D&D 4E 4E WotC Tools dead?

dave2008 said:

Again, that is a broad assumption, and definitely not what I wanted.

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Well its what the market wanted. I wanted a vastly overhauled 3.5 with what would be called bounded accuracy and narrow gap on saving throws, Pathfinder wasn't exactly what I wanted but at the time it was better than the alternatives. SWSE tye D&D could have been interesting at least on the martial types

dave2008 said:

EDIT: we also eventually got rid of the AEDU structure and made everything cost surges.

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That idea is something [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] is doing in his 4e Descendent design. How did you implement it?

dave2008 said:

Again, that is a broad assumption, and definitely not what I wanted.

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And from most I have read it was not really fixed barely included minor house rules and shove it out the door with their branding.

dave2008 said:

It was a rhetorical question. My point was: that is not how it played for us. We could get through combat in less than 30min or 4-5 hours (that was our longest battle I believe). I had one group that was tactically inept and rarely if ever selected powers that synergized, and it was still a blast! There is no one way to play 4e, just like there is no one way to play any other version of D&D.

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This is true. People still get scandalized on the internets when they hear that I and others played 4e without any grid or miniatures (though we did have it firmly set in our minds where everyone and everything was and if there was a question we DID occasionally use paper and pencil to show where everything was situated).

It was completely possible to play 4e that way (And we did), but you had to have imagination enough to do so.

I know most people did or could not (which is probably a big plus for 5e in that zone), but I and many others did.

So, I agree that there are multiple ways to play 4e, some of which are denied by a lot of people on the internet.

(Though currently I admit I prefer 5e overall, especially for that style of play).

Garthanos said:

And from most I have read it was not really fixed barely included minor house rules and shove it out the door with their branding.

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They din't really fix the numbers porn they did go through and kinda fix the worst offenders like polymorph but they missed a few. They also tweaked the classes- Pathfinder fight is better than the 3.5 Fighter for example. DIdn't really stick with Pathfinder to long played more SWSE and then went OSR/AD&D 2E when my books were dropped off in 2012 and I ran a one shot with modern players and they liked it.

Garthanos said:

That idea is something [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] is doing in his 4e Descendent design. How did you implement it?

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encounter powers cost 1 surge, dailies 2 surges and then if you were 10 levels above the power its cost went down one step

GreyLord said:

This is true. People still get scandalized on the internets when they hear that I and others played 4e without any grid or miniatures (though we did have it firmly set in our minds where everyone and everything was and if there was a question we DID occasionally use paper and pencil to show where everything was situated).

It was completely possible to play 4e that way (And we did), but you had to have imagination enough to do so.

I know most people did or could not (which is probably a big plus for 5e in that zone), but I and many others did.

So, I agree that there are multiple ways to play 4e, some of which are denied by a lot of people on the internet.

(Though currently I admit I prefer 5e overall, especially for that style of play).

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Yes, we also played without grid and minis at times, they were not required. I really don't get why so many people thought they were required to play the game.

thanson02 said:

Importing 4E elements in your 5E game is real simple. The biggest thing is just understanding how to do it without offsetting the core elements of 5e combat mechanics. Actually just watch this video last night. I really enjoyed it and I think he really gets to the heart of what makes 4E such an enjoyable RPG.

https://youtu.be/QoELQ7px9ws

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He is right about the genre discordance of calling maneuvers and spells - "powers"

They had an opportunity to do very minor language change some of the powers were already among feats in earlier games so they could have claimed "feats" as the generic word for active abilities. and spells cast in but a moment represent a "feat of magic", an elaborate sometimes unlikely difficult maneuver is a "feat of martial prowess" and so on.

Then other non active feats might be called features.

dave2008 said:

Yes, we also played without grid and minis at times, they were not required. I really don't get why so many people thought they were required to play the game.

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I think that's very similar to the '4e is anti-roleplaying because skill challenges exist' problem. No one is forcing anyone to use the grid and there's nothing inherent about 5e that makes theatre of the mind easier.

Basically, a large part of how D&D gets played is based on the marketing of how one could play it. And 4e's initial marketing sucked to parts of the target audience as adventures forced grid+roleplaying areas were forced into dumb skill challenges.

4E was heavily reliant on the grid just based on the powers. Could you play without it? Sure but the default expectation was a grid and the language of squares vs say feet/ft. It was basically to get you to buy the D&DM which if you read the credits on the rule books was developed by the same people who did 4E (Heinsoo etc).

They basically wanted everyone playing and paying online VTT, and buying the minis IRL. Some people compared 4E to WoW presumably because encounter powers are like cooldowns (IDK I didn't play WoW), but WoW took a chunk of the D&D playerbase its one reason 3.5 died so quick (in print 4 years, + d20 crash of 2004). Felt more like Advanced D&D Minis to me than WoW or a video game- AD&DM. Combat length in early 4E was also similar to a game of D&DM- 30-45 minutes. Kind of meant you could only get in 2 or 3 fights in a typical session of 3-4 hours (unless combat was all you did) vs 4+. Long fights are all right on occasion not the default. Our longest was 2 hours in 2E but it involved hundreds of beings in a 27 hour session.

You can't really plausibly claim there was not a heavy emphasis on minis over even 3.x. AD&D if you read it these days says something like "you can even use minis if you want". Playing 4E without minis would not work that well in most cases except maybe for certain classes who picked certain powers that avoided push/pull effects and things like that. You would have to go out of your way to build PCs avoiding things like that which would be difficult using just the 4E PHB. Technically you could play without minis (well more a grid), would not call it a good idea most of the time.