Fair enough this is your position on the matter, but there were also 4e players that agreed with the sentiment that 4e had WoW/video-gamey qualities.
http://dreadgazebo.net/4e-plays-like-a-video-game/
But to each their own.
Yeah, there's no need to war about it. The whole line of reasoning just always smacked of "I don't have anything concrete to say, but I want to diss this game" TBH. 4e certainly is COGNIZANT of MMORPG game play, I just don't think it really makes sense to say that ANY TTRPG is very much like an MMORPG, they are entirely different genre of thing and even if you ported a mechanical concept from one to the other it is generally in service of a very different master.
Considering that my post largely dealt with how much of 4e exists within 5e, your above quote doesn't make much sense.
Sure it does, you stated that 4e didn't do anything original, on a page that contains a VERY LARGE LIST of 4e's signature features, all of which are fairly original, and if you read the thread people have added dozens, maybe hundreds, more. So your comments about what part of 4e is in 5e are not even relevant to this comment AFAICT.
So your prediction on 5e would be that it didn't change enough so will die quicker than 4e? You're ready to make that statement now?
No, my prediction is that D&D will become very much less relevant going forward. It may remain more popular than most other games, but it won't innovate and it will fall further and further out of step with RPGs in general. This is actually pretty similar to what happened to AD&D when TSR failed to innovate with 2e. Then they got stuck, the game became MUCH less popular and turned into something of a backwater in terms of game design. It lost contact with the leading edge of the hobby by the late 90's it was a moribund 10 year old game. TSR subsequently went bust. Failure to innovate clearly had something to do with that, as the subsequent huge upsurge in 3e's popularity amply demonstrated. So perhaps we do have something to look forward to, in 10 years Hasbro will spin off D&D and someone else will start the cycle anew.
Yes.
In my humble opinion, WotC. Please note, I'm not saying that a lot of great ideas were not explored with the design of 4e, I'm only speaking to a large fracture being created within our community on the levels that the previous editions never created.
I don't think it makes sense to 'blame' anyone. WotC made a large number of mistakes, only some of which might have been game-design related. I think its clearly possible to do D&D better than 4e, but I don't agree with people who say it was this or that feature of 4e which was 'bad' and created problems. 4e incorporated necessary innovations to deal with the issues of 3e, which were IMHO rampant and quite large.
I believe the attempt with 5e was to heal the fracture. Sadly you do not see it that way. Also your suggestion seems to have them compete with Rob Heinsoo's 4e baby 13th Age by sticking to the 4e way and as far as I can see based on posters on Enworld that many were not happy with the simplitic attitude of Essentials. I think revision/consolidation of ideas was very much needed.
I think if WotC's people in charge of D&D had been enthusiastic about 4e and 'grokked' 4e's strengths then they could have gotten a huge amount more mileage out of the system. Designing a new edition was premature and had they had someone in charge who really got 4e and was comfortable with it then better things could have been done than Essentials. OTOH I don't have a big issue with Essentials, I just thought it wasn't the fixing what needed fixing, which was terrible adventure design basically.
From my perspective 4e was not as flexible as any of the other editions, it was a closed system. The DDI character builder was horrible in terms of customization, IMO.
Yet you can read on this or other threads here by 4e GMs how incredibly flexible things could easily be. You can read Chris Perkins writeups of his Iomandra campaign too, which was pretty friggin cool to put it mildly. 4e is a customization powerhouse at several levels, you simply have to get out of the mindset of thinking everything is cast in stone or that narrative isn't the real driving force of RPGs.
What agenda are you referring to here?
WotC constantly attempted to cast everything in terms of AD&D-esque adventures with very static design. While some of them might have had decision points of a sort they ALMOST all lacked really dynamic situations and didn't climb very high up on the action-adventure scale. They were basically dungeon crawls to a large extent. They never understood that the beating heart of a good 4e game is highly dynamic situations. Many 4e monsters, especially some of the MM1 monsters but even some in MM3 and MV, are very suited to knock-down-drag-out fights, or force encounters into that mold.
True, in 5e there is no epic play in the same style of 4e - however 4e did not seem to include a great many styles of play, hence the reason for the fractured community. Which game is more inclusive, one which excludes one epic style of play or one which excludes a great many styles of play.
I don't see where 3e or 2e really supported a wider variety of styles of play than 4e did. You may not have bothered to TRY different things, but that's not to say they weren't possible or that the game didn't do them well. Certainly there isn't total overlap, we can agree on that, and I've said as much.
No Orcus, but Tiamat is available.
And there are many quite solid and fun 4e solos as well, even epic ones. Lolth for instance is pretty interesting, though I suspect that her bare statblock really doesn't do her (or any capstone boss) justice on its own. You really need context with that sort of monster. Again, I think the problem you see with something like Orcus is that the designers simply didn't see where the strengths of 4e really were right off.
The point being that a 4e mechanic has been included within 5e.
Sure, in some small fashion you can say that bits of 4e float around in 5e like bits of yesterday's hobbit float around in a jelly cube. It ain't getting up and tap dancing...
There are mixed reports on survivability regarding Venomfang. I prefer that. As for the Wizard being balanced with the rest of the characters - he has always been more flexible in every edition - as for greatest damage dealer, I'm not convinced on that.
No, I think the battlemaster in our game is the highest damage dealer. The wizard is usually the lynch pin though. Sometimes he manages to deal LOTS of damage, but often its more like with the owlbears where he was able to pin one away from the party with a CoD, putting it in a nasty catch-22 vs our archery, and T-Wave the other one back out of contact with the party long enough that one of the fighters could jump in and the cleric was able to buff him and keep things going our way. The funny thing is said fighter is an EK and his next action was to unleash a spell of his own.
Yeah I see this, but I'm not convinced. IMO, 5e improved grid play by removing all the grindy-4e mechanisms (conditions and reactions).
It made AoEs much harder to adjudicate, created a very weird 'Conga Line' effect that plagues grid combat, and added some complications of its own like the weird insistence on having 2 different ways that spell attacks work.
Now, I'm all in favor of some things that 5e DID do, and I don't claim it 'did nothing', but it isn't particularly innovative. I think 4e's tactically fiddly power/action/duration juxtaposition isn't a great implementation either. The removal of the Minor Action, I like. The, sadly only partial, conversion of situational modifiers to advantage/disadvantage, I like. Most of the other things 5e did, not a fan of them. "4.5e" or whatever you wish to call it could have done all of that without sacrificing the other innovations of 4e. That game deserved to be made, and 13th Age isn't it, not even close IMHO.
Another view point being it made it samey and bland. You push two squares, he pulls two squares, he slides away two squares and he affects two squares.
You hold his hand, he holds your hand, you hold your hands together and on a miss you grasp each others hand.
Yeah, I'm not going to relitigate how little IMO the people who say these things just don't get what happens in 4e or just how incredibly diverse the characters actually are. I've never seen 2 characters in 4e with the same shtick, never. Just because their 'thing' is composed of similar elements does NOT make the end results very similar.
I think its more a consolidation of ideas over the last 4 editions. Does it lack a couple of aspects from previous editions that we might like, sure - but it caters to more styles across the board. 4e was innovative, but it felt like a pushy selfish edition - stating "this is the way you MUST play"
Yeah, I just don't see where 4e's agenda is any stronger than the agenda of 2e. Have you READ 2e? I mean really actually sat down and read the core books, not just skimmed a bit of it and assumed it was 1e with THAC0?
And as for 3.x, its not utterly in service of a very strong simulationist agenda and play style? Really? It doesn't with very great reliability lead to a certain sort of super-casters and their sidekicks kind of game with a lot of meta-gaming and 'gimmick' play?
Personally the signpost of 5e is more along the lines of "this is some of the better and more popular ideas of D&D over the course of its life, some variants are included for the different playstyles, do with the system what you will"
Honestly, I don't FAULT 5e for being a game that caters mostly to certain styles of play, this is part and parcel of RPGs. There are a couple issues though. First is the issue of the massive snow job (or fit of wishful thinking) that happened in the process of releasing 5e. The 'promised' modularity was transparently impossible from the start (at least within the context of a game that is conventional D&D for the most part). I posted about this 2 YEARS before the game was released, and many other people did too.
And no, the rather mild one-paragraph here and there variant rules don't really address many styles of play. They may address some, but you can't do with 5e, regardless of which variant rules you use, what I was doing with 4e, it just isn't possible without significant fundamental changes. I never thought it would be, but I constantly hear this refrain that I need to 'be happy' because I can 'just use some of the rules variants'. Sorry, it doesn't work for me.
Honestly, what where the variant options available in 4e? Off the top of my head I can only think of the Inherent System and Page 42, I'm sure there were more but I cannot recall them right now.
4e has relatively few real 'variant rules', though the DMGs both mention a number of things that could be changed. Mostly these are in terms of basic 'how the game is run' types of things. Stuff like XP, healing and resting, treasure and magic, etc. AFAIK the only real player-side variant rule was Inherent Bonus. I don't think that's a huge black mark on 4e though, AFAIK only 2e (and to a bit lesser extent 5e) really include any significant number of variant rules in core books. 1e certainly didn't, but when you go back to 70's-era stuff its hard to tell, you weren't really expected to play 'by the book'.
Page 42 BTW isn't a 'variant rule', its a core part of 4e. I see no sign that it was intended to be optional or a lesser part of the game.
