Nemesis Destiny
Adventurer
For my part, I was very ready for 3e at the end of the 2nd ed era. I was sick of boring fighters, sick of limited options, and really sick of all the fiddly rules subsystems, so the promise that 3e made of warriors with options, more diverse characters, and a unified, internally-consistent game engine were super-appealing to me. It wasn't until later when I realized that it wasn't meeting my expectations, and more importantly how and why it was failing to do so that I became discontented with it as well (ridiculous MCing and LFQW chief among the reasons).Yeah, we're not everyone, but I did have a pretty parallel experience. We played a LOT of 1e back in its early days, but then got a bit jaded by the time 2e came out, and while we played a couple fairly extensive 2e campaigns we were really off onto other games and other things by the time 3e came around. I READ a 3e PHB, but didn't much like what I saw. There were a lot of things that desperately needed reworking and 3e did rework a lot of them, but I just never could see it working well, the MCing and general caster power bloat was off-putting.
For us, it was a combination of content and presentation. My first character I deliberately picked choices that I thought I would hate, because I wanted to dislike the game. I actively tried to sabotage my experience with it. I failed, and I'm delighted that I did; I was having fun despite myself.Anyway, we had no qualms about the content of the game. I was a bit dubious about the presentation, but we started up a game and sure enough people picked classic archetypes, the roguish spy, the dour dwarf warrior, the flirty elvish wizard, etc. Things played pretty OK from the start, but I did find that the game was less forgiving in terms of knowing how to put together a good adventure. It really took me a couple years to FULLY appreciate the almost-Pemertonian degree that you could push it into open narrative type play (and for the record I assume this sort of play was not really anticipated by the 4e developers, in fact I'm skeptical they have yet cottoned to this style of play at all, maybe Chris Perkins has).
But yes, you make a good point; the game offers poor advice on how to really make it sing, and no prior D&D experience really prepares you for it either. I eventually got wise to the techniques required, but stumbled by them accidentally. It wasn't until I started having conversations about pemertonian scene-framing on these board that I began to understand why these techniques worked so well. Now that I'm in the know, I don't want to go back, and I think that's one of the reasons why I'm finding Next to be such a disappointment so far.
I should clarify. Yes, in some ways it's not ugly, per se, but it's not what I wanted in a D&D book - or so I thought. *Now* I appreciate the clean presentation, but when it launched, I thought it looked silly, contrived, and very clinical, for lack of a better word. Even then, though, I thought they would have been better off presenting the rules in a neutral SRD-like way and letting individuals add their own skin to it (because I hated a lot of their default choices). Something like the more-stark presentation of the X Power series. The presentation they chose is excellent for conveying game information, and I thought I wanted a book of Gygaxian prose with a game in it. Now I think they made the right choice. Though as supplements like Heroes of the Feywild shows, there is room for movement in both directions.So, yeah, I don't know if 4e is 'ugly but plays well'. In some ways it isn't ugly at all, but OTOH the presentation of a lot of the elements and ideas is inconsistent or misses some really interesting aspects of the game. This is all a major reason why I'm more interested in what can be done with 4e than in Yet Another DnD-Like which is what DDN seems to be. It just doesn't spin any wheels for me. I can do what DDN seems to be aiming to do using 2e and have been able to since before many younger players were even born! lol.
I pretty much agree with the rest of your point here; I would sooner see them push the limits of 4e design further, and still cling to hope that after the initial hubbub of 5e has subsided, that we may yet get back to that (though I'm not holding my breath, lol). At the same time, I understand and generally support what they're trying to do, even if I don't like how they're going about it. If only they had produced Next instead of 3e back in 2000...