No one has actually pointed to anything in Worlds & Monsters which is "insulting". It's a book about RPG design, with a particular focus on the accreted story elements of D&D. Yes, it contains opinions about the strengths and weaknesses of that material, and about the best way to combine it into a playable RPG. That's (part of) the job of RPG designers - to form, and then carry out, such opinions.
D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023
- Thread starter Alzrius
- Start date
For anyone curious, it is available on DMsGuild for less than 5 bucks. I think I will take a look, in fact.
On my first pass through, paying particular attention to the introductory bits and "blog posts" at the end, i don't see anything especially "insulting."
In fact, now removed from this by a decade and a half, I am much more intrigued by the design intent than i was then. is it possible 4E was just too early?
In fact, now removed from this by a decade and a half, I am much more intrigued by the design intent than i was then. is it possible 4E was just too early?
M.L. Martin
Hero
I've long figured it was released a year or two ahead of schedule, both in terms of 'what the market was ready for' and 'how much design work had gone into it.'
I think a lot of the designers were assuming a level of dissatisfaction with 3.5's rough points that either wasn't there, or that disappeared in the wake of resentment against 'the Man' when the new edition was announced. And if it's true that 'magic missiles not auto-hitting' and 'gnomes in the PHB' were two of the major sticking points, the D&D fanbase of the time was much more invested in little details of tradition than they would have expected, which means that the 'reimagine everything' approach 4E wound up taking was doomed to die from the beginning. The unfolding and success of 5E would seem to validate this point.
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Red Castle
Adventurer
It is indeed often said that 4e was ahead of his time.
But as much as I love 4e (it’s my personal favorite edition), there was more in play that created a backlash and made this edition so divisive.
deganawida
Legend
Yes. I’ve mentioned in another thread, but many of the complaints (problems?) people have with 5e were solved in 4e. The designers came up with solutions to issues which had been complained about since at least when I started playing (1990 or 1991), but the complaints/problems hadn’t reached critical mass, so people thought the game was too far removed from older versions. Had it been given time for a revision to clear up some things and iterate upon the experimentation of PH3 and Essentials, it probably would still be going, and going strong.
Well, for me it was just in time!
More generally, I reckon it's pretty hard to say. I'm confident that 4e has influenced various strands of "indie" design as much as it drew from the strands that predated it (eg this is reasonably clear in Luke Crane's Adventure Burner for Burning Wheel). So it's hard to form a conjecture about where the state of the hobby would be now if 4e hadn't been a thing, and hence how it would be received in that counterfactual circumstance.
Echohawk
Shirokinukatsukami fan
I'm of the view that if 4E had either dramatically overhauled the mechanics or dramatically overhauled the lore, it would have been fine. Dramatically overhauling both at once makes some sense, but I think it was too much for many fans.
