The roots of 4e exposed?

Tony Vargas said:

However, nothing can change the nature of the established fanbase, one segment was still chafing against 3e for not being enough like the TSR era, so the OSR would have happened anyway, even had there been no 4e, and the current come-back would still demand a more traditional, DM-focused, system for the 40th-aniversary edition.

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The OSR happened long before 4e became a thing, and wasn't a reaction to it. Honestly I think 'OSR' is overrated anyway as a market force. I have yet to encounter people that actually are in any sense militant about, or even prefer, to play such games. Beyond that there was ALWAYS a certain core of people who thought the 3 1974 LBBs were the last word in RPG design. The term 'Grognard' is NOT new, it was current in at least the 90's and probably the 80's. Anyway, I was playing since the mid 70's and I can tell you that the day 1e hit the shelves there were people who hated on it.

So I don't think OSR actually matters. I don't think it appreciably shaped 5e as a distinct movement (maybe the structure of a few options was tweaked to make a more old school type of play a little easier, but 5e is hardly catering to OSR fans anyway).

Frankly I think 3.x just wasn't dead yet, and WotC tried to put a stake in it, and the beast just wasn't going to go down. It was also a sort of natural down cycle of D&D, much like the late 80's and the late 90's (note the roughly 10 year cycle). 3.x was getting long in the tooth, but not THAT long. Paizo was created by WotC basically, and it bit them. The market shrank, 'old Coke' was still able to capture almost 50% of it given the marketing and business mistakes that were made, etc. A lack of desire on the part of a decent chunk of people to move on from a game they weren't tired of (but had already bought all their books for) was a big thing, but WotC both created and walked into their own perfect storm.

Frankly I think 3.x just wasn't dead yet, and WotC tried to put a stake in it, and the beast just wasn't going to go down. It was also a sort of natural down cycle of D&D, much like the late 80's and the late 90's (note the roughly 10 year cycle). 3.x was getting long in the tooth, but not THAT long. Paizo was created by WotC basically, and it bit them. The market shrank, 'old Coke' was still able to capture almost 50% of it given the marketing and business mistakes that were made, etc. A lack of desire on the part of a decent chunk of people to move on from a game they weren't tired of (but had already bought all their books for) was a big thing, but WotC both created and walked into their own perfect storm.

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Yep.

Personally, I think the efforts the designers put into adhering to some but not all of D&D’s sacred cows was harmful to its potential. I genuinely like certain elements of its engine, and think it could have been turbocharged by ditching classes. Ditch alignment completely (or just Good-Unaligned-Evil) instead of the approach they took. Perhaps even the 4 roles could have been ignored. No need for hybrids or multiclassing- just build your PCs using the feats & powers you want.

As an essentially toolboxy, genre-neutral type system, that form of 4Ed might have been a second hit for WotC while 3.X trundled along to its natural conclusion, whatever that may ultimately be.

I could even imagine that version of the system still being a market presence today.

Dannyalcatraz said:

it could have been turbocharged by ditching classes. Ditch alignment completely (or just Good-Unaligned-Evil) instead of the approach they took. Perhaps even the 4 roles could have been ignored. No need for hybrids or multiclassing- just build your PCs using the feats & powers you want.

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Classes and roles are fundamental to 4e PC building - much more so than in 3E or 5e.

To get rid of them would be to rebuild from the ground up.

Shasarak said:

The real problem with 4e is that it is just too slow.

I just dont see how blaming the community or lack of decent adventures or lack of DDI is going to solve the real fundamental problem with the rules.

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4e is too slow when you play it like Mike Mearls. My game isn't slow at all! It is filled with action and excitement at every turn. When a combat lasted 2 hours it was because everyone was having a total blast. Some of them lasted 5 minutes (ok, not so many of the combat rules got used in that one, but it was a fight). This is the problem, the game that Mike and co thought they had written might be slow. The game that poor old James Wyatt wrote a DMG for that he couldn't quite figure out, might have been slow, but the actual 4e that was the ideal game that was created, that wasn't slow at all.

You just had to find that game. I think some of the people that worked on it did understand. I don't think that game was just some sort of 'accident'. Just a lot of people couldn't envisage what it could be, they lacked the insight or the guts to go ahead and just do it.

And then they wrote 5e. Chicken poops.

AbdulAlhazred said:

4e is too slow when you play it like Mike Mearls. My game isn't slow at all! It is filled with action and excitement at every turn. When a combat lasted 2 hours it was because everyone was having a total blast. Some of them lasted 5 minutes (ok, not so many of the combat rules got used in that one, but it was a fight). This is the problem, the game that Mike and co thought they had written might be slow. The game that poor old James Wyatt wrote a DMG for that he couldn't quite figure out, might have been slow, but the actual 4e that was the ideal game that was created, that wasn't slow at all.

You just had to find that game. I think some of the people that worked on it did understand. I don't think that game was just some sort of 'accident'. Just a lot of people couldn't envisage what it could be, they lacked the insight or the guts to go ahead and just do it.

And then they wrote 5e. Chicken poops.

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Wow, the arrogance is breathtaking. I may not like the game that James Wyatt and company created, but I won't stoop so low as to actually insult them over it.

AbdulAlhazred said:

TBH the big if here is whether or not Paizo could have written good enough 4e adventures. Frankly the APs I've read and played in do NOT have very well-designed encounters, so I'm skeptical. It would have been a question of whether not they could have grasped the essential 'story first' nature of 4e and created some sort of alternative structure to oppose that of the 2008 vintage HPE stuff (which is not all completely bad, but none of it actually plays to 4e's real strengths).

We will never know. Had they produced such adventures of high quality then its quite possible 4e would have just continued. WotC could have lived with that. I mean, as long as the 3.5e players were still buying their products, and there's no reason they couldn't have kept some of them in print, then why not?

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I think you are right. It seems doubtful that Paizo would have realised that 4e was a "story first" game and been able to create an adventure path to play to 4e's strengths. That would have been asking for a real hail mary shot to pull that off for sure.

Shasarak said:

It turns out that the other alternative to DnD getting shut down was to cut down the staff to a couple of guys who put out a couple of books a year. No magazines, no VTT, no novels but DnD is still going.

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So we’re just going to ignore the context these editions exist in, then? The fact that Hasbro’s demands for D&D’s performance shifted, or the rise of streaming campaigns?

Les Moore said:

Well, I don't know how to describe it, otherwise? It had a beautiful layout, incredible art, well synopted general explanations of the overall game, at the front,
and the back end just was hard to describe in it's incomplete complexity.

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I gave you an example of how to re-word the same things more respectfully right in the post you just quoted. It’s not that hard to express distaste for something without demeaning those who do like it. “I dislike thing” instead of “thong sucks.” “I found thing too minimalist” instead of “thong is dumbed down.”

pemerton said:

Classes and roles are fundamental to 4e PC building - much more so than in 3E or 5e.

To get rid of them would be to rebuild from the ground up.

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I played 4Ed, I know how PC building worked. I’m saying that it is possible- and IMHO, probable- that a classless, toolbox version of the mechanics could have resulted in a (different but) more popular game.

AbdulAlhazred said:

4e is too slow when you play it like Mike Mearls.

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I have zero idea of how Mearls plays, or how anyone outside of our group did, for that matter.

The main reasons we experienced slow play were:

1) the near absence of iterative attacks. If your attack roll resulted in a miss, you were basically done for the round.

2) too many short duration and/or small value modifiers. That meant a lot of tracking +1s & +2s from a variety of sources, of various durations. You were almost never attacking with the same attack or damage bonuses as the previous round, which meant doing math every turn.

3) some of our less-experienced players struggled with choosing powers, and often were not settled on a course of action when their turn rolled around. I suspect those players would have done better with Essentials classes, but those were not available until after our campaign concluded.

Charlaquin said:

So we’re just going to ignore the context these editions exist in, then? The fact that Hasbro’s demands for D&D’s performance shifted, or the rise of streaming campaigns?

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No, we are going to observe that predictions of DnDs demise were greatly exaggerated.

I mean they even got enough funding to have a two year playtest.