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

[Haffrung]

I appreciate that different people have different conceptions of what D&D is about and how it should play, but in my mind there is no doubt that 4e - both its fiction and its play - fits squarely within D&D tradition.

4E did one particular style of play very well. But if it wasn't clear before, the reception to D&D among long-time players demonstrated that there are many ways D&D is played out in the wild, and 4E was a bad fit for some of those styles.

WotC has more or less acknowledged 5E is a correction to the divisivness of 4E, and that correction involved making a system that supports more diverse approaches to D&D. Which doesn't mean 4E isn't a very good system for what it's trying to achieve and for those onboard with that style of play.

 

[billd91]

Interesting. I'd thought it was 2012 - not that Essentials had bombed quite that hard.

I wouldn't be surprised if Essentials (as weirdly organized as the books were) was a bit too confusing to approach for newbs, coming to 4e-friendly consumers who were already pretty sated on 4e products, and too late to appeal to the 4e-unfriendly players who had already written the edition off. Kind of the worst of all 3 worlds.
That said, I had borrowed a friend's copies to read (during the long spans between swims at my daughter's swim meets) and found I liked it considerably better than the initial 4e core. Had that been 4e in 2008, I might have kept playing it. But it wasn't and by the time I read them, that ship had sailed over the horizon.

 

[CleverNickName]

I said in the 3e thread: «wait until we get to 4e.»

179 posts in less than 24 hours. 4e Paragons are alive and kicking! Good for them. ;-)

Yep, it's true. This 4E poll collected more votes in the first 24 hours than any other survey collected in an entire week. The 4th Edition game definitely left an impression here at ENWorld.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I had a ton of fun with 4e. It has, at its core, a really excellent tactical skirmish combat engine. I played it for several years and worried I wasn't going to enjoy 5e at all with how much it removed from 4e in terms of class abilities. Frankly, I still miss not having Fighter powers like Crack the Shell and Villain's Menace. Turns out I like 5e quite a bit because games are fun.

A few scattered thoughts about the game:

1. Never really gave a crap that things like AEDU abilities and temp hp couldn't be easily explained in terms of "physics." Really, who cares? Not me. I just don't care. Just try not to blow your daily, 'kay?

2. Many of the design problems with 4e are the inherent problems of doing something new, not something fundamentally wrong with the core ideas. These problems have been rehearsed endlessly. We know what they are. But when you do something new from the ground up, and it doesn't matter if we're talking about RPGs or diesel engine fueling systems, there are going to be a lot of problems you didn't foresee. I just want to say that those problems are inherent to newness, and they don't mean the designers were stupid or bad people or didn't respect you or whatever.

3. The biggest, worst, most glaring thing 4e did wrong was try to introduce something radically different under an established brand. I say this as someone who liked the game, but you can't deny that there was a largely negative response from people with established expectations of what the D&D brand meant. That's a hard pill for designers to swallow. People want a certain thing from "Mustang," "Coca-Cola," "Call of Duty," "Microsoft Windows," and "Dungeons & Dragons." And we get it, designers are creative people, and good designers inevitably want to upend tradition and do something really new, and it gets boring to iterate on the big behemoth. It's actually really hard to innovate and satisfy customer expectations simultaneously. But when you're working in an established brand, that's what you have to do.

 

[ZeshinX]

They could have done an actual Greyhawk line, and an actual Greyhawk setting book (there hasn't been an actual Greyhawk campaign setting book since 1e, just random supplements set in that setting!)

There was actually the From the Ashes boxed set for 2e (From the Ashes (2e) - Wizards of the Coast | AD&D 2nd Ed. | Greyhawk | AD&D 2nd Ed. | Dungeon Masters Guild).

Granted not a single book if you meant that literally, but certainly a campaign setting post-1e.

 

[Aldarc]

4e was fun. It could have used longer public testing (as per 5e), a bit more polish, and less toxic marketing and 3pp support, and it probably would have been far more palatable to tables.

 

[wingsandsword]

There was actually the From the Ashes boxed set for 2e (From the Ashes (2e) - Wizards of the Coast | AD&D 2nd Ed. | Greyhawk | AD&D 2nd Ed. | Dungeon Masters Guild).

Granted not a single book if you meant that literally, but certainly a campaign setting post-1e.

This is going rather far afield, and might be better for another thread, but I've always found Greyhawk to be staggeringly hard to get into, because of a dearth of good materials

I'd never heard it described as an actual campaign setting release, I'd always thought that was just an update for metaplot events. That was one reason I'd never tried to track it down when I became curious about the setting.

I know that in 1998, when I was first getting into AD&D and was learning about it, when I was curious about Greyhawk (largely as the place where all the named spells in the PHB came from), when I asked about it, they pointed me to the used book shelf and said that they often get used copies of the 1e Greyhawk hardcover in and that was the last general introductory work to the setting that had been made.

I know that in much of the AD&D 2e era, it seemed TSR was actively trying to kill the setting. The 1996 Planescape book On Hallowed Ground literally said that Oerth was dying and its gods fading from existence and that people beyond that world knew it wouldn't be around much longer, and that at most a handful of the Gods of Oerth might survive if they got followers on other worlds. I always took that as an implied editorial note from TSR at the time that they didn't want to do anything with the setting.

There really hasn't been a good way for players to get into that setting in a very, very long time. Certainly nothing as accessible or approachable as the various Forgotten Realms books, or even the 3e Dragonlance campaign book.

For what was one of the original, core settings of D&D, and what was the presumed default setting of 3e, they did absolutely nothing with it for a very long time other than Living Greyhawk, which, if you weren't RPGA, was something people generally ignored.

Hence my suggestion that if WotC was looking at things they could have done with 3.5e instead of tossing it out to make 4e, they could have produced Greyhawk setting materials, (or other settings, which had been treated with equal disregard during 3e).

Yes, WotC had pressure from corporate to do otherwise, which was a critical flaw. That same corporate mindset is what gave us the toxic, alienating 4e marketing "3e is WrongBadFun" campaign, after all.

 

[happyhermit]

Interesting. I'd thought it was 2012 - not that Essentials had bombed quite that hard.

It wasn't that essentials bombed, it just failed to save 4e from it's decline. Pathfinder had already caught up to 4e and Wotc had fired the people responsible for the edition.

 

[teitan]

ICv2's data has Pathfinder tying D&D in Q3 2010 while Essentials and Dark Sun would have been fresh, then overtaking D&D in Q2 of 2011, not late 2012.

between April 2011 and August 2012 there were a total of 9 products listed as 4e but the last of those was system Neutral, Menzoberannzan. Between April and August of 2011there was nothing released. That’s a period of about 5 months. The next product was in November, Heroes of Shadow and the next was the BoVD in December 2011. Then February and lastly in April. That’s a large chunk of months with no D&D releases and then several cancellations of products. Pathfinder was more robustly supported during this period so yeah it outsold D&D in the period for sure! It’s also interestingly a more robust release schedule than 5e which goes to show the wide acceptance of 5e and how the course changed. After Menzo, D&D products were what looked like high priced Collector’s editions that were really just previews of the new book prices and D&D Next previews. It’s kind of odd looking at the release schedule and thinking it was moribund but it was actually kind of robust with the reprints and preview products.

it should also be noted that Next/5e was announced in January of 2012, the 9th of January according to Wired. So that probably killed what little remaining sales there were for 4e.

here is a link where some people are discussing the cancellation Of Ravenloft and other books.

Cancellation of several 4E products (and D&D miniatures) | Dungeons & Dragons (4th Edition)

From http://www.wizards.com/WPN/Sales/Article.aspx?x=lineup_changes_01_2011: Janauary 12, 2011 By Wizards of the Coast Today, Wizards of the Coast announced some changes to the 2011 D&D product line-up and release schedule. (see this week’s [url=http://www.wizards.com/dnd/article.aspx?

boardgamegeek.com

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The WoW influence I think was a total misreading of the market. While there is significant crossover between D&D players, at least at the time, and MMO players, Hasbro banked too much on that trend thinking it was the future. It was a mistake that even Ryan Dancey made. To many people listened to Dancey a little too religiously after the success of the D20 System License and OGL when he kept harping on and on about WoW and other MMOs and trying to capture that audience. While I don't think 4e was a financial failure as some try to proclaim, it certainly wasn't with DDI subscriptions alone, it fractured the market. I think what made Habro turn on it was losing market dominance when Pathfinder started selling just as well.

I think it was a huge mistake on WOTC's part to include all new material in DDI. They greatly undercut book sales by making all the new rules content "free" under DDI. DDI was in general a failure that hurt the edition. It seems it was designed with VTT play to become the default and when that failed to materialize in an solid form in the DDI tools they lost a lot of potential money. While I think DNDBeyond is expensive to purchase e-books, the model is pretty good and they have been wise in not overpromising like Project Morningstar.

I think you may be overselling DDI a bit. The contents of the 4e books was NEVER available on DDI. DDI had 3 tools, plus an archive of material (Dragon, Dungeon, and the organized play stuff). Compendium contained pretty much all the 'crunch' from the books, but nothing else, not even including descriptive text for said crunch. CB contained the player-facing crunch and obviously served to generate PCs. Monster Builder contained the monster stat blocks (but no descriptions at all) and let you tweak them or build your own.

For a lot of casual PLAYERS, DDI was enough. You could go into CB and simply create a character and not read any books. You missed all the flavor text, guidelines, etc. but you got enough of the gist of something that you could play it, and doubtless others in your group had at least the core books if there was a strong need/desire to reference such. For GMs DDI was not nearly enough. You simply cannot run 4e based on DDI, it lacks the actual meat of the rules text.

Beyond that DDI doesn't really contain much of the value of the GM-facing books, which is in terms of setting, cosmology, game play, resources, etc. Sure, you would get the stat blocks from the back of Draconomicon: Chromatic Dragons, but that is 10% of the book! Likewise Open Grave, The Plane Above, etc. etc. etc.

Overall though, I think you're not way off. DDI drove down the market for books. A lot of players didn't feel compelled to buy supplements, GMs might not buy every Monster Manual or supplement, etc. They could get the 'meat' of it for the price of DDI. That would have been OK, as DDI's $7/month adds up, but of course each GROUP generally got one subscription. The GM could use that to do his thing, and the players could take turns playing around with CB, or (as in some of my groups) designate one player as the 'character wrangler' who owned a subscription and did all the PC character sheets. Without a VTT to drive all the players to want a subscription, it was hard to make mint on 4e, especially when Dragon/Dungeon was part of DDI. 2/3 of 4e's players were not paying a thing. If WotC was lucky, they bought a PHB1.

In fact, 4e's core books, particularly the PHB1, sold extremely well. DDI just helped to depress the market for additional books, and 4e was built on the concept of lots of books, selling really well, and funneling everyone into DDI subscriptions. Instead people were not heavily invested, so they could just play 4e, sponge off an DDI sub, not really buy in, and then go buy Pathfinder books with their money.

Frankly, I think DDI was an instantiation of what is inevitable in the long run with TTRPGs. Everything will be digitalized. Paper books may or may not be available, but will be afterthoughts. Tools support will be what separates out the 'big boys' from small publishers. The key, for a WotC, will be making the 'digital character sheet' so compelling that nobody will want to use paper. At that point everyone needs a sub. A GM could then own a 'premium' version that lets them support the 'new kid', etc. I think 4e envisaged a lot of that, WotC just couldn't execute. I guess it is an open question if TTRPG market is big enough to support even one such platform or not...