D&D 4E Am I crazy? I've just gotten a hankering to play 4e again...

[Zardnaar]

Such being the purpose of the internet, afterall.

Pretty much. There's opinions though eg healing surges are great)terrible then there's 4E phb isn't have healing surges.

 

[Panda-s1]

Speed of play was one of our biggest gripes. At high level one round could take an hour or more. High level play in 5E can be a bit of a grind if you have people that insist on rolling one die at a time, but you can get around that. If I could just get people to get over analysis paralysis I'd be all set. I never did find a way to make 4E play much faster.

I have to say, I've never understood the desire to go back to 2e or B/X either. Play 5E with just PHB classes and subclasses, no feats. Maybe ignore backgrounds and skills. Wouldn't the result be close? That's probably a topic for a completely separate thread.


Monster lore was a bit of a mixed bag though, wasn't it? I remember one of my first games when I asked the DM to describe the monster we were fighting and he couldn't. All the MM had was stats - no description, no lore, nothing. I guess that worked if it was a monster from a previous edition that you recognized, but if not you were SOL. Monsters were just a bunch of stats and if you were lucky a picture.



That doesn't really seem to have anything to do with the edition though, more related to mod guidelines.

I think the goal was to jam pack as much monsters as possible. Each Monster section had a short description for the group as a whole, each monster had a small 'tactics' section on how to use it, and you had at least three different result for knowledge checks AND encounter group exemples.

Basically, the book wasn't interested in entertaining you, it wasn't interested in presenting itself like Volo's guide as a in-universe book. No, it focused on what you needed to USE the Monsters in it: under which conditions would those monsters enter in conflict with the PCs, what do they DO during those conflicts, who do they challenge the PCs with and, finally, what the player characters could know at a glance. That's all. They added pics too.

They added the heavier fluff later.

Here's a place with example pages.

I always felt like this was a weird bit of backlash on the part of your average D&D player. I rarely ever recall players stopping to ask about every bit of lore their character could recall about goblins, but the 4e MM doesn't have a detailed description of every monster's biology? TERRIBLE BOOK.

I also remember people laughing at the idea of moderate DC checks on bear lore, like okay it's a mundane creature, but I really had to think about it: even today your average person probably isn't gonna see a bear in the wild, and if you don't have popular media to tell you about bears then why would anyone just be knowledgeable about bears?

 

[HarbingerX]

As a B/X player, I say you're all wrong. 2e was a bloated mess. Ok, truthfully I left D&D in the early 1e era before MMII and UA and didn't return until 3.5e.

I would never, ever play 4e again except as a one-shot for the combat. I found running 4e horrible and as a player the combats took so long that players would completely check out until their turn. And their at-will/encounter/daily sequence of powers was the same every combat.

As a DM I found the monsters had a lot of really cool powers meant to synergize together, but unless I spent a lot of time studying them I'd find them a bear to run at the table. Other editions I'm able to just pick a monster and wing it pretty easily.

4e felt like a framework for a great game but without enough flesh on it to remove the 'mechanical' feel of the game. I think they had the right idea, but it was way to close to the bone to feel fun.

I find 5e a way better system to run than any of the 1e-4e, though my preferred system to run is still B/X with a modern hit/save system to remove the tables. Target20 being my favourite.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I always felt like this was a weird bit of backlash on the part of your average D&D player. I rarely ever recall players stopping to ask about every bit of lore their character could recall about goblins, but the 4e MM doesn't have a detailed description of every monster's biology? TERRIBLE BOOK.

Apart from anything being adequate reason for backlash at the time, D&D does have a history with monster lore. In the early days it was haphazard, whatever Gary or Dave or whomever thought of to write down about the monster. Thus, like, Gnolls being half-troll/half-gnome in one version, and hyena-persons in another, or purple worms possibly originally being purple wyrms (that was interesting, never heard that one before, but it just came up in some thread).
Then there were random bits of lore lifted straight from mythology, from other source of inspiration, and from Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings.
But, then, right at the height of the fad, we started seeing Ecology of ____ Articles in Dragon. And those got really detailed over the years, and they were very popular, IIRC.
And 2e had a lotta settings, each lavishly developed, including monsters' places in each of them.
Finally, 3.x let you build monsters with the same loving detail as PCs!

So, yeah, the pendulum had swung awfully far over in the direction of drowning monsters in detail and swaddling them in fluff and enshrining them in setting-specific lore.

 

[Oofta]

Some if the stuff you claimed was in the core books. 2E did have monster design rules in the DMG. Page 69 1995 DMG.

All I said was 2E was the most moddable D&D ever printed. It blows 5E out of the water. 5E has a few levers you can rebuild 2E from the ground up if you really want to.

5E dies some things well, it's encounter rules for example are a bit meh worse than 4E, argueably no better than 3.5.

It doesn't do high level, gritty, tactic or hexcrawls well. Alit of the optional rules eg flanking are also worse than 3E and 4E.

The encounter guidelines break down around level 6, feats outright break the game IMHO. Still fun it's not perfect. I

I never said 2E didn't had monster design guides, I said there was no way to calculate XP. There have been other interviews where the devs stated that older editions didn't have a systematic way of calculating XP.

The rest of what you state is your opinion. You're entitled, I simply disagree with pretty much every statement. Calling me a liar because I disagree is insulting.

 

[JeffB]

4e felt like a framework for a great game but without enough flesh on it to remove the 'mechanical' feel of the game.

Which is why I love 4Ecos usually I hate WOTC's "flesh", and I'd rather "flesh it out"myself

Reskinning things was so easy and fun. You didn't even NEED a MM. Just grab some of the various charts with the math and have at it. I ran complete improv games that way in 4E.

 

[JeffB]

I never said 2E didn't had monster design guides, I said there was no way to calculate XP. There have been other interviews where the devs stated that older editions didn't have a systematic way of calculating XP.

Sure it did. Its in the DMG.- Page 47 of the original prints.

Is it similar to modern games, nope. But D&D has always had a way to calculate XP for new monsters even the LBBdid. That sounds like something SKR would have said in his 3E days-he was always whining about how bad 2E was and he couldn't find anything in the books.

EDIT- There are also systems and advice for awarding XP for various other things too in that chapter

 

[Panda-s1]

As a B/X player, I say you're all wrong. 2e was a bloated mess. Ok, truthfully I left D&D in the early 1e era before MMII and UA and didn't return until 3.5e.

I would never, ever play 4e again except as a one-shot for the combat. I found running 4e horrible and as a player the combats took so long that players would completely check out until their turn. And their at-will/encounter/daily sequence of powers was the same every combat.

As a DM I found the monsters had a lot of really cool powers meant to synergize together, but unless I spent a lot of time studying them I'd find them a bear to run at the table. Other editions I'm able to just pick a monster and wing it pretty easily.

4e felt like a framework for a great game but without enough flesh on it to remove the 'mechanical' feel of the game. I think they had the right idea, but it was way to close to the bone to feel fun.

I find 5e a way better system to run than any of the 1e-4e, though my preferred system to run is still B/X with a modern hit/save system to remove the tables. Target20 being my favourite.

it's weird (and tangential), I knew a handful of people who played 2nd ed., skipped 3rd ed. entirely, and then got back via 4e and really enjoying it. this only further reinforces my opinion that 3rd ed. was an overwrought rules spectacle compared to AD&D. admittedly 3.5 was how I entered tabletop rpg's in general, and a string of bad GM's combined with common bad rules interpretations didn't help, but I still find getting into AD&D (and BECMI) a way more intriguing prospect than going back to 3.5.

Apart from anything being adequate reason for backlash at the time, D&D does have a history with monster lore. In the early days it was haphazard, whatever Gary or Dave or whomever thought of to write down about the monster. Thus, like, Gnolls being half-troll/half-gnome in one version, and hyena-persons in another, or purple worms possibly originally being purple wyrms (that was interesting, never heard that one before, but it just came up in some thread).
Then there were random bits of lore lifted straight from mythology, from other source of inspiration, and from Borges's Book of Imaginary Beings.
But, then, right at the height of the fad, we started seeing Ecology of ____ Articles in Dragon. And those got really detailed over the years, and they were very popular, IIRC.
And 2e had a lotta settings, each lavishly developed, including monsters' places in each of them.
Finally, 3.x let you build monsters with the same loving detail as PCs!

So, yeah, the pendulum had swung awfully far over in the direction of drowning monsters in detail and swaddling them in fluff and enshrining them in setting-specific lore.

I mean I do get the sudden lack of lore compared to previous editions, it is a lot to lose, but considering lore is largely in the realm of DM's (imo further enforced by the kinda bad rules for Knowledge in 3rd ed.) it still felt like people overreacting to 4e. I also felt like it was a weak attempt at getting DM's to come up with their own lore instead of having everyone effectively playing in the same setting. also, as it's been pointed out before the ecology series never stopped after 4e came out (hell it was one of my favorite parts of the new Dragon) so I mean if you really wanted dat lore it's not like WotC was hoarding it.

though I think the other pendulum in play here was the erosion of the DM/player segregation. I know 1st ed., and to a lesser extent 2nd ed., drew a hard line between DM's and players, or at least tried to, like "DON'T READ THE DMG YOU'LL RUIN THE GAME 5EVER", but by 4e it was like "PHB, you get magic items. DMG you get practical advice to help DM's not be garbage people". I still feel it was an overreaction, but in that context I can see some non-DM's getting mad about that.

...man though, putting magic items in the PHB is a whole other can of worms. "omg if magic items are in phb where is mystery? o:<" like okay do you want DM oriented information or not?

 

[Oofta]

Sure it did. Its in the DMG.- Page 47 of the original prints.

Is it similar to modern games, nope. But D&D has always had a way to calculate XP for new monsters even the LBBdid. That sounds like something SKR would have said in his 3E days-he was always whining about how bad 2E was and he couldn't find anything in the books.

EDIT- There are also systems and advice for awarding XP for various other things too in that chapter

Huh. Seems that my memory of a game I haven't played in 20 years is a bit fuzzy. Maybe I was thinking 3.x.

So bad on me for making statements about something buried in the cobwebs of my brain.

The rest of it still stands though. In my experience I've found most editions easy to customize if I wanted, I don't see how 2e would be dramatically different. I can see that it could be slightly more difficult with 3.x, and significantly more difficult in 4E to make more than minor tweaks (I made a few) or change presentation. Custom monsters were probably easiest in 4E, but I've found it fairly easy in all editions.

 

[Henry]

So that's all to say - I'd love to play me some 4e.

If you can make it happen, go for it! The hardest part is organizing the group...