Oh, another one for me:
4) 4E will be remembered as the first RPG in decades which caused non-RPGers seeing us playing it to ask if they could play, too.
In part I think this was actually because it was visually obviously more of a "game" (with the map, markers and so on), but it was also because we were clearly having fun and not having to constantly refer to rulebooks (indeed we often don't have any obvious rulebooks at the table in 4E, unlike any other edition), because damn, big fat D&D rulebooks scare the BEJEEZUS out of a lot of non-RPGers (this is one thing I worry about with 5E, where they apparently want us to carry nearly 1000 pages of A4 hardback around with us by default - let us pray that the digital offerings don't suck and arrive quickly!).
Oh and another:
5) 4E was the first edition where ALL my players felt like they understood and controlled their own characters and levelling, and where I could say "Okay, you level up!", and fully reasonably expect to see all the PCs completely and sensibly level'd up by next game session, rather than 75-50% of the players turning up with non-level'd PCs at the beginning of the session, because they couldn't figure it out, or didn't feel confident in their decisions, or whatever.
ANOTHER!
6) 4E was the first edition where ALL my players were frequently as rules-savvy as I was. I'm not talking some BS about "optimizing" or whatever, here, I'm talking about genuinely, fully understanding how initiative, combat rounds, attacks, powers, conditions, skills and so on actually work. In 2/3E, I'd always have to work with them on this - some of them would never figure certain things out, and I'd be the only person at the table with a completely solid grasp on the general game rules, most of the time.
With 4E, though, the general rules seem to have been much easier to grasp, and I found that players who previously ran a mile from rulebooks were doing things like correcting me on what "Concealed" meant, or how such-and-such a Condition actually worked (in polite, helpful ways), and I actually found this was tremendous, and really sped up play at certain times.
MOAR!
7) One bad thing I will remember 4E for amplifying from 3.XE (though we've yet to see a 3E-style "loop") and/or bringing from other RPGs, though, was the "I INTERRUPT THIS ACTION TO BRING YOU BREAKING NEWS OF SEVERAL EXTRA ACTIONS I AM CAUSING TO HAPPEN!". Towards the late-middle of the Heroic Tier, we'd got 4E running at such a speed that few encounters took more than 45 minutes, and some even down to 30! Nice, given the tactical complexity and improvising and so on.
Then we hit the end of Heroic and the beginning of Paragon, and we acquired a new PC who was a Shaman who granted extra attacks to party members in a way such as to make a Warlord jealous. Plus a multitude of ways in which various PCs could use their previously-rarely-used Minor Actions!
That slowed things up back to 60+ minutes! Darn it! The ruling that each PC could only be granted 1 extra attack/round helped, but just made the damn Shaman think harder!
And more!
8) Yet despite that, 4E is also the first edition where, all the PCs are well past level 10 to 12, yet everyone keeps wanting to play them, rather than just the single-class Mage! This was something quite characteristic of our 2E and 3E games - when everyone got past 10 or so, interest rapidly declined for all but the Mages/Wizards, and everyone started talking about rolling new PCs or trying other RPGs (we did get higher, I think to an average of 15, once, but it was a bit of a struggle). I cannot help but feel the fact that non-caster PCs had less and less influence on the result of the game beyond magic item use was a factor there.
I could go on about the causes of this for pages, but suffice to say, at the core of it is good rules design (imperfect, as noted in 7, but good), which has prevented people feeling left out or like they're getting special treatment or whatever, and rather has had everyone feeling empowered and powerful and involved.
4e will be remembered by my group as the edition that proved they could not work together as a team. It was not the edition's fault
It certainly tends to separate the team players and cooperators from the "self-made superhero"-types, gameplay-wise. I was surprised to find my players worked together really well (the players who hold them together both naturally picked Leaders, too, which was interesting), though it did take them a couple of sessions to get it. I note that the one player I know who really disliked 4E, but who had really liked D&D previously, had always played the kind of Mage/Wizard who was ready for everything, had a million spells known and a million scrolls prepared, and a dozen long-duration buffs for himself, and could basically solo everything (or believed he could - it wasn't entirely unjustified either in 2/3E) and was very dismayed to find this was no longer really viable, and even where it was viable, it was no longer solely his purview. He did play a few games as a Controller of some kind, but he always seemed to be working *around* the party rather than with it.
