I see that 4E was polarizing in a number of ways. But can someone give me the "jist" of the whole thing? Or maybe point me to a site that has already broken it down?
More than a few 'h4ters' have long diatribes about the evils of 4e and the triumphant victory of Pathfinder.
The truth is pretty complex, and points mainly to some very bad business decisions by WotC (or forced on WotC by Hasbro).
1. How did everybody (or most people) here react to the news of a new edition in the first place? Excitement or trepidation? Didn't 3.5 still have a good amount of momentum in 2007? Or were people ready for an overhaul?
Obviously, with something that resulted in armed camps having at eachother, reactions varied but eventually shook out into h4ters and 4vengers.
The /initial/ reaction, though, I think it's safe to say, was on the surprised and negative side. You were there for 3e, you must recall the sense that 3.5 was a cyncial cash-grab 'forcing' fans to re-buy core books. AD&D had two editions, both lasting at least 10 years. BECMI also went over 10 years. Whether you looked at the announcement as ending 3.5 after only 5 years, or 3e after only 8, it was clearly too soon.
So the stage was set for a whole lot of folks to latch onto /any/ reason, real or imagined to hate 4e. Unfortunately, there were both a few real reasons, and a lot of very determined people ready to manufacture imagined ones.
2. How impressive were the early sneak peeks? Were people shocked at some of the changes from the get go? Or were people who didn't like the new game mostly blindsided once they picked up the core books?
Not very. They really failed to capture the positive changes that had been made with 4e, making it look 'different for the sake of being different.'
3. I see that that having the option of playing "Pathfinder" fragmented the fanbase somewhat. Was that a good thing or bad thing for this forum? Or did it have a minimal effect at all?
Pathfinder was the beneficiary of a 'perfect storm' of legal loopholes, established relationships, backlash, competitor meltdown and design talent. WotC didn't so much lose the D&D franchise to Paizo as it forced it on them. If Paizo hadn't consented to print Pathfinder, a dozen other 3pps would have tried their hand at it, and one would have taken the lead.
[sblock="The Perfect Storm:"] In the 3e era, they created the OGL, which gave /anyone/ who wanted the rights to re-print and build upon the core d20 system, including many untrademarkable D&Disms, like 'fighters' and 'clerics' and whatnot, that together, had been used by TSR to defend the franchise from imitators like Arduin. That resulted in rocketing D&D/d20 back into industry leadership as competitors fell all over themselves diverting their efforts from competing RPG products to complementary d20 products. Chief among these was actual WotC-partner, Paizo, who took over publishing Dragon and Dungeon magazines (incidentally, giving them a subscriber list of all of D&D's most ardent fans). Then, WotC (or rather Hasbro) decided all that revenue growth in the industry belonged to them, and tried to put the OGL genie back in the bottle by putting out a radically-redesigned game and tying it inextricably to a much more restrictive GSL.
That move, alone, would probably have doomed the next ed of D&D. But that was only part of it.
Hasbro had a policy of dividing it's product lines into 'core' and 'non-core' properties. Core got lots of resources for new development to fuel big growth numbers, while non-core was expected to prettymuch just keep printing the same things and making modest, stable profits. WotC pitched the next D&D as a core property, on the rather wild idea that they could get it to generate MMO-like subscription revenue via an on-line suite of exclusive publications and utilities (DDI was all they came up with to deliver that). The revenue goal was, according to a Hasbro insider who latter leaked the whole thing, $50-100 million, for perspective, the entire RPG industry after the boost d20 gave it, /might/ have represented 20 mil or so. Maybe. So you're looking at the bar for 'success' for D&D being raised from "win in a $20 million marketplace" to "win the whole market and at least double it."
That move, alone, would also likely have doomed any conceivable RPG product launch to 'failure.' At best, it was a bold, long-shot betting of the future of the franchise. But, it's still not the whole story.
4 launched and, predictably enough, in spite of the nerdrage, was an instant success by D&D-book standards, appearing on best-seller lists and so forth. DDI also launched, and turned out to be mostly vaporware - but a lot was promised to be in the works. Then, the lead developer of the DDI tools died (and the less said about the circumstances, the better). Apparently, he hadn't been a stickler for SWDLC or documentation, either, and nothing much was done with the DDI tools for a couple of years. The vaporware never coalesced and DDI never met it's industry-re-defining revenue goals.
At that point the D&D line was doomed as a 'core brand' of Hasbro, and WotC suffered some nasty layoffs. The line, which had been planned to have a constant constant new products, new classes, new options and updates to help support demand for DDI, had to be re-imagined in the much lower-resources, lower-revenue non-core brand mode. The result was a pretty bland, back-peddled re-boot of the franchise, after only 2 years, called Essentials. It failed miserably.
The the OGL and Paizo dealt them a final blow when Paizo released Pathfinder. The 'h4ter' nerdrage started before 4e hit the shelves, and never abated. Normally, when a D&D rev rolls (even as far back as AD&D and B/X slowly replacing original D&D), there are hold-outs who want to stick with the old edition. Thanks to copyright and trademark laws, no one had created a very successful alternative to support an older edition since Arduin got C&D'd by TSR. Thus, though there were always hold-outs, they had nothing much to buy and nothing much to talk about after a while, and the emphasis shifted to the current edition, even if the hold-out never actually converted. With the OGL, hold-outs had a ready source of new 3.x d20 material in perpetuity - if they could demonstrate the demand for it. And, remember, Paizo just happened to have the address of everyone they'd been mailing Dragon and Dungeon magazines to. And, of course, there's the internet. So it was very easy for Paizo to tap into the hold-outs' nerdrage and direct it to a 'playtest' while they developed Pathfinder (using d20 as the meat & bones of the system). Pathfinder came out just as D&D was imploding into it's non-core-brand 'Essentials' slow-pace-of-realeases incarnation. Pathdinfer, unsurprisingly, pulled ahead.[/sblock]
4. What else was noteworthy about 4E? Was there some product that was particularly awesome or infamous?
The first adventure for 4e, Keep on the Shadowfell, was pretty awful. It was written before the 4e rules were finalized, and contained some serious errors in encounter design as a result. Two of the battles were particularly notorious for TPKs: the "Irontooth" and "Kalarel" encounters. Both involved a badly-statted, over-level 'Elite' (something the DMG specifically warned against). A later, generally better module, Thunderspire Labyrinth, made the same mistake with it's final 'boss fight.'
If you got past KotS and gave the 4e rules a chance, though, you found a relatively (by D&D standards) innovative system that addresses many long-standing problems with the game.
[sblock="The Good"]
Class Balance: A major problem D&D struggled with it's entire history was balance among the classes. Some classes were overpowered at low level, underpowered at high level, others were the reverse, others just bad all the time. Layered over the raw-power imbalance was balance in versatility: some classes lacked it almost entirely or had only the versatility the DM would grant them with off-the-cuff rulings, others were extremely versatile if they could access the limited resources that made them so. The things D&D tried to do over the decades to correct the issue generally only shifted it around or made it worse. The 2e fighter went from overpowered at very low level to overpowered damage dealer over a wider range of levels. The 3e casters went from underpowered and harried at low levels, to overpowered at all levels, wildly so at high ones. 4e put all classes on a unified level progression chart, and gave them comparable access to limited resources in a pattern called "AEDU." Each class got a comparable number of 'powers' - spells, martial exploits, divine prayers, etc - that were useable at-will, 1/encounter, or 1/day. The numbers did vary a little due to class features, and potency varied a little with Role, but those variances were minor compared to prior eds. The 'powers' were radically different in nature from one 'Source' to another (martial powers, called exploits always used weapons, never did typed damage, and were overwhelmingly melee or ranged, while arcane powers, called spells, never used weapons, did a wide variety of typed damage, and were overwhelming Area Effects and Ranged, rarely ever melee/touch). The result was that each class had a clear role to play in the party that it was good at, yet no class was absolutely required for a party to succeed, and every character contributed to that success.
Roles & Sources: Mentioned above Roles (striker, leader, defender, controller) and Sources (Martial, Arcane, Divine, Primal, Psionic), have always been present in D&D. 4e, however, formalized them and supported them within the system. Divine & Arcane magic were no longer all just 'spells' that you memorized. Divine 'prayers' could use a holy symbol or a weapon, be melee or ranged/area and tended to do radiant damage, for instance, while Arcane spells were more like traditional D&D spells, not calling for weapons and emphasizing range/area effects, and even still being memorized ('prepared') in the case of the Wizard. Similarly, Roles took de-facto party 'niches' like the 'tanking' front-line fighter (which the fighter had never been very good at without a handy choke point to park in), the 'band-aid' cleric's all-important healing, and the trap-finding/lock-picking/backstabbing theif - and consolidated them into more evenly-important formal Roles with each class excelling at one Role and having one or two others it might develop in a secondary capacity. Fighters, for instance, gained the ability to mark and to stop enemies trying to run past or get away from them, making them effective 'Defenders.' While Clerics saw their band-aid role expanded to that of a healing/buffing 'Leader' still capable of contributing offensively in combat while filling that role.
Clarity & consistency: More hallmarks of a decent game. While d20 had done a lot to make D&D less self-contradictory and confusing in it's base mechanics, 4e continued that trend and applied it to classes and npc/monster stats as well. From minor things like consolidating fiddly modifiers under 'Combat Advantage,' to assumptions that permeated the rules like 'exception based design,' (the simple idea that specific rules are 'exceptions' to general one), and presentation that bordered on a technical-manual style of precision, the game was designed from the ground up to be easy to understand and adjudicate, lightening the burden for the DM...
Ease of DMing: For 26 years, designing an 'encounter' to challenge your players was much more art than science. Monsters had HD that didn't map well to levels, and not much else to indicate what kind of a threat they might pose to the party. Figuring that out was a matter of experience and 'feel' - and, perhaps, 'fudging' things substantially on the fly. 3e tried to formalize monsters by Challenge Rating, but it still didn't map very well to level. Some CR monsters were as over- or under-powered as their PC counterparts' classes. Indeed, the DM could give monsters class levels. 4e used some fairly straightforward (though tweeked a few times) formulae to build monsters that would be a suitable 'balanced' challenge for the balanced parties of PCs it enabled. It was an entirely new approach, and arguably wasn't perfected (if anything can be said to be 'perfected' in an RPG) until the MM3.
Skill Challenges: One of the biggest innovations of 4e, and, at release, it's most appalling failure, Skill Challenges provided a structure for non-combat encounters that was designed to include everyone, in spite of class/role. A great idea, but the first cut of the rules was mathematically broken - as designed, Skill Challenges actually got /easier/ as you ratcheted up the 'complexity' that was supposed to make them harder. An initial revision put them back in order, bu they swung between 'too easy' and 'too hard,' before finally settling on a balanced final update.
Playability: One final, perennial problem D&D had always faced was that of playability across levels. Prior eds of D&D had a 'sweet spot' at which they played reasonably well, when the classes and races and monsters and so forth all pretty well balanced and delivered fun play. The exact range varied with edition and opinion. In AD&D it might be pegged at 3-8, while 3.5 might be run 'E6.' 4e delivered playability across all levels - and provided 30 levels in total, to boot. The higher levels arguably had some fine-tuning of 'da math,' before they were 'perfected.' [/sblock]
