There were some neat ideas in 4th at least.
I look at editions as toolboxes to draw from in my own game, and 4th had a few good tools to it. The forest might have been unwanted, but there were some pretty trees.
Man, I still think 4e’s at-will / encounter / daily powers were an interesting idea that made non-magical classes more fun to play, balance issues aside. People complained that it made the classes too samey, (which is a valid criticism). But damn, I want cool, once per day fighter abilities on par with a spell.
I also thought that the progression of class -> paragon path -> epic destiny was badass and really enhanced the storytelling aspect of a character.
People complained it was too much like a video game, because it used actually good game design principles.
I still like minions as a concept. Dinky little guys that have 1 HP but if ignored will still do a decent amount of damage?
Yeah it’s good stuff. Still rewards people for splitting fire too so suddenly it’s fine to attack zombie ABC even if your ally has already damaged zombie XYZ.
4th edition gets a lot of hate but I definitely enjoy borrowing things from it.
I did a few 4th edition sessions and I cannot quantifiably say I’ve had a worse time than my 5th edition sessions.
Meanwhile Pathfinder’s out there doing the royal bastard thing, just one mentor and magic sword away from becoming the chosen one.
I’ve played different systems, and they’ve had their pros and cons, but PF was my first and I just keep coming back.
I feel like most people who hate on 4e didn’t play it much, but enjoy feeling like they’re part of the group.
Yeah, 4e doesn’t deserve the hate it gets. I found it much more mechanically engaging to play than 3.X or 5e.
4e was when WotC discovered D&D has a very large problem - it’s not allowed to change anything, for worse or better.
4e was when WotC discovered D&D has a very large problem - it’s not allowed to change anything, for worse or better.
This is true.
They’re so close to discovering dice pool with advantage/disadvantage.
I started thinking about a 5e hack that converts the whole thing to a dice pool system. Instead of 1d20+X, it’s Xd20. You can then have degree of success via “how many dice hit the number?” and degree of difficulty via “you have to hit X times”
There’s a ton of other stuff I’d love to see changed. Mostly around the adventuring day and only-spellcasters-get-cool-stuff
That’s why 4E is so good. 4E says “all adventurers are magic users. Having muscles so big they bend reality in your favour is magic. Being great at inspiring your team is magic. Being able to blend into the shadows so well you were never even there is magic. Nobody is a boring normal in this system.”
“Also here are abilities that recharge every encounter. Now you don’t have to worry about short rests.”
Well, I have good news! There’s a huge number of other systems out there, most of them are quite good, and there’s plenty of very interesting mechanical innovation going on. I encourage you to explore, D&D isn’t the only game in town. ;-)
I’m well aware. I have a weekly game of Fate, and played a lot of nWoD over the years. The trouble is usually finding players.
Also sometimes players who only play D&D pick up bad habits and narrow views of things, and it can be hard to change their habits. In my Fate game, the players often forget the wide range of things they can spend fate points on,
I was about to say, if you like dice pools try nWoD/CoD lol.
As for FATE, my players have the same problem. And I forget to compel a lot of the time to give them FATE points, which doesn’t help, either.
In my first couple Fate games I didn’t get a lot of good compels in. But in this game my players have 3 aspects right now that are super easy to compel on:
- “maybe the answer is violence”
- “compulsive truth teller”
- “[hostile NPC faction] bounty on your head”
If the players are dicking around too much, compel on maybe the answer is violence - get in there and do something. Fucking around with the NPC instead of advancing the plot? Compel to tell the truth and let’s see what blows up. And if all else fails, fuck it, some goons from Razor can show up.
It’s been a lot of fun.
The players haven’t quite got a handle on self-compels yet, though.
Agreed. With how many people started with 5e the older 3.5 cohort who shat all over 4e are in the minority. Plus I feel like a 5e player would more easily transfer over to 4e then 3.5
I learned Adv and then got too lazy to ever upgrade my knowledge and books, so I still play that (with feats)
I kinda like super slow leveling. Less fucking around with books and more RP, magic items more impactful, every step up feels more special. But then ofc you’re still level three 8 games in
I used to play adv. back in the day. Also rules were more like guidelines anyway.
Yeah look at what video games have to do to match a fraction of our power
I’ve erased enough shitty movie sequels from my memory to know where this is going.
There is no movie in Ba Sing Se.
Here we are safe. Here we are free.
people like to shit on 4e, but every time anyone tries to actually explain why it was bad it just makes me wish for it more.
The way they told me is that every class of 4th edition effectively had 2 builds.
Every level had 2 choices: one that fit your build and one that didn’t.
Choosing any option that wasn’t on the build was useless.
Then there is also something about cooldown abilities, which is hard to keep track of on boardgames.
Except cooldowns were extremely straightforward? You had at-will abilities (use as often as you want), encounter abilities (once per fight), and daily abilities (once per day). Easier than tracking spell slots.
Sounds like Baldur’s Gate 3 in a way
It felt like they were trying to make an MMO be a table-top game at the time when WoW was at the height of its popularity (that WotLK nostalgia). Its not that it was overly bad, it was a square peg, round hole situation.
These days I feel like 5E has no teeth, very good intro but beyond the first few campaigns and the endless art books its mechanically uninteresting. Pathfinder 2e has been what most of my games have converted to.
I have heard the ‘4e was MMO edition’ critique multiple times and not once has anyone been able to articulate why 4e was specifically like WoW in a way that wasn’t outright false or was so broadly similar that it applied to nearly all fantasy RPGs, electronic or tabletop.
Painting in broad strokes here as its been over a decade since D&D v4 and WoWs high-water mark, I think people call it that because of several factors, not all of them in the game design of v4.
- It was the begining of the trends that we see today in 5e where the stock classes were designed to fit the archtype, not the style. If you played something out of the base books, it just had to work and character progression was boiled down, you had to try to brick your character.
- This was also around the time when WoW was changing its mentality to “bring the player, not the class”. This still holds up today where they design content around the players being there, not what was there. Fewer class specific shortcuts or tricks, unique traits. No one single common ability is unique to a class. For example, need temporary invuln to eat one hit that causes max damage, bring a pally, mage, or hunters.
- The migration from 3.5 to 4 left a void in class/race variety as the prestige classes took a while to convert to the new system, many were lost. Like when Disney bought Starwars and threw all the extended universe content out. D&D 3.5 had an alarmingly high number of suplimental books.
- The increase in charts in v4 felt like they could have fit more in with a PC RPG, I do realize the irony in the success of Pathfinder 1 as it just took that “charts for days” concept and ran with it.
D&D v4 to me will always be the MMO version because it was a product of its time, and also WotC scrapped pretty quickly, relativly speaking.
It’s better for games where you actually have a table with miniatures imo, but the rules seemingly being structured around this was not great for strictly paper adventures. Grappling was simpler, I guess.
I started with 4e, so I have fond memories, but my friends and I also had no idea what we were doing and just made a bunch of stuff up, so that probably helped.
4E got a lot of people who never would try D&D into playing. At least from my experience.
From a very narrow perspective 4th was good.
That perspective was new people who knew nothing, and played briefly or got really in to competitive play.
Viewed from any other angle 4th was a pile of dog shit.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN MY ONCE DAILY MISSED. I HAVE ONE FUCKING SHOT WITH THIS PER SESSION AND I MISSED.
fucking infuriating.
Most of my group started with 4E. They love it. I’m a 3.5 child, so 4e is just weird to me.
Hate new shit.
Love me 20 sided die.
Simple as.
We don’t talk about 4-E, no, no, no, we don’t talk about 4-E!
Having played all the editions in the comic, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that 4e is unfairly maligned and I would rather play it over Advanced 2e or 3.5.
The powers system gets bloated fast, but offloading potentially broken support spells and powers into 10min to 1 hour rituals is genius. 4e has the only useful version of Pyrotechnics between the listed editions.
Short Rests being 5 min instead of 1 hour really feels like the pace of encounters keeps up without any awkward pauses, and means encounter powers are reliably up by the next fight.
The understanding that mechanical roles and flavor power sources could be swapped around and make a bunch of classes instead of trying to theme classes solely around fantasy archetypes let them have greater design freedom.
Short rests and powers attached to them, subclasses being a core part of the basic classes, ritual casting, at-will basic spells for casters, & proto-advantage in some class abilities are all extracted from 4e.
5e isn’t bad - its arguably the best version of D&D. But I’ve seen a lot better fantasy systems than D&D, and some fantastic mechanics left on the cutting room floor between NEXT and 5e.
If anyone’s hankering after a 4e-alike that’s actually good, try the new MCDM/Matt Colville RPG ‘Draw Steel’.
As a former My Little Pony fan, this sentiment follows many fandoms that span generations.
4E was great and one day I’m going to run a campaign in it.
It’s great as long as you don’t have to run a mid to high level fight in it.
