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.
Nod. I thought the point I was making was that it would have happened in the absence of a 4e, anyway.
Didn't it really take off in 2009, though?
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).
Were you paying attention to the playtest, MM was constantly going on about evoking the 'classic game.' Playtest adventures were call-backs to ancient modules. Heck, Essentials had gone there in a big way, too, with the 'Red Box' and game day character sheets in goldenrod. IDK if it was because of the OSR, or just because MM is a 1e grognard, himself, but it sure seemed like a thing.
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.
Honestly, that's how I felt about it, myself. 3.x had only had 8 years, 1e had had 13, and 2e, counting coasting after TSR folded 10, it just seemed too early. I get that 3.5's blistering pace of development had bloated the game like a corpse in a hot climate, but, even so, it was just too early. Plus, with the SRD/OSG, there was a d20 genie that wasn't ever going back in the bottle, so for the first time ever (and the only so far), the prior version of D&D could be cloned, outright, to compete with the new, without getting sued like Arduin was.
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.
There are so many things about D&D that are terrible game design, that there's almost no limit to how much of it you could change before you started making it worse instead of better. But the game(npi)-changing, revolitionary 'RPG better than D&D' has been arround virtually since the 2nd (maybe 4th?) RPG was created later in the 70s, one after another, almost without pause, and has had 0 impact on the dominance of D&D.
4e was enough better than, and different from, D&D to be warred against by the old gaurd, as it was, making it more so would only have further marginalized it - as long as it had the D&D logo. Without the logo, it'd've just been the
nth game to come out, be hands-down strictly superior to D&D in every way, maybe win an award or two, and never be heard from again.
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.
I couldn't. The two-prong approach may have worked for the original game, in the fad years, but I doubt even the come-back zietgiest of today could have overcome the confusion of having two or more versions of the game. To stage a come-back, a brand needs more unity of identity than that.
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.
I can't agree with the rest of that, but I did find that, while a 4e combat could take more rounds than a 3e combat, or more table time than a 1e or 5e combat, it was time spent with more of the players engaged in the entire experience.
When I did see problems with turns 'taking too long' it was the players who were disengaged when it wasn't their turns - not even all of them, the old 'wake me when the fight starts' type players slipped off into their usual comas - were the ones that complained. That kind of player really needs to be dominant, the center of attention, to be engaged, at all, when someone else is having their moment, they shut down. The most destructive spiral is when you get a player like that, and he gets the idea of 'leading by example' (because he's accustomed to dominating play) and taking really /fast/ turns, which exacerbates his frustration.
4e was a good game, but it was being played by D&Ders, some of whom had decades of bad habbits to overcome before they could take full advantage of it.
1) the near absence of iterative attacks. If your attack roll resulted in a miss, you were basically done for the round.
Doesn't that speed up play?
[qute]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.[/quote] "Did you remember the +2 I gave you?" Yeah, there was a lot of that. It wasn't any worse than 3e itterative attacks & myriad modifiers. Combat advantage was the main situational modifier, so it consolidated a lot of that, much of the rest was probably under the players' control. You could take feats that gave you a constant befit or more situational ones, your leader type could pick fiddly buffs or straightforward healing. That kind of thing.
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.
Pregens are a good way to go with new players, and starting at 1st, where the issue is minimized, did not bring with it the problem of the characters being overly fragile. Compared to playing an essentials or other-ed caster, though, 4e classes were fairly streamlined with easy choices among just a few powers, and the choice not being as critical (most rounds you could just use an at will and be fine) vs many, more critical, decisions among spells.
Essentials classes theoretically should have helped returning players who had the expectation that starting with a fighter would be 'simple,' but returning players had been thoroughly turned off by then.
My experience was that this got much worse for high-level play. Most of our level 25+ games consisted of just one or two set-piece battles. And, to be fair, 4e does that sort of huge battle very well, if a bit slowly. High level play in 4e felt more epic to me than it did in 1e, 2e, or 3e. But 4e doesn't work so well for quick, easy "side" encounters.
Acutally, it does handle it simply enough, you just get a quick/easy side encounter, which, compared to a 4e set-piece is hardly worth it (and might well be worth no xp by the guidelines). It's not any worse than it is in another edition, it just seems pointless by comparison. Arguably, it is pointless, in any edition - but other eds were so dependent on multiple encounters/day to siphon off even an odd low-level slot here or there, that it was worth it for the DM to keep the 'wandering monster' and rooms with a few spiders and whatnot coming.
When I did want to get an many-little-encounter crawl going, I'd put it together as a skill challenge, with the 'wandering damage' mini-encounters coming on each failed check.
