D&D 4E Edition Experience - Did/Do You Play 4th Edition D&D? How Was/Is it?

[Ruin Explorer]

You are arguing that one specific concept of minion was not present. I am arguing that in general there were minions present - and you just admitted their were. See the issue?

Okay, but by that logic "minions" have been in D&D since OD&D/BECMI. There are tons of adventures from that era where a boss is summoning skeletons, or surrounded by orcs or the like.

So 4E didn't add them, just renamed them and changed them to 1HP, copying Feng Shui. It's certainly not something "from WoW".

Maybe we should start here though - name one thing unique about WOW that wasn't in other RPG's or MMO's of the time.

Eating food/drinking drinks to gain health/mana is the first thing that comes to mind.

Being able to level from level 1 to max level just by doing quests.

I'll think of more but those were huge, and totally changed the experience for a lot of players.

EDITED IN:

Bandages - (actually gone from WoW now) - this was huge too, in WoW you could make a "bandage" with the First Aid profession skill and just use to yourself to rapidly heal up, even though you weren't a healer. There was no limit on it too, you could use it literally after every fight if you wanted, the only cost was the materials you looted.

The Auction House - Other games had trading methods - "consignment merchants" for example in DAoC for example, but no-one had the streamlined and accessible AH that WoW had.

I'm trying to think of specific class abilities because they might be interesting but I keep realizing another video game or MMO did them first (like taming pets - that was in Pokemon, and it wasn't even the first - wow later got an entire Pokemon-rip-off subsystem). The difficulty is WoW was actually behind the curve on a lot of this stuff. It was accessibility that made WoW huge, just as its made 5E huge.

 

[FrogReaver]

Okay, but by that logic "minions" have been in D&D since OD&D/BECMI. There are tons of adventures from that era where a boss is summoning skeletons, or surrounded by orcs or the like.

So 4E didn't add them, just renamed them. It's certainly not something "from WoW".



Eating food/drinking drinks to gain health/mana is the first thing that comes to mind.

Being able to level from level 1 to max level just by doing quests.

I'll think of more but those were huge, and totally changed the experience for a lot of players.

EDITED IN:

Bandages - (actually gone from WoW now) - this was huge too, in WoW you could make a "bandage" with the First Aid profession skill and just use to yourself to rapidly heal up, even though you weren't a healer. There was no limit on it too, you could use it literally after every fight if you wanted, the only cost was the materials you looted.

IMO - what makes WOW be WOW isn't those unique elements you just cited. Which implies that what makes WOW be WOW is the unique combination and implementation of mechanics it borrowed (or independently arrived at) from other games. Which also implies that 4e could be like WOW even though the mechanics in question aren't exclusive to WOW.

Which is the problem I have with your argument - that 4e isn't like WOW because non-WOW games share these mechanics or introduced them first is simply not a valid argument against 4e being like WOW (or an MMO in general).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Which is the problem I have with your argument - that 4e isn't like WOW because non-WOW games share these mechanics or introduced them first is simply not a valid argument against 4e being like WOW.

This is matter of shifting goalposts, though. The comparisons to WoW, specifically, are quite weak.

The comparisons to MMOs in general, are slightly stronger, but still weak.

The comparisons to tactical JRPGs are quite strong.

The comparisons to other TT RPGs, especially Earthdawn and Feng Shui, are very strong.

You can certainly compare 4E to WoW. You can also compare 2E to WoW. You can compare 5E to WoW. You're going to find about the same number of points of similarity in all cases. It'll be different things, but you'll find them.

My point is that there's a claim that goes beyond "look these things are arguably similar even though there's no demonstrable connection", which is that 4E specifically took elements from WoW (specifically, not MMOs or video games generally), and that's where it all falls apart, because it's just not viable.

If you want to say "4E took a bunch of stuff from video games, including MMOs, and from other very-non-D&D RPGs!", I cannot disagree.

If you want to say "4E took a bunch of stuff from WoW, specifically, not other video games, not other MMOs, non other non-D&D RPGs!", then you and others have failed to make that case.

I hope this makes sense.

As an aside, if you ask an actual WoW player from 2004 what made WoW different from other MMOs you would get the following:

1) Leveling by questing. Before that in MMOs, you leveled by grinding, this was a gigantic difference. It also allowed you to level meaningfully solo, something not viable in most MMOs.

2) Lack of downtime. In other MMOs pre-WoW, you often had to sit down and stop doing anything for minutes so you could fight again. In WoW, you ate/bandaged and were immediately back at full and read to rock.

3) Beautiful visual design.

4) Responsive controls.

5) The GCD - this was something other MMOs didn't really have, or gained around the same time, which meant you couldn't jam all your "instant" abilities at once, and gave WoW kind of steady pacing other MMOs didn't have. It allowed them to add a lot more "instant" abilities to WoW, where in other games you often just "autoattacked".

6) A general level of polish and accessibility which Blizzard was famed for and which even the most successful MMOs before it didn't begin to approach (indeed I don't think it was really equaled until SWTOR/GW2).

If you took out points 1 & 2, WoW would not be WoW. WoW would not have succeeded. WoW would have been what Blizzard actually expected it to be - another MMO fighting for second place behind EverQuest. Their original sales estimate was 250k, and they thought they were being slightly optimistic.

Leveling by questing was an accident, too! They put in a bunch of quests very late in their alpha, and players loved them, so going on with the alpha, and into beta, they kept adding them, because the response was just so wildly positive (other MMOs had very sparse quests), and then you could spend the whole game doing them - this is what made it so accessible. They actually hadn't finished when the launched - the area between L40 and L53 or so was a lot sparser quest-wise, so you had to grind a bit, but they eventually fixed this with Desolace, Marudon, Feralas and so on.

 

[Argyle King]

I had a love/hate relationship with 4th.

I liked many of the concepts, but I often was not thrilled with the implementation.

I also felt as though there was a disconnect between what the fluff and story said was going on versus what the mechanics said was going on.

 

[wingsandsword]

As claims about marketing or publishing strategy, I can't agree with these. WotC sold a lot of 4e D&D stuff. It's hard to imagine that a game with a different name and different (ie non-legacy) fiction would have done anywhere near as well.

It also lead to the first time in about 20 years when D&D wasn't the top-selling tabletop RPG.

Pathfinder supplanted it at the top for a while circa 2012 IIRC. The last time, and only other time, D&D wasn't the #1 selling RPG was a brief period in the 1990's when the World of Darkness books were selling better.

4e did sell a lot, on the strength of the D&D brand name and the fact that it catered well to a specific subset of D&D players (at the cost of alienating many other players), but when you compare it to the response that both 3e and 5e got, you'll see it didn't do as well.

 

[Neonchameleon]

It also lead to the first time in about 20 years when D&D wasn't the top-selling tabletop RPG.

Pathfinder supplanted it at the top for a while circa 2012 IIRC. The last time, and only other time, D&D wasn't the #1 selling RPG was a brief period in the 1990's when the World of Darkness books were selling better.

4e did sell a lot, on the strength of the D&D brand name and the fact that it catered well to a specific subset of D&D players (at the cost of alienating many other players), but when you compare it to the response that both 3e and 5e got, you'll see it didn't do as well.

Pathfinder supplanted 4e at the top for the same reason that the World of Darkness did - it took a period when nothing was being released and won that period. The last 4e book published was Into The Unknown: The Dungeon Survival Handbook in May 2012 - a book that was literally half full of adverts for D&D dungeons (and that was comfortably the worst 4e splatbook). Pathfinder overtook D&D between late 2012 and the launch of 5e in 2014 because WotC was literally not producing any D&D content other than the systemless Menzobaranzan book that no one asked for.

As for roles, I know which game introduced me to the idea of character classes fitting within set predefined roles. AD&D 2e. Saying that that made 4e MMOish was always to me the weirdest criticism short of 4e's take on hit points being unrealistic.

 

[Oofta]

The idea that 4E played a lot like an MMORPG goes back a long way. For example, this post from 2008. NOTE: I'm not saying I agree with anything the article says, just that this impression has been around for a long time.

But yeah, cheap healing, self-contained abilities that had cool down periods with more powerful abilities having longer cool down periods, calling out specific roles for classes, the list goes on.

None of that was necessarily a bad thing. But for me they went too far with the style of powers for martial characters and the overhead required for tracking. It's easy to track buffs/debuffs/statuses from round to round with interrupts and reactions galore for a computer. Unfortunately it just ground the game to a near halt, particularly at higher levels.

So it felt like an PnP attempt at implementing an MMORPG to me as well.

 

[Raith5]

4e is only edition other than 1e where I killed Orcus - so thumbs up from me!

For me 4e was D&D was taken to its natural conclusion in terms of creating a heroic game with long standing tropes like fighters being meat shields being taken to its full (mechanical) extension. I get the criticisms of 4e but it really worked at the table for my group. I really liked 4e - it is my favorite edition of all editions I have played, but I still find 5e really enjoyable.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So it felt like an PnP attempt at implementing an MMORPG to me as well.

Just for reference, I'm not saying people couldn't "feel" that way. Feelings are yours. It's like me feeling like 4E was actually like a fantasy novel.

It's when you move on from "feels like..." to "is" or "was influenced by" or "derives from" that a cross a line that requires proof/evidence, and that has not been forthcoming, and people didn't even try at the time. That's where things like that article flop. The guy has clearly not played many TT RPGs, in fact it sounds like he's only played 3.XE. So when tries to go beyond "feels like" and into specific claims of fact, he just makes a mess, as I've illustrated.

It's also interesting that people seem to have forgotten the Book of Nine Swords, which used to be a major topic of discussion re: 4E.

 

[Oofta]

...
It's also interesting that people seem to have forgotten the Book of Nine Swords, which used to be a major topic of discussion re: 4E.

I have heard rumors of this "Book of Nine Swords" that you speak of, but whether it is myth or legend I cannot say.

In other words, I know it supposedly inspired a lot of 4E but I never read it. There were a lot of influences for 4E. I can't find the quotes now but I could have sworn the devs talked up borrowing concepts from video games quite a bit initially.

Don't forget as well that they had plans to make what was effectively going to be an online MMORPG with a DM running things. Never happened of course and I kind of doubt they ever had the budget to make it really work but at the time everybody was trying to cash in on the MMO craze.