With 5e here, what will 4e be remembered for?

[jodyjohnson]

Took too long to create a character.

As a 4e Fan I will admit that it took too long to print a character.

I could whip up a full set of level 4 characters for the night's D&D Encounters in a few minutes but it would take over an hour to print them. What's up with generating GB+ files just to print a character sheet.

 

[TerraDave]

"In my game, we had this encounter..."


Now I will read the thread and see how many ninjaed me.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I just wish there was some recognition that it's about taste and not about "good" rules versus "bad" rules.

Taste absolutely is a factor but there also needs to be recognition that, once you've accounted for that, some sets of rules achieve their stated goals, some do not, and some fail at their goals but perhaps semi-accidentally succeed at creating something else cool. 4E's rules largely succeeded at their goal (maybe 75-80%), but it wasn't as popular a goal as expected! Not sure 3E's rules did as well at their various stated goals, but they were more popular despite that (albeit for complex reasons)!

As a 4e Fan I will admit that it took too long to print a character.

I could whip up a full set of level 4 characters for the night's D&D Encounters in a few minutes but it would take over an hour to print them. What's up with generating GB+ files just to print a character sheet.

This is on your print drivers, not 4E! If have better print drivers, or print to PDF then print that, you'll get better results!

 

[TerraDave]

Encounters.

4E is all about complex interactive environments where traps, skills, and creatures all combine to create memorable and challenging encounters. ....

4. "In my game, there's this cool encounter..." ....

I agree with those who say that 4E will be remembered for its Encounters.

Intricate, tactically deep set-piece encounters with interesting environments and plenty of options for every character during combat.

Heck, the in-store play program was even called D&D Encounters.

And yes, 4E will also be remembered for controversy and changing too much, too fast.

I definitely concur with what you guys said [MENTION=158]Henry[/MENTION] and [MENTION=18]Ruin Explorer[/MENTION].



4e will be remembered for... fun dynamic combat encounters which could be created fairly easily by the DM.

...

Kinda what I expected. But I still wanted to post it.

Agree with the tone of this thread, but I have never got the idea that 4e is all about the grid and miniatures. I have used them ever since basic D&D for most encounters.

But 4e is certainly for me about mechanics for everything and everyone. In particular, the way 4e gave PCs powers and mechanics to really shape combats really empowered players compared to other editions. I just loved seeing my DM's monsters being pushed over cliffs, monsters being stopped in their tracks by the fighter, stunning Vecna, being successful in difficult skill challenges.

Yep. Stuff you do in an encounter.

It was a very logical approach coming out of 3E. We had a lot of good ones in our game. But not every encounter needs to be a big explosive deal, and not every thing the PCs do needs to be a big explosive encounter.

 

[Dungeoneer]

As a 4e Fan I will admit that it took too long to print a character.

I could whip up a full set of level 4 characters for the night's D&D Encounters in a few minutes but it would take over an hour to print them. What's up with generating GB+ files just to print a character sheet.

Apparently you never got bogged down sifting through lists of hundreds of feats, like I did!

 

[Dungeoneer]

It was a very logical approach coming out of 3E. We had a lot of good ones in our game. But not every encounter needs to be a big explosive deal, and not every thing the PCs do needs to be a big explosive encounter.

Agree with this. 4e could have used a way to hand-wave less consequential encounters.

When EVERY encounter has to be laid out on a grid and takes 4+ minutes to play you have a recipe for long, drawn-out sessions. I ditched 'random encounter' tables very quickly once I started running 4e.

 

[Gargoyle]

Apparently you never got bogged down sifting through lists of hundreds of feats, like I did!

This. But also choosing powers, paragon paths, skills, etc, became difficult and time consuming.

Part of it is that with the DNDInsider subscription, we had easy and cheap access to far more options than in any earlier edition, including many new classes and races, and yes, even more feats. Too many officially endorsed yet unplaytested options delivered right to my players, without very much ability for me to limit what they could choose from made for some long character creation sessions, especially when everything from the online Dragon and Dungeon magazines were considered "official".

IMO it wasn't easy to limit options. It's funny and sad that as of 2/27/14, one of the known issues with the Character Builder is "Campaign Settings Editor is not implemented".

 

[BryonD]

Sure there would have been some kind of division, just like every edition. That's not the point, though.

There wouldn't have been the same kind of division, not the one Emerikol called rather dramatically "our industries greatest civil war".

Ok, mea culpa for focusing on "the division" and not "civil war".

However...

You can see this pretty easily by imagining a different 4E, AND no Paizo AND no OGL (and thus little/no OSR, which was significantly enabled by the OGL). Whatever it's form, there would have been a division, period, for sure.

Let's envision a 4E that was incompatible with 3.XE products in the way 3.XE was with 1/2E ones. Very basic design concept changes. However, it's inoffensive in terms of ability design and so on (akin to Essentials, perhaps, but even less risky, with no treasure packages, fixed monsters and so on - the details don't matter). No matter how inoffensive it is, there will be a division. It will be missing stuff some people want, and have stuff some people do not (you and Emerikol are showing this very clearly with 5E!).

Without Paizo, the OSR movement, and the OGL (which is responsible in large part for the former two), that division will be there, but it will be limited. Furthermore, with the lack of an in-print alternative D&D (in the form of PF and OSR games), people who reject it for a year or three will be very likely to try it again after a few years, and may revise their opinion.

Here I strongly disagree with you (again).

4E disenfranchised a very substantial portion of the fanbase. A divide "like any other edition" fails to come close to expressing the portion of fans that were lost from the start.
There was plenty of vocal comments to that effect at the time. And the 4E response was a combination of (a) players are destined to come around and (b) players who leave will be replaced many times over with fans pulled into the TTRPG hobby.

You are back to (a) with the addition that it didn't happen because the OGL was there to create a relief valve.
I still consider it more than a stretch of reasonable to assume people would play a game they don't like.
You don't even have to go further than this thread to see the opposite: people saying they liked 4E but as time went by they found a lot of the complaints were true. And 4E did continue to lose fanbase as time went by.
So I consider the presumption that any meaningful number of the people who disliked it would revise their opinion to be simple wishful thinking.
There is certainly no evidence that makes it a reasonable presumption.

And even in your hopeful scenario, you have a huge chunk of fans milling around lost in the gaming wilderness for "a year or three" before they give in. That is what is known in market terms as "demand". The OGL DID make an easy path of least resistance and thus reality happened. But in this alternate no-Paizo no-OGL universe, the demand would still exist. Maybe someone at White Wolf or someone at Steve Jackson would take heed and give the masses what they want. Maybe some company that doesn't exist because Paizo beat them to it would have. May twenty different options would have absorbed the demand in pieces. We will never know. But any of these presumptions are more reasonable than "people will give up and play a game they don't like".

Yes, the OGL most certainly played a key role in how the "civil war" played out once the divide existed. It seems we easily and obviously agree on that. Some alternate universe scenarios may have not had the same civil war feel. But some of them did. And with the number of people pushed out of the D&D brand, the potential that something very similar would have happened is quite real.

 

[Truename]

Definitely encounters.

In my game (1-30 just finished last month) we had this encounter where the heroes were in a pocket dimension and could change gravity with a minor action Arcana check. (This was inspired by WotBS, but I changed it up some.) There was a large ballroom with floating motes in it, and the party was hard pressed by a particular baddie. So they changed gravity to knock him around a corner, then the druid changed it again to fail 100 feet onto his head, weapon pointing down, making an Acrobatics check to transfer his falling damage onto the baddie. Splat. There was also much throwing ropes around the floating motes and using them to change trajectory mid-air...

Many levels later, the party was trying to destroy a huge magical weapon emplacement, guarded by runes representing each school of magic. They could either destroy the runes, or stand next to them to control their effect. Each one could do something devastating (teleport, throw up a barrier, fireball, etc.). Meanwhile, an endless stream of devils is coming through a portal, and the weapon is guarded behind a magical barrier...

In the very first campaign we ran (Scales of War), there was this encounter inside a dwarven mine, a huge room with stairway running up around the outside edge, and an endless stream of orcs coming out of doorways along the stairway. The heroes had to get to the top and figure out a control panel that would fill the room with scalding water and stop the orcs. They did that, but then some of the orcs pushed two of the characters off the platform. They fell into the scalding water and kept trying to get out, but were pushed back into the water. The heroes prevailed, but the two characters were boiled to death...

Good times. 4e will definitely be remembered in my group for its amazing set pieces. For me, it was the first edition where combat was truly fun in its own right, and I've played every edition since AD&D.

 

[Vael]

I'll remember 4e as the edition that made me a DM. My first effort at DMing 3.5 was a nightmare, and while I'm now more experienced and can handle Pathfinder and 3.5; it was 4e's ease-of-use that got me there.

I'll remember it as the edition that one of my most bad-ass characters was a bard. I had so many tricks up my sleeve, I could contribute as a spellcaster and melee combatant. The ongoing joke was that I could cast "Assassin", as I could grant so many attacks to him. (Oh and kudos to 13th Age on continuing that trend, their bards rock)

I'll remember it as the edition of my gaming group. Only two of us had played previous editions, 4e was the start for the rest. Which means I'll remember it for awhile, 'cause we're going to keep playing it.