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

[Dausuul]

The most fun I had when running 4E was when I mostly ignored the fantasy tropes and ideas embedded in the fluff of the game. ...which was a shame because I was in the minority of people who actually enjoyed many of the fluff changes.

I liked a lot of 4E's changes to the lore of the game as well--especially the World Axis cosmology, with the multiverse shaped around the conflict between the gods and the primordials. It's a really elegant, evocative system. 5E has done a decent job mashing the World Axis and the Great Wheel together, but it's not nearly as clean.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It is quite hard to use that to work out a "no matter what you do, you're doomed to be crushed by this crapsack world" which is basically the thematics of BitW. Similar problems would arise with secret agent games, Lovecraftian horror, detective fiction, most urban fantasy, etc.

Disagree strongly re: urban fantasy and the like , though it's a broad genre so some stuff would be terrible (most UF is not "crapsack world", not sure why you're saying it is). You're not thinking it through imho. The power levels don't have to be that extreme, on paper. It would certainly do a MUCH better job 3E's really sad attempt.

It would be imho a total nuclear disaster for superheroes because classes and set abilities are a disaster for superheroes. I've played a lot of superhero games, and only ones which let you have a fairly free hand (like M&M levels of free hand) ever felt at all superhero-y. 4E, with all it's precision-tactics and pushes and pulls and so on would be a trash-fire for superheroes.

Agree re: the rest, but level-based games are a total disaster for secret agents and so on, as Spycraft repeatedly proved over several editions of failure. Not like we didn't give it a chance. We gave it too many chances by far.

I hated that monsters were so pathetic. I'm not looking for every encounter to be a meatgrinder, but it's weird when things are so heavily tilted in favor of the players. I did learn how to make this better, but -for me- I had the most success when I completely ignored virtually all of the "official" advice about running the game. To this day, I'm still baffled about what was going on at my table which was so drastically different than how the designers apparently played. At one point, I had started to rewrite encounter tables and drastically redesign a chart for how I was doing skill challenges. It's in an old notebook somewhere, but I never finished the work because I eventually started playing a system that wasn't D&D.

You were probably using old-monster-math monsters. They didn't fix it until MM3, and you had to, IIRC, manually fix monsters from before that (which was really easy with the DDI, but not without it). They were pretty bad. New-monster-math monsters worked extremely well.

There was another issue with the official advice, which was I think that they assumed you were going to try and do attrition, but 4E didn't do attrition, so you needed to ignore that and go for the total daily budget in fewer encounters (this also helped with combat taking too long). But the actual charts were extremely reliable, in a way that they were not in 3E (where the charts were actively misleading - eyeballing was better than using them) or 5E (where they're just not very accurate).

I know that once I worked out that I needed to go with "fewer, harder" encounters, but to otherwise use the guidelines, 4E really worked very well. Unfortunately 5E works best with "more, easier" encounters. Which feels more "D&D" (for sure - up well into 2E there are lots of adventures with tons of encounters/day, often ludicrous amounts), but feels less dramatic and story-like to me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

The whole 'MMO Debate' is so foolish and pointless it is just laughable. There is nothing similar about the experiences of playing WoW and playing D&D or any other TTRPG. NOTHING about them is even similar, beyond some degree of RP, and CRPGs lack even that since you're 'playing with yourself'. WoW is a canned world, every single thing you can do is coded into it and had to be explicitly allowed and thought up by some designer somewhere. Nothing you do can change anything, except in some very predefined way. D&D is open-ended! It is a game of mutual story-telling, in a computer game, at best, you pick one of several predetermined paths.

So, OK, you could, in some way, maybe, argue that 4e 'got roles from WoW', but that is like saying 'Baseball got cleats from rock climbing'. There's nothing similar about baseball and rock climbing, except they are both sports where you need traction and wear foot gear. In fact 4e got roles from 1974 vintage D&D, where they were VERY VERY explicit! The fighter 'tanks' (engages the monsters directly using his high AC and hit points to survive their attacks), the wizard rains down damage from a safe distance (or just insta-ganks the bad guys, whatever), and the cleric 'off tanks' some and heals the fighter. Its a pretty simple formula which was well-understood by ca January of 1975 (believe me, I was there)! There is even a 'Fineous Fingers, Fred and Charlie' joke about how you always need a cleric in your party! OK, the thief was added in Greyhawk and that MIGHT be considered a sort of 4th role, maybe, but mostly thieves sucked in combat, being well-advised to either stick to a bow and stand near the wizard, or get in their one backstab towards the end of the fight (when hopefully the target dies instantly so it doesn't slag you with its next attack).

I think I already noted that IMHO Pathfinder got good sales MOSTLY because a lot of people just mooched off the DM's DDI account and never bought 4e books. So they had cash to go out and spend on PF instead, and weren't super invested in 4e. I think that was also sort of the problem with 4e's fast release schedule. Even if you bought a 4e PHB1, within 6 months you weren't really invested in 4e anymore, there were 10 more books you'd need for that. So a lot of players didn't feel super attached to the game, and spent a lot of their money elsewhere. Then of course they were going to PLAY those other games, so PF started to rival D&D at the time WotC stopped putting out 4e books. Several factors came together there...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

4e always struck me as reasonably well-suited for kung fu action where the AEDU structure fits the conventions of the action sequences in the movies - basic strikes abound (at will), but special moves get used only once for the coolness of the move in the action sequence. Of course, this perception may be somewhat colored by my first reading of the 4e PH while waiting at the drive in for it to get dark enough for Kung Fu Panda to start.

I don't think it's just our big furry friend, I think you're right that 4E really is quite well-suited for this, structurally, and it reflects the Book of Nine Swords heritage 4E has (which was pretty Wuxia-ish). Likewise it worked well for sort of "swashbuckling" heroic fantasy. Slide on the bannisters-type stuff. And the stunt rules, which potentially extremely generous (a DM could be a twonk with them, but still), encouraged exactly this kind of thing.

The one kind of superhero it could work for would be the kind that crosses over with Wuxia - the sort of Daredevils and Iron Fists and so on of the world. Equally I think it could have worked for "pulp action" stuff. Like a D&D version of White Wolf's Adventure.

 

[happyhermit]

... 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!

If that's how it went down, sure, that's not what happened though. They released products in April, May, and June: Heroes of Shadow (2011) in April, The Shadowfell: Gloomwrought and Beyond (2011) in May, and Monster Vault: Threats to Nentir Vale (2011) in June. So, one book per month (plus misc.) in the quarter that 4e lost it's place for good.

 

[Argyle King]

Disagree strongly re: urban fantasy and the like , though it's a broad genre so some stuff would be terrible (most UF is not "crapsack world", not sure why you're saying it is). You're not thinking it through imho. The power levels don't have to be that extreme, on paper. It would certainly do a MUCH better job 3E's really sad attempt.

It would be imho a total nuclear disaster for superheroes because classes and set abilities are a disaster for superheroes. I've played a lot of superhero games, and only ones which let you have a fairly free hand (like M&M levels of free hand) ever felt at all superhero-y. 4E, with all it's precision-tactics and pushes and pulls and so on would be a trash-fire for superheroes.

Agree re: the rest, but level-based games are a total disaster for secret agents and so on, as Spycraft repeatedly proved over several editions of failure. Not like we didn't give it a chance. We gave it too many chances by far.



You were probably using old-monster-math monsters. They didn't fix it until MM3, and you had to, IIRC, manually fix monsters from before that (which was really easy with the DDI, but not without it). They were pretty bad. New-monster-math monsters worked extremely well.

There was another issue with the official advice, which was I think that they assumed you were going to try and do attrition, but 4E didn't do attrition, so you needed to ignore that and go for the total daily budget in fewer encounters (this also helped with combat taking too long). But the actual charts were extremely reliable, in a way that they were not in 3E (where the charts were actively misleading - eyeballing was better than using them) or 5E (where they're just not very accurate).

I know that once I worked out that I needed to go with "fewer, harder" encounters, but to otherwise use the guidelines, 4E really worked very well. Unfortunately 5E works best with "more, easier" encounters. Which feels more "D&D" (for sure - up well into 2E there are lots of adventures with tons of encounters/day, often ludicrous amounts), but feels less dramatic and story-like to me.

It improved with later monster math, but the problem never went away because players got stronger with the new books too.

Also, monster math wasn't the only part of the problem. It was also (for a lack of better words) the physics engine and game world math.

According to the narrative, certain monsters were terrors to behold and nigh unstoppable. According to how things worked at the table, some of those same monsters were struggling to do mundane tasks, while PCs operated more like super heroes.

 

[Longspeak]

I traded some games on the forums I used to frequent so get a look at the core 4e books. Read 'em, traded them forward.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Very quickly I realized that if I need to use a computer to manage my character or campaign, that's not a game for me.

For me it was kind of the opposite reaction - after using the DDI for so long with 4E, able create a new monster literally faster than I could even write it down with a pen (and not by a small margin), and have it work well, and having the players all level up their PCs between sessions and so on (and of course I could check, and advise, and so on, between sessions), it was amazing and I couldn't go back to running an RPG where I couldn't do that.

(The level-up thing alone made a huge difference. Back in 3E and very early 4E we lost so much time to players turning up to a session and needing to do leveling at the table - not because they they forgot, but rather because they needed the books and stuff to do it, which they didn't all have. Often that was 20-60 minutes, especially if the whole group hadn't done it. Getting that much extra session time every few sessions was amazing.)

So I didn't really get into running 5E until Beyond came around. But yeah for me after that I wanted only RPGs I could manage without the slightest effort on paper (Dungeon World), or ones which had great digital support (4E then, 5E now). Games which were complex and had no digital support suddenly became deeply unappetizing.

According to the narrative, certain monsters were terrors to behold and nigh unstoppable. According to how things worked at the table, some of those same monsters were struggling to do mundane tasks, while PCs operated more like super heroes.

Not sure what you're referring to here, I think I'd need a concrete example to understand. Especially the "struggling to do mundane tasks", given how the DC system works in 4E, that seems um, impossible.

 

[Argyle King]

For me it was kind of the opposite reaction - after using the DDI for so long with 4E, able create a new monster literally faster than I could even write it down with a pen (and not by a small margin), and have it work well, and having the players all level up their PCs between sessions and so on (and of course I could check, and advise, and so on, between sessions), it was amazing and I couldn't go back to running an RPG where I couldn't do that.

(The level-up thing alone made a huge difference. Back in 3E and very early 4E we lost so much time to players turning up to a session and needing to do leveling at the table - not because they they forgot, but rather because they needed the books and stuff to do it, which they didn't all have. Often that was 20-60 minutes, especially if the whole group hadn't done it. Getting that much extra session time every few sessions was amazing.)

So I didn't really get into running 5E until Beyond came around. But yeah for me after that I wanted only RPGs I could manage without the slightest effort on paper (Dungeon World), or ones which had great digital support (4E then, 5E now). Games which were complex and had no digital support suddenly became deeply unappetizing.



Not sure what you're referring to here, I think I'd need a concrete example to understand. Especially the "struggling to do mundane tasks", given how the DC system works in 4E, that seems um, impossible.

It's not a mundane task, but an example which comes to mind is putting Dimensional Shackles on a creature. A cheap magic item was a fight-ender because monsters struggled to get out of it before they were beaten to death. (That's assuming they even survived long enough without being stunlocked or incapacitated to even be alive.)

It's been years since I've played, so I don't have specific situations in mind. It's more of a general comparison of monster math to world math versus comparing PC math to world math. Monsters struggle to do a lot of things which are trivial for PCs.

It was common that the group I played 4E with to easily crush most monsters.

Edit: This was even after the usual DM intentionally made encounters tougher, so as to better fit a group which works rather well as a team.

 

[billd91]

HP bloat was a problem for monsters (and 5th also has this problem sometimes). In many cases, higher level monsters weren't tougher; it simply took a few more rounds of them being massacred before they died.

I'm a lot more forgiving of hit point bloat in 5e because it's not only the primary defense of the monster in question, but due to the shift in math, I find it a lot easier to feel like the players are making progress. If the AC defense is too high and you get a lot of swing and whiff, that's really frustrating - even if the monster crumples after only a few good, solid hits. The player is stuck at the mercy of the die and whatever few modifiers they can eke out. A lot of hits feels less frustrating, even if the monster needs a lot more to take down - plus, a character doesn't have to be as optimized to actually contribute, which is good for a table of mixed player types.

At least, that's my experience (gained through playing Champions, interestingly enough).