The D&D 4th edition Rennaissaince: A look into the history of the edition, its flaws and its merits

[Staffan]

Heh, yeah there is.

I'm not a huge fan, nor a huge hater, of 4E . . . but I've noticed over the past few months an uptick in folks talking about 4E, talking about playing 4E today, and using 4E design choices to inform current game design.

I mean, it's nowhere near as huge or influential as the OSR movement, but yes, 4E is coming back for a segment of our hobby.

I don't think anyone can say with a straight face that 4e wasn't a failure, for a variety of reasons (I mean, a game with those sales would have been a roaring success for any other company, but not for Wizards). I would chalk the reasons up to:

• Class homogenization, particularly in the core books. Even if the classes do different things, they all use the same structure of at will/encounter/daily powers.
• The focus on powers also meant that each class took up a lot of page count, and much of that page count was focused on combat-related things. This is to some degree a perception issue: other editions have had many classes saying they cast spells of a certain type and then refer to an appendix for those spells. This makes the class description itself pretty lean, by off-loading the page count elsewhere.
• Powers being combat-focused also gave the impression that non-combat magic was gone. It was not, but had been moved to the realm of Rituals which could in theory be accessed by anyone with the right skill and feats. This actually improved the access to non-combat magic by not limiting it to particular classes as well as not taking up daily resources, at the cost of making it less convenient (taking time and costing components to use). Again, a perception/presentation issue.
• Things people felt were important (metallic dragons, many giants, some classes and races, etc) removed from the core books. This together with new material added made people feel these things were getting replaced, even if they got added back in with later books.
• Changes to the assumed lore, with a very vague assumed setting that simultaneously stole some things from classic lore (Vecna, Tharizdun, mention of famous dungeons, etc.) and made up its own things (Dawn War, the fallen Dragonborn and Tiefling empires).
• Nuking the Forgotten Realms, essentially making a new setting with the same name as the old, in order for it to absorb all the new lore.
• Having a system that purports to be highly balanced, while actually being off regarding math (skill challenges in the core were almost impossible, monster defenses increasing faster than PC offenses, monsters having too many hp).
• An introductory adventure that would have been a fairly bad adventure for earlier editions, and was really bad for the new one because it played up its weaknesses and didn't show off its strengths.

Many of these things were fixed in later releases – for example, the PHB2 and MM2 covered most of the missing classic classes, races, and monsters, but at that time the damage was done, and you only get one chance to make a first impression.

That said, even if 4e as a whole was a failure, it had many good parts and what I think is happening is that these parts are being appreciated more. Many people appreciate having martial options beyond "I hit it with my axe". Positioning and conditions mattering means there's design space for abilities that apply and/or leverage those. Having a mix of encounter and daily powers is pretty cool, letting you both have "Is this the round in which I use my good thing?" and "Is this the fight in which I use my AWESOME thing?". If you like attrition-based adventure design, healing surges are a great way of handling it, because they let you make individual combats feel dangerous, then allow recovery, but still have an overall attrition that doesn't depend on the casters' spells – plus, they in combination with the Leader role, remove the need for clerics. And monsters have a fair amount (but not so many things become hard to deal with) of cool abilities themselves, in addition to just dealing X damage.

 

[Echohawk]

John Peterson is an embarrassment to real journalists and real historians everywhere.

Sightation: (1) I was a real journalist in my younger days; (2) my father taught graduate level history for decades.

Wait, what did I miss? I haven't seen Peterson's referenced interview with the 4e designers, but I have found his historical work (such as Playing at the World) to be excellent. Are you sure you aren't confusing John Peterson with Ben Riggs, about whom I've heard a lot more criticism?

Edit: This thread references an interview where the interviewer (Ben Riggs) states that World of Warcraft was the inspiration for 4e. But Riggs is very much not the same person as Peterson.

 

[BrokenTwin]

It confuses me when people talk about the reasons for 4E 'failing' always seem to omit just how weirdly aggressive and bad the marketing was for, like, all of it? So much of marketing I saw for that edition seemed like it was deliberately antagonizing their customers. And even the 4E fans (like myself) were confused as to whether Essentials was supposed to be a replacement or addition to the base game, which is a straight up design/marketing failure of its own.

Not saying 4E didn't have mechanical issues (the monster math only being properly solved by MM3 certainly didn't help), but there were just so many bad faith arguments about 4E at the time (and even today) that it made arguing in good faith even against valid complaints difficult.

And yes, there's definitely been a 4E Renaissance in the last few years, and it is amazing. I doubt it will ever hit OSR level, but it's still great to see people finally taking what was excellent about the edition and running with it.

 

[TheSword]

Keep moving those goalposts, buddy. "Pathfinder" the adventure path using 3.5 rules <> Pathfinder the entirely new game system.

But it's always this. Even in an article that kinda backhandedly praises 4e, someone else was always doing it better.

Matey, I played the beta, it came out well over a year before release. We were playing Pathfinder off a full pdf of the rules in Aug 2008. It wasn’t just being talked about. It was out in the field.

 

[Echohawk]

It confuses me when people talk about the reasons for 4E 'failing' always seem to omit just how weirdly aggressive and bad the marketing was for, like, all of it?

Especially at the beginning! Negative marketing is a thing and can be successful, but it is really risky to conduct a negative marketing campaign against your own product while all of your customers are still happily using it.

Also, I've said this before on ENWorld, but I don't mind repeating myself: 4e made the mistake of substantially changing both the lore and the rules substantially. I think it could have gotten away with changing either one of the two and still been a success. But both at once just lost too many fans.

For context, I had a really successful 4e campaign going all the way up to level 30, but it was mostly for new players who were board game fanatics trying out D&D for the first time. For them, the heavy tactical focus was a plus and they were completely neutral about the lore, since they were experiencing it all for the first time. For those specific circumstances, 4e was a perfect match.

 

[TheSword]

It's still pretty wrong.

Like, believe me, I would love for it to be right! Because that would mean 4e never had any period where it truly stood on its own--it would mean that the edition wars were there from effectively the instant it happened. That would be incredibly useful to me, because then I could objectively say that the vast majority of haters never even gave 4e a chance, they just complained for two months (or whatever) and then immediately switched to PF1e, complaining all the while about a game they never played. Of course, many of the things people said then, and still say today, are conclusive proof that a lot of the complaints came from people who had never even read the rules. But it would be so useful to be able to point to an objective, unequivocal "see?! SEE?! PF1e strangled 4e in the cradle!"

But it didn't. 4e had at least a full year to stand on its own, and the response was very bad by the end of that year. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, and I think the article is about as fair as you can get from someone who still had a stake in the edition wars against 4e. That is, there are still several inaccurate or openly edition-war statements (like roles being "rigid", which is factually untrue!), but apart from those occasional incorrect jabs, the article is generally pretty good.

The more frustrating thing for me--other than the objectively inaccurate, edition-war-y statements--is that it glossed over many of what I consider the really important reasons why 4e stumbled so badly, giving them barely more than a sentence or two, while hyperfocusing on issues that were things people complained about a lot, but which weren't really that central. Again, in part because of people making complaints that had nothing to do with the content of the books.

Big example: Every "critic" and their sibling loves to say 4e explicitly said you could only use level-locked combats and difficulty class numbers, so levelling up became pointless, because you'd just face level 5 goblins instead of level 4 goblins the instant you hit level 5. This is objectively untrue, and I have quoted to many such "critics" all of the relevant passages (a total of four of them, I believe?) from the 4e DMG. Not only do the books not say you can only use level-locked combats, they explicitly and repeatedly say you SHOULD NOT only use combats at the party's level, but instead provide a healthy mix of many different combats, while providing specific cautionary advice for what can happen if you over-use either very low-level or very high-level fights, and for how to re-imagine extremely high-level fights as instead skill challenges to avoid being pasted. I don't think it's explicitly mentioned, but the most common example given by 4e fans for this is how the hobbits respond to the cave troll the Fellowship faced in Moria. They can't meaningfully harm it, their goal is to survive it, and Frodo straight-up benefits from one of his signature magic items, a literal Elven Chain Shirt he inherited from Bilbo--it's simultaneously one of the most cinematic battles of the early series (hence the films' focus on it!), and such a perfectly D&D-like situation up to and including magic items being involved, a rarity for LotR.

Like, it's literally right there, in the 4e DMG1: "If every encounter gives the players a perfectly balanced challenge, the game can get stale." (p 104) The books explicitly tell you not to do that, and give specific, clear advice for other things you can do instead. And yet it's on every "critic"'s lips anyway! Show them the evidence against it, and naturally, the goalposts move to a far weaker claim...but the "critic" still claims a victory nonetheless.


I mean, when there are objectively false statements also present, it's not hard to conceive of what that reason might be--and it's not one that would inspire a winky-face emoji.

You’re in luck. The pdf beta for Pathfinder was released in August 2008. 2 months after the 4e core books released. I checked my old forum posts on Paizo’s and it went off like a rocket.

 

[BrokenTwin]

I admittedly was never really attached to the various settings, but I liked what they did with the Spellplague. Can definitely understand why the more diehard FR fans didn't like it though.
And 4E's Dark Sun book was unexpectedly just flat out great. Still upset I got rid of my 4E books, but that's the one I miss the most.

 

[Joshua Randall]

What evidence is there that 4e is making a comeback? Because me and my still-playing-4e friends are very curious.

 

[Joshua Randall]

It's still pretty wrong.

Yes. But wrongness has never mattered in the edition wars. Just like in a real war, the objective is to defeat the enemy by any means necessary.

Inter arma enim silent leges​

Again, in part because of people making complaints that had nothing to do with the content of the books.

Yes. Very seldom has any edition of D&D been critiqued on its merits as a game, as a work of the written word, as an entrant into the Forge-y GNS crucible (the latter of which, I’m going to toss off without proof: 4e absolutely should be considered).

No. Instead various D&Ds or D&D-alikes are critiqued for their marketing, their politics, their sales, and their perceptions by internet culture (which, let us not forget, is a tiny tiny fraction of the entire game-buying populace).

All of these topics are valid and (in the past were) interesting, but they are also stale well trodden ground. To continue the war analogy: all of these topics are the trenches carved in the earth with a field of the dead in between them. No significant advances in those fields can be made. Only more senseless death.

The books explicitly tell you not to do that, and give specific, clear advice for other things you can do instead. And yet it's on every "critic"'s lips anyway! Show them the evidence against it, and naturally, the goalposts move to a far weaker claim...but the "critic" still claims a victory nonetheless.

Well put.

Part of this, “the so-called critic still claims a victory nonetheless”, is part of our degraded internet influenced culture in general. No one enters an argument (in the classic sense) with the goal to uncover truth or to test one’s (or the other’s!) beliefs against evidence. No one enters an argument open to the possibility of being wrong, of having one’s mind changed. No one enters an argument and thinks, “I believe and accept that the other person has good faith reasons for his or her beliefs, and together we will scrutinize what evidence there is.”

None of that happens, particularly with internet slap fights about which version of elf-gaming is the most bestest. Arguments are entered in order to destroy the opposition by any means necessary.

I mean, when there are objectively false statements also present

Inter arma enim silent leges​

 

[Staffan]

It confuses me when people talk about the reasons for 4E 'failing' always seem to omit just how weirdly aggressive and bad the marketing was for, like, all of it?

Right, that certainly didn't help. Having an edition that changed so much at once, combined with alienating marketing... not so good.
You also had the whole thing with the high-flying plans with the character creator and integrated VTT that... let's say "fell through", but I'll put that in the "certainly didn't help" column rather than "actively bad".

What evidence is there that 4e is making a comeback? Because me and my still-playing-4e friends are very curious.

4e itself, not so much. But there's been a greater appreciation for aspects of 4e. One of the leading proponents have been Matt Colville, who is incorporating many 4e elements in his new game "Draw Steel".