D&D 4E Is there a "Cliffs Notes" summary of the entire 4E experience?

[fanboy2000]

My View

4e is about failing to convince the corrupt city guards that you're not really there to get Galroc, the thieves' guild's number 2 guy and so now you have to fight them. You guys tried, but they just weren't buying it.

Well, now you're bloodied and down to two healing surges. You were really hoping that you'd be less beat-up, but guess what? You're not. Now you have to make a choice: to you try to daily the guy in front of you, the guy who's responsable for most of your damage, or do you go with an encounter power and hope for the best? You were hoping to be on your top game for Galroc, but that's not happing.

Because this has to be done with tonight. Any later, and he makes his big push, and that's bad for everyone.

That, for me, is the CliffsNotes for 4e.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I find that for me, 4e's biggest weakness was its "one true way" ism. There's no reason that 4e HAD to be a game at its core about ADEU, Healing Surges, Martial Dailies, Inspirational Healing, Morale HP, skill challenges, Forgesqueries, Dragonborn, blink elves, or any of that rot. 4e *should* have been a game you could play without any of that.

One of the disappointing things about 4e relative to d20 was that 4e's basic structure and design philosophy could have been used to create a more robust core system, like that of d20, but more adaptable to other genres and the like. Not to the point of being outright generic like Hero, but more than just a collection of games using the same dice-resolution rubric.

I suppose it's pretty obvious that it couldn't have done that, /and/ been used as a vehicle to try to undermine the OGL with the GSL, but it is sad to see such potential undeveloped.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Again, 4E was losing fan base over time.

The pattern that D&D has followed since the fad ended was that new eds start out strong selling the core books, then taper off quickly[/quote] when they have nothing to offer but supplements. (Really, most games follow that pattern, afterall, no one's likely to buy a supplement if they don't already have the core, and a lot of people might be happy playing with core for a long time.) 4e was no different from any other ed in that regard. It was not being abandoned en masse by fans that started out liking it -indeed, it was drawing in an retaining new fans better than most post-fad eds - it's just that supplements don't sell well, and WotC cynical attempt to label supplements 'core' didn't fool anyone.

Just tracing the same old trajectory wasn't enough, because the revenue goals were so far beyond the pale. 4e needed to not just sell like a new ed, it had to sell DDI subs like they were MMO memberships. When DDI tools were set back by a certain tragedy, that went from highly unlikely to virtually impossible, and D&D was dropped into non-core-brand hell, requiring a massive pulling back from it's ambitious design principles as staff was slashed. The result was Essentials, a much slower release schedule, and Pathfinder pulling ahead in sales.

1E and 2E were near on to the only game in town in their day. There was not any great "hold out" community to "come around". (Other than OD&Ders, and they did NOT come around)

Actually, there were some parallels when 1e and B/X rolled. Even though TSR kept printing 0E, there was a contingent of holdouts, and, someone put out a clone for them: Arduin.

And TSR sued them.

So it didn't happen again until a rev rolled with the OGL available.

There is no evidence to support your theory whatsoever.

All three elements of the 'perfect storm' are real. One comes from an insider, one is a matter of public record, and, obviously, no one can debate that the OGL exists or what was in the GSL.

Importantly, they correlate. They're things about the release of 4e that was /different/ from other D&D rev-rolls.

The pattern of sales: starting off strong with the core books, then tapering off, was not different, it's the way 3.5, 3.0 and 2e - and many other 2nd-and-later editions of RPGs have historically sold. It's why WotC is constantly tempted to re-boot the franchise, instead of letting it have nice long decade+ TSR-era-style runs.

 

[pemerton]

Come on, guys. You may not sympathize with the anti-4E people's stated reasons for disliking the system, but that does not invalidate those reasons or mean they are offered in bad faith.

My objection to this "everyone's to blame" storyline is this:

WotC published a game. There was plenty of previews to tell us what it would be like, and when I bought it, it was just as the previews had promised. Then when I came online to talk about it I could hardly get a post out or a thread up without multiple posters coming in and telling me how I was playing a video game, playing a shallow game, playing a series of miniature skirmishes loosely connected by free-form roleplay, etc.

So the wrong thing I did was playing and liking and posting about 4e. Which is now to be treated as equivalent to spamming thread after thread with pointless rants and insults. Personally, I don't see the equivalence. The rants and insults may well have been offered in good faith - I'm sure a lot of "h4ters" were very sincere. That doesn't mean they weren't rants and insults.

It is certainly possible to point to places where earlier editions did the same things; but 4E did them a bunch more, in more places, and that was a bridge too far for some folks.

<snip>

I think part of the reason for the problems around hit points was that the 4E team failed to reckon with the contradiction between the Theory of Hit Points and the way they were presented in the game.

I don't really agree that 4e went futher than 1st ed AD&D with its metagame mechanics - AD&D has metagame action economy, saving throws and hit points, just like 4e.

I agree that it was different from 3E.

On the issue of the aesthetics of hit points, I have some sympathy for the 4e desginers - who was to know that people who for years had swallowed the fact that "Cure Light Wounds" didn't actually mean what it said (given that it can heal a near-mortal wound on just about any 1st level character) would suddenly complain when "Healing Surge" didn't quite mean what it literally said?

 

[pemerton]

The 4E rules had a big shift towards gamism compared to 3E and the rules stopped to even try to be simulationist.

In 3E it is easier to heal a mortal wound to a farmer (Cure Light Wounds will do the job) then a bruise to a high level fighter (for a character with over 100 hit points, even 20 lost hp are just a bruise, but Cure Light Wounds can't restore them).

What is that simulating?

In 3E, an ancient dragon has "natural armour" that is tougher than the most enchanted magical plate mail.

What is that simulating?

There are simulationist systems out there, but 3E is not one of them. The closest it gets is in its grapple rules and it skill system - but even the skill system breaks down at high levels. What is simulated by a DC 40 lock compared to a DC 20 lock? As with natural armour, they numbers are just mechanical stipulations to make the system work. They are not actual models of any fictional phenomena or processes.

 

[tuxgeo]

This thread is depressing.

Not to me: I find it encouraging, in the sense that I hope that many other posters may find it cathartic: they post their final rants against 4E here in this thread while they can, because the subject has a slight chance (very slight!) of never coming up again.

Once they have that ranting completed and out of their system, they can start commenting about 5E in other threads instead. (Here's hoping! )

 

[Henry]

I don't think we're writing the same language -- an objective is what you're trying to accomplish.

The objective of the skill challenge was "to gain a favor or assistance from a local leader". If successful, the favour is gained. If it failed, it wasn't and we're done.

A fail-forward would be more like "you have failed to impress the local leader, but if you do this he must accord you honour" or "as you leave without the help you sought, a merchant gives you a cryptic whisper on the way out 'Toberic can help with what you seek. Tell no one'". Or anything else that keeps the narrative moving and provides enough additional input for the players to make another meaningful choice.

Oops, left out the word "overall" - sorry. As in, the currying of favor was not the end goal, the example made it clear (to me at least) that stopping some sort of goblin incursion was the goal. If you failed, as it said, the challenge just gets harder.

Anyway, I'm not put to change your thinking on 4e anyway -- it's water under the bridge by now, and I don't even play it anymore either (though I still keep it around should I get the chance to run it again sometime). I just found the skill challenge concepts as laid out in the DMG still well explained, even if the mathematics of execution needed reworking.

 

[Henry]

Not to me: I find it encouraging, in the sense that I hope that many other posters may find it cathartic: they post their final rants against 4E here in this thread while they can, because the subject has a slight chance (very slight!) of never coming up again.

Once they have that ranting completed and out of their system, they can start commenting about 5E in other threads instead. (Here's hoping! )

One can hope, though I don't wager money on this.
I'd much rather find people willing to split some common ground and get together into a 5e game, and find a group of orcs to go all "murder hobo" over.

 

[I'm A Banana]

One of the disappointing things about 4e relative to d20 was that 4e's basic structure and design philosophy could have been used to create a more robust core system, like that of d20, but more adaptable to other genres and the like. Not to the point of being outright generic like Hero, but more than just a collection of games using the same dice-resolution rubric.

I suppose it's pretty obvious that it couldn't have done that, /and/ been used as a vehicle to try to undermine the OGL with the GSL, but it is sad to see such potential undeveloped.

I was excited when I saw Gamma World, and disappointed that it didn't go further.

It'll probably come as no great surprise to anyone that I think any attempt to go against the OGL was harmful to the D&D community as a whole, and to WotC's bottom line as a result. Put simply, the folks who were scared of an OGL brand competitor to D&D were, I believe, scared of the wrong thing.

But OGL or not, I wanted to see more diversity out of 4e than I got. Hell, I might *still* like to see it. If 5e ends up disappointing me, I'll still be playing and tweaking 4e until at least 6e, and I will certainly be in the market for products that do stuff with 4e that WotC was too timid to attempt.

 

[Nagol]

Oops, left out the word "overall" - sorry. As in, the currying of favor was not the end goal, the example made it clear (to me at least) that stopping some sort of goblin incursion was the goal. If you failed, as it said, the challenge just gets harder.

Anyway, I'm not put to change your thinking on 4e anyway -- it's water under the bridge by now, and I don't even play it anymore either (though I still keep it around should I get the chance to run it again sometime). I just found the skill challenge concepts as laid out in the DMG still well explained, even if the mathematics of execution needed reworking.

The way I read the challenge was the group was about to head out to the goblin lands and wanted more help so they sought out the challenge before heading out the door. They either get the help they request or they don't.

I like the concept. There is a workable framework buried in the DMG1 idea. It certainly needed work to fix the math; I think it also needs work to make the probability of success levels more obvious. I also think it needed a stronger discussion as to how to implement a skill challenge -- the example is pretty poor in that it include auto-failure points (Intimidation attempts) and a limited win/loss condition. The other published examples from early WotC modules were generally panned -- which tells me they were struggling with the implementation themselves.

I know some of that work was done later and I know several of the posters that treat 4e as story-now/pressure play have very good things to say about the challenge system.

In many ways I'm a bigger fan of FATE's mental/social combat, concessions and consequences as resolution mechanisms.