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

[Nergal Pendragon]

It depends on what you are looking at.
If WotC had handled their 3PP policy better (even just communicating it better, not necessarily doing something different in the end), then Paizo may have not pulled the trigger on Pathfinder.
But even then, if 4E was what 4E was, then there was going to be a vast pent-up demand in the marketplace. Without PF, there would be some other game or group of games that would be blamed for how things ended up for 4E.

I'm looking at perceptions of the entire outcome. So I don't think it actually matters what WotC could have handled better in reality, only that there is a perception they mishandled it and Pathfinder resulted from that mishandling.

 

[Savage Wombat]

It depends on what you are looking at.
If WotC had handled their 3PP policy better (even just communicating it better, not necessarily doing something different in the end), then Paizo may have not pulled the trigger on Pathfinder.
But even then, if 4E was what 4E was, then there was going to be a vast pent-up demand in the marketplace. Without PF, there would be some other game or group of games that would be blamed for how things ended up for 4E.

I'm not sure any other company was as well-positioned as Paizo to fill the market void.

 

[billd91]

I saw 4E as a more advanced version of the old D&D minis skirmish game.

That came to my mind too.

That and City of Heroes. A friend of mine was adapting it into a tabletop game and it has some elements startlingly like 4e's role-oriented powers.

 

[Nagol]

That came to my mind too.

That and City of Heroes. A friend of mine was adapting it into a tabletop game and it has some elements startlingly like 4e's role-oriented powers.

A lot of MMOs do. It comes from having defined similar roles for combat. Many MMOs have settled on the holy trinity (as it is called) Tank, Striker, Healer. A few have tried adding other roles -- buffer, debuffer, damage soak, etc. But almost everyone has the main three.

 

[BryonD]

I'm not sure any other company was as well-positioned as Paizo to fill the market void.

Maybe not. They certainly had a huge advantage the way things played out.
You remove Paizo from the equation but leave the demand, something will happen. As I said, it may not have even been one single game.

But, yes, they were in a great spot for this.

 

[Manbearcat]

I think THP are a pretty annoying mechanic in every edition so I avoid them. The latter suggestion is a fine optional rule, but needlessly fiddly for normal play, imho.

Fair enough. I've never had any issue with them and find the valuable. Again, it is easy to see how these types of differences have huge impacts on the play style preference.

You didn't answer my other question: " If a fighter with 100 HP was hit 10 times for a total of 57 damage, would you limit the Warlord to healing only 47, leaving the 1 HP/ hit as actual injury?"

The problem with temporary hit points as a core healing mechanic for a class is two-fold:

1) It is less tactically engaging than "filling HP buckets" and therefore not very mentally rewarding from a "playing a game" perspective. There are very few to no decision-points. It is always optimal to proactively apply temporary hit points immediately so unforeseen, potentially lethal, burst damage is mitigated. There is no opportunity cost of choice and there is no extrapolating several "moves" into the future to maximize your group's capacity for survival. Just press the temp HP buttan and do whatever else it is you do. Healing is tactically engaging (thus rewarding) because there is opportunity cost of choice and you're faced with multiple, critical decision-points throughout the course of a conflict. Temp HP subverts that paradigm entirely.

2) Reactive healing, assuming it is sufficient to the task, is better because you are always in a position to respond to true urgency (not just proactively attempting to mitigate forecasted urgency - which may never come to pass), typically due to spike damage, wherever it might be. Filling HP buckets as they're depleted ensures you're never in a situation where you've deployed precious resources as a contingency to protect against burst damage that may never come. Its more efficient and it stacks so you're always ready.

More fun. More function.

 

[pemerton]

I saw 4E as a more advanced version of the old D&D minis skirmish game.

That came to my mind too.

More advanced in the sense that it has rules for creating and playing characters, for scene framing, for non-combat resolution (the most sophisticated of any edition of D&D), plus a rich and evocative default background which is tightly integrated with a number of these mechanical elements.

Ie it's an RPG, not a skirmish game.

 

[pemerton]

From my experience, the thing that always appealed to me - and has kept me in the hobby for 30 years or so now - was the whole ’theatre of the mind’ aspect. The idea of playing in a shared, interactive fantasy without the need for visual, tactile or tabletop representation of any kind.

The GM in D&D has generally always needed visual, tabletop representation - world maps, dungeon maps etc. The game's movement rules, for instance, all presuppose the existence of such things. So did it's combat rules, which have always delineated movement in terms of distance on a map, not in terms of abstract "zones" or positioning. (This remains true of 5e; 13th Age is one D&D ruleset that dispenses with the need for maps in combat.)

4e opens up these things to the players; it doesn't introduce them into a game where they were previously absent.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

Ultimately, for me, it was the edition that tried to lure MMO / video game players into tabletop roleplaying, with predictably disastrous results (when all was said and done).

 

[TrippyHippy]

The GM in D&D has generally always needed visual, tabletop representation - world maps, dungeon maps etc. The game's movement rules, for instance, all presuppose the existence of such things. So did it's combat rules, which have always delineated movement in terms of distance on a map, not in terms of abstract "zones" or positioning. (This remains true of 5e; 13th Age is one D&D ruleset that dispenses with the need for maps in combat.)

4e opens up these things to the players; it doesn't introduce them into a game where they were previously absent.

Not true. In previous editions to 3E there wasn’t a need for miniatures or any other visual/tactile representation. From Basic D&D:

“Your campaign group might like to use miniature figures to represent all characters and monsters, especially in combat encounters.”

Many groups chose not to - and certainly that was my experience when I first encountered the game. DMs may have scribbled some maps and stuff down, and in our group we generally nominated the order in which the party would walk, but we didn’t have miniatures and there was nothing in the rules that actually needed them to operate the game. Other groups I played with later literally played the game from armchairs without even a tabletop present!

In 3e the ‘attacks of opportunity’ rules, and the like, became more strident, but again this was controversial at the time, and many groups ignored them (indeed considering the wide variety of d20 products that didn’t use miniatures - it’s quite evident).

4E, however, made it pretty made the miniatures based rules central and integral to the game. Some have argued that this took the game back to it’s 1970s war-game roots - but again that is missing the point. D&D was an evolution away from miniatures-based war-games. It created a new genre of game - due to it’s ‘theatre of the mind’ aspect - and that is what people felt they lost in recent editions.