With 5e here, what will 4e be remembered for?

[CrypticSplicer]

I'll always remember 4e as the edition that most encouraged teamwork and party tactics. Tactical leaders like the warlord more than doubled the effectiveness of entire parties. Everyone got to feel awesome! My friends and I made some of the craziest teams that we brought to conventions. We once made a team of pixies, halflings, and gnomes and called them Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. Another time we all made construct characters that "came from the future" and called ourselves Skynet. We always knocked our foes unconscious, unless they were human. We killed all those wankers. Any one of them could be one of John Conner's forefathers!

We could have made all those parties in other editions, but we never did before 4e because only 4e encouraged party synergy so much.

 

[kerouac]

I've been playing with a core group of the same guys since our freshmen year of college (2001), and before that I played with the same group of friends since 4th grade. Sure, a couple of folks have come or gone over the years, but we were always 2E players until 4E came out and that's when we made the jump...

You can imagine our shock.

For our group it ended up working out pretty well because we all played Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo, Risk, Axis & Allies, etc and had pretty tactical minds. The biggest downside is we lost some of that fast pace and imagination that we used to have. It was still a lot of fun and there are some great memories, but it didn't feel like OUR D&D.

With the Playtest and research into 5E so far, it feels more familiar. Our two newest players might have a bit of an adjustment because they started at 4E and for them it was a great entry into a larger roleplaying world.

 

[Manbearcat]

I've thought on this a bit more and I think if I had to abstract all of the things that I appreciate about 4e into a eulogy it would be:

In 6 years, untold hours, and over 70 levels of play, I've never had a bad session, hell a bad 1/2 hour, running games with this ruleset. I've never prepped so little and had so much consistent fun with D&D. The basic conflict resolution systems are crunchy but intuitive to the point of almost being rules-lite in their core functionality. Its the only D&D ruleset I've run that kept on giving...where I've wanted to run more and more games the longer I've played. Its the only D&D ruleset that has progressed and gained a greater sense of itself and its capabilities as it aged, rather than suffered through the inevitable cycle of subtraction by addition.

Never a chore. Always a pleasure. 4e - I tip my 40 to your memory.