That sounds like the internet just doing what the internet does, but actually they tended to be talking about different parts of the game; compared to 3E, a 4E _fighter_ became a more complex character to play, whereas a 4E _wizard_ was - you just lost most of what your character used to be about. The baseline for complexity definitely jumped _up_ a bit, and the ceiling for it was _also_ lowered substantially. This focussed the game a bit more, though, so if you sat down for a game of 4E D&D you generally knew what you were getting. Which was nice.
- Implying fans were literal trolls was not, as they say, the _half_ of it. 4E _also_ came with its own new and improved licensing scheme, _and_ it released in the middle of the whole Financial Crisis thing, so - complaints about the system's mechanics were the nice ones. Everyone else was too busy watching all the game shops and companies going out of business and suddenly having nowhere to _play_ all these fancy new adventurers' league games being advertised. (As for why they did what they did with the licensing - er. The OG OGL was very permissive; some people did release some things that could have tarnished the brand if a news outlet took a dislike to them and held up a selection of the more out-there 3.x sourcebooks as 'look at what's in this "D&D" that people are playing!'. And randomly targeting some niche-market pop-culture product for a moment of brief public shock and outrage was not an uncommon pastime even as recently as the 2000s; they were, in some ways, simpler times.)
- I have nothing constructive to say about the Lady of Pain one, save the observation that: this certainly was 2000s web animation; I knew a stack of people who loved stuff like that, and then within about five years they all turned around and hated it instead. And they were not young people, either; the late 2000s were a weird time in ways that are difficult to articulate. Also - what's held up as the best 4E book, gets what looks like the worst 4E promo animation! Hah.
- Yep, 4E shipped with a whole suite of online software tools. Also offline software tools! I knew people who bought the top tier subscriptions and played with all the gadgets. _However_ - this was still 2008, so the laptops, phones and tablet computers that this was all supposed to run on were... not always as reliable a platform for these services. Which is to say, even the stuff they did release was a bit buggy and crashed a lot. Plus, this was in the early days of social media and smartphones, so - nobody was really sure who would end up being liable for any given part of an online interaction on a platform like a VTT yet. That may have made them hesitant to puch forward with it.
Coherent, and agreed, on multiple points. And yes, those were, in so very many ways, "simpler times"
swear to god perkins was just in those promos so he could try on a variety of wigs
Thinking of these videos as old makes me feel old
My partner at the time's mom had a D&D insider subscription and I remember making a lot of characters with the character builder, but rarely playing any of them. It was a very weird and extremely complicated character building system that got very frequent updates through the magazine content. It did stuff like generate a deck of cards to keep track of all your character's abilities, which you could print out and use.
I can confirm that 4e really required minis and a grid playmat because a lot of abilities were based on forcing certain types of movement and exact positioning, like moving enemies around and blocking certain squares was the fighter's whole thing in that edition.
My fondest memory of playing was making a hybrid vampire/cleric (vampire was a rogue type class) because you could hybridize any two classes to pick parts of each that you liked, and hybrid vampire-clerics could get a passive ability that removed their weakness to sunlight since they were divinely empowered.
I believe the VTT went unfinished and the whole digital initiative was dropped because the guy that was leading it and doing most of the work building the VTT killed his wife in 2008. I think later a WotC person who had been part of the DDI initiative called that event the "coup de grace" on 4th edition's digital initiative and 4e itself in some ways.
The woman who was tragically killed was named Melissa Batten if you want to look into it. But there's not a lot more to say. Tragic and awful.
Saw that in the comments. Very sad and it's interesting how much of an impact this incident had on D&D.
I was at the D&D day convention that they had when they first released 4E, and that guy (the murderer) was demonstrating the VTT and I annoyed him because I kept asking him questions about importing character image models that you design yourself through a 3D modelling program. I think they were intending to do the microtransactions even back then and didn't want to open source it. Also, I got to play in a 4E game DMed by one of the designers, Rob Heinsoo. It was enjoyable, but apparently some of the rulings Heinsoo made in that game didn't crossover into the actual 4E rules. IMHO they really stifled out of the box thinking in 4E.
@@roberthradek7100 Not to defend a stalker-murderer, but as a software & game-dev, 3d models are actually really hard to create an import pipeline for. Even just supporting FBX, the main industry-standard, can be wonky, with lots of variations and supported/unsupported features. It's a bit easier with environment models since they aren't rigged for animation, but characters are a bit of a nightmare. It's why even games with modding tend to supply their own models, and maybe just let you reskin with uploaded 2d images/textures.
@@roberthradek7100 As for supporting DM/players going off-script, I feel like that blossomed as the edition rolled out. More emphasis on options in the rules & lore, but also the Insider/Builder tools did end up supporting homebrew to an almost ludicrous extent. I used to give out XML files to my players with new races, classes, powers, items & deities, and they could mix/match them with built-in stuff to spit out game PCs. The Monster/Encounter Builder had a lot of levers for tweaking, and import/export. Can't say whether that was the plan from the start, or whose idea it was, but they offer that creative appeal eventually.
@@mandisaw Though the figures in the VTT had no animations, they were pretty much an environmental model that you could move from square to square. Quake which had been around years before this allowed you to do skins, wireframe, and animations. Even the unreal engine which WotC is using for their current VTT was around then, and definitely allowed model customization. You would think that they would have at least considered it, but either they seemed to have not nor did not want to. Especially because I had been doing it in other platforms for years. Granted I am not a game developer, but my daugter is studying to become one and using unity she is constantly adding new models.
I started playing somewhere around a year before the release of third edition. The elimination of THAC0 was great. I think that fourth edition was them trying to set up for convention play. You could set up your character and insert it into what was essentially a one shot with no extra effort.
That's WILD! I remember the tiefling and the gnome animation xD but none of these other ones.
Amazing video
I've always said that 5e is just a very well disguised 4E and that they would circle back round to trying to go digital. I still mourn the death of Dragon and Dungeon Magazines
Yes those magazines were awesome. I still have a few
I managed to save the entirety of the _Scales of War_ Adventure Path that got released alongside Dungeon Magazine. Very thankful I did that.
I had DDI from very early-on, so while I don't have a complete set, I have loads of article PDFs for later reference. I have much of the print run in digital form from the ah, more parrot-friendly days of the internet. In terms of using digital as a complement to tabletop play, 4e-era WOTC was way ahead of its time. Proof's in how they're praised now for offering *fewer, worse* digital tools than 15 years ago.
Pf2e is actually 4e, Logan Bonner was the dev for 4e and became the lead dev for pathfinder 2nd edition
5e is 4e if you remove everything good from it and add more things from 3.5 for grognard's happiness.
Really good video - did love the animations. I happen to like 4e, but my favourite version is probably 3.5. Keep up the good work - top content!
That animation style definitely brings to mind Bitey of Brackenwood from the old Flash/Newgrounds days
Such a flashback, thanks Bob. As a dude that was there and not just someone that complains about it, THACO and 4E were just different systems, as basic was a different system, advanced and so on. It was just a different learning experience each time it really wasn't a big deal for any of my people I played with, once you got the hang of it. For me, 5E, I'm pretty sure, will be my last stop. No 5.5 or OneE for me. But that will probably change lol. Always a great vid say hey to the World Destroyer and keep on keeping on 😎🤘🍻
Man, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Bit of a nostalgia trip, this one.
4e has amazing stuff to steal if you're a DM. Minions and monster Roles with rules for mixing them made encounter building very easy. And frankly, the At-will, encounter, and daily power mixing was a good thing for class balance. If 5e balanced classes along similar lines for their options, we'd be much better off both in terms of balancing classes with each other and also in pacing the adventuring day. Skill challenges were also pretty decent.
Basically, 4e was a great edition, but it sadly didn't feel enough like prior editions of DnD, which alienated a lot of people who went over to Pathfinder. Frankly, I love 5e's simplicity in a lot of ways, but I wish it had many elements that were present in 4e.
That was awesome. Need more of that today.
When Wizards announced a new VTT last year I had flashbacks to the 4e D&D Insider VTT... Heck, my PHB still has an ad for that product on the last page!
4e came out when I was a teenager and I played it quite a bit. It was a fun system that smoothed some rough edges of 3.5, but also incorporated new ideas. Of course, it has issues, and there were all sorts of business blunders at the time too.
It's very funny reflecting of the history of D&D (under both TSR and Wizards) and looking at current events. On one hand, I see them being scared to repeat the past, and on the other, it just seems like pulling from an old playbook is all they ever do.
I keep waiting for you to wave your arms and yell, "I'm a DM, Raaa!"
Really a great video. Goes to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I actually follow the animator for these, Adam Phillips (his youtube channel name is Chluaid). He also worked on the music video for Ween's Transdermal celebration and animated for Bob's Burgers, and he has his own personal web series that is absolutely beautifully animated.
It's always interesting to me to see someone that didn't play 4e, actually dig into it and see what they think of it after hearing all of the "horror stories". It's never like the actual descriptions that were going around at the time of 5e's launch, and it seems to surprise people that's the case. The digital character builder is still alive and kicking, you just have to look around the popular communities to find it and download it (it was updated with all of the content, so you can fully play characters using it to this day!)
As far as the digital game table goes, there was ALOT of horrible circumstances that led to it just kind of fizzling out and ending up ruining 4e's chances at sticking around for a long time. It's a truly sad story, if you read into it.
Every single time, they say, "whoa, 4e is nothing like what I read online". I don't know why folks think geek hobbies/communities are somehow immune to the same truth-bending that the internet is infamous for. But I'm glad that the onset of 5.5/6e is shining new light on one of the best tactical TTRPG systems out there.
I started playing with 4e and the gnome and tiefling video is actually super nostalgic for me.
You should probably know that frankly a lot of what you hear about 4e is just wrong? 4e is almost certainly the simpler than AD&D and 3rd edition for example. Many established players had a very strong reaction against 4e after playing it once and brought that attitude to their friends who never touched 4e. Olde Greybeard on UA-cam covers 4e quite a bit if you want to talk with a creator who knows better.
I think your mind will get blown when you read why the VTT didn’t actually launch. Really shocking story.
I remember testing the virtual tabletop a few times. I don't remember much, but it worked well enough.
Looks more like an albino black sheep era before new grounds became the juggernaut. I remember those back when DND was just words and a reference to me. Pure nostalgia.
thank you for finding and sharing these vintage clips! for sure, the VTT would have been awesome and might have been able to compete with World of Warcraft and other options at the time of 4e
I never played 3rd or 3.5 - I started with 4e. The games I ran for my friends (who had played 3 and 3.5) were fun, but minis are maps were definitely a big part of it. I don't recall anything in the PHB or the DMG really talking about theater of the mind play. I do remember many of my players lamenting the extremely reduced 'skill list' that you didn't have proficiency in specific skills, but rather just broad categories and a shorter skill list. They would tell me 'i don't know what i can or can't do, this is super limiting' whereas I saw it as freeing - you weren't limited to just the skills on the page, your were proficient in any acrobatic skill and you could make an argument that the thing you wanted to do was an acrobatic stunt.
I thought encounter building in 4e was easier, the prescribed roles for monsters meant you had a better idea of how they'd function and how durable they would be. Transitioning into 5e's CR system has been a long struggle for me with encounter building because monsters I intended to be scary "come back later" indicators could still get hit and defeated by a low level party if their rolls were lucky enough and mine went poorly.
I'd have to check my books, but I'm pretty sure there was an ad on the back of the PHB or DMG for the digital tools including the tabletop. I remember using and having a D&D Insider subscription for the character builder, it was super handy!
I liked 4e but I also didn't have the nostalgia for the earlier editions.
4th edition really wasn't complicated. It was tactical. It used terms like squares instead of feet, and combat had lots of effects that moved people around the grid. We never used real miniatures, we did use a vinyl battle map. We just usually used M$Ms or those Mahjong tokens to keep track of things.
As a person that played D&D in the 80s I can tell you we all had trouble with THAC0. We also home-brewed and house-ruled like crazy. The people in OSR forums that think OSR means sneak around and die all the time was how we played, got it all wrong. We beefed up our PCs and wanted to go kill stuff.
4e had some fancy classes. I remember playing a shaman with a spirit companion and some kind of psionic tank.
I don't think it was more complicated than 5e (and definitely a lot simpler than 3e), but I went too far away from the classic D&D experience, so there was a lot of new stuff, which might have been the reason some said it was complicated.
4e's legacy is worth it just for the Warlord, and more generally what they did with Martial & Primal classes. Not only gave them more & more-interesting combat options, they dug deep and came up with lore hooks that made those classes shine in their own right, no matter what setting you dropped them into. Running something like an all-one-Power Source party became a fun, intriguing concept.
so, the videos where short little things on WotC's website during the preview season for 4th ed. I think they might have been lost during one of WotC's website migrations over the years, but if someone's willing to do the archeology involved they are a fun watch.
Also remember at this time D&D was just at the tail end of the massive content creep that 3.5 had gone through, and Pathfinder was just started in development as a response to the way worse OGL scandal of 4th ed (i.e. there essentially wasn't a 4e ogl.)
This was the wild west of the indie rpg gaming industry, and everyone was nervously laughing, hoping things would be ok, right before the big collapse that destroyed a few big name companies, and killed a lot of the indie scene for a while.
I vaguely recall the, “it will be the same” adds.
When it came to rules, for the most part the wording was very specific.
Some good things came from 4th edition. Like long and short rests. Some things we use in 5th edition that was never carried over, like bloodied. Also had some cool magic items.
Being very tactical minis was often the best way to play out combat. From what I recall any distance of powers was calculated using squares rather then feet
I think the point of the inappropriate host is that he's inappropriate and gets his ass kicked. I don't think they were trying to paint him as a role model. Jokes and satire sometimes does this thing where they expose wrong behavior by demonstrating it. To release tension. Within the framework of ... well, joking. It's almost never an endorsement, quite the contrary.
Yeah I think they handled it mostly okay by having clear consequences, but "dark humor" can be a fine line. I stand by that it was definitely a product of the time and not something we'd ever see today for some of the jokes/violence
@@BobWorldBuilder Sensitivities have definitely changed, that much is certain. And the stuff you and I find funny in 2023, someone in 2040 will definitely be making videos about, calling us out for our problematic poor taste.
Yes, people absolutely complained about 4E being too simple. There's this really strange idea in the current meta that 4E was designed to be "like an MMO', but if you played it it was incredibly obvious that it was designed to be a card game -- you know, like the other highly successful game WotC produces. The game literally printed cards for each of your powers that you would tap, yes the copyrighted tap mechanic, when you used them and untap them at the end of the round, encounter, or adventuring day. You had far fewer bonuses to add to your die rolls, all bonuses were +/-2 or +/-5 because they didn't want you to have to actually do any math anymore, multiclassing was extremely limited to close out the dip and dive stuff that dominates today and dominated 3.x.
The main thing it didn't have going for it is that it was the first edition where it became difficult to fully realize some fairly straightforward character concepts, because of how heavily gamified the game had become. Eventually, they tried to create a box for every possible character by just combining the combat roles and the power sources to create "one of everything", but this is just the first example of replacing characterization with ye olde official options and the direct, lineal predecessor to "my character is only interesting if it's a bespoke combination of features and powers" and "oh gods no, my character would never do what my character would do, characterization and motivations are too likely to conflict with another player or ye olde official campaign railroad -- my character is literally just a yes man for the DM with a collection of powers."
Man it's crazy to me how people just never talk about this stuff! I've been playing D&D for almost a decade, but I'm only finally learning what 4e was really like. People talk about every other edition but this one!! Or at least, the things people do say about this edition appear to be false.
@@BobWorldBuilder Us 4e fans have a secret handshake - only once it's safe to we break out the great stories 😄 Most memorable skill challenge I ran as DM was a daring chase across rooftops in an Arabian Nights urban-mystery game (4e w/ 2e Al Q'adim bits, in Pathfinder's setting). Had an Iranian player doing a culturally-reframed OG Assassin's Creed divine avenger,
+ a sha'ir princess with a Warlock-like Pact with powers unknown and her loyal? genie manservant,
+ a town guardsman in a Gone Girl scenario,
+ the cowardly-badass eladrin swordmage who bickered in-character with the tiefling assassin (Mike Mearls' Shadow-mage version, Dra 379),
+ a warlord with an ice-dragon artifact-hammer whose voice only he could hear [I'd pass him notes/emails OOG, we didn't tell the other players/party til later - old LARP trick👍],
+ and a warforged monk in the shape of a terracotta warrior, built by long-dead kings for a long-past war, and trying to discover himself (my late hubby, his all-time favorite character).
People who say "you can't roleplay in 4e" clearly suck at let's pretend 🤷♀