The other thing that struck me about early 4e was how poor some of the early adventures were. It just seemed that even the designers didnt seem to know how the game was meant to work.
There's no question that KotSf was horrid. It's telling, because Cordel wrote some great modules in the past, in particular, Heart of Nightfang Spire (yeah, I may be in a minority for thinking that's a masterpiece, but hear me out). HoNS kicked it in 3e, it took all the things that people had started doing to wreck that game and caused them to crash and burn. The Story Hours on here about that module were beautiful. All-caster-scry/buff/teleporter parties getting schooled but hard. It was punishing and brutal - if you metagamed - and a lot of it was turned up to 11.
KotSf was supposed to be an intro adventure, but it had a couple of fights that were clearly meant to be punishing, and they were made that way using the method you would've in 3e - by taking a PC type and leveling it up above the party's expected level. Only, 'PC type' was "Elite Monster," which had defenses a bit higher than they should've by default, it was leveled up to the hairy edge making its defenses improbably high, and placed in terrain that further upped those defense. Oops. Maybe Cordel was already thinking that 4e players would be powergaming up really high attack bonuses? IDK, but it badly overcompensated for whatever it was he was thinking would require an over-the-top challenge.
The problem was repeated in the Iron Tooth fight and again in the Paldemar fight in Thunderspire (the rest of Thunderspire was pretty good).
(And Pyramid of Shadows, though I personally enjoyed it from the player side, and it didn't have any similarly screwed up encounters, was aweful on just a story level, I admit - but it reminded me of a classic, weird/pointless dungeon, and that was enough to make it a certain kind of fun. I guess it helped that I was playing kinda a retro character concept in it.)
But I really appreciate 4e as a game. We played as a proper roleplaying game and it worked as well as previous editions or 5th - we didnt get so hooked that we "dwelled on the grid" as the article noted.
The article said something about 4e "succeeded,
technically." That's how I've long felt about it. Technically, as a game, 4e was a significant improvement over D&D. (Which is faint praise, indeed.) As an edition of D&D, in every other aspect, prettymuch a trainwreck. D&D just isn't 'just a game' to most of it's fans.
It was a complicated game but I liked giving everyone powers and it changed my expectations of what I want to see in martial characters and monsters in particular.
D&D has always been a complex game, in spite of 3e & 4e having more material than AD&D, they were progressively less complicated, because each became more consistent, consolidating the redundant sub-systems and trimming the needless baroque flourishes of the ones before (in 4e's case, with a chainsaw). As has come up in another thread, long experience with D&D insulates most of us from its complexity, the bits that are the same as prior eds just fly under our radar, only the new/changed bits seem to pile on 'added' complexity. There were fewer stealth bits for 4e, more glaring changed/addded ones, because of its genocide of sacred cows.
