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

[Joshua Randall]

I guess it bears repeating what I've said before:

I yearn for the day when everyone can stop fixating on 4e as being the "failed" edition, the "controversial" edition, or the "divisive" edition.

Unpossible. You’re seeing it happen in real time in this thread. 4e must always, always be raked over the coals whenever its name is mentioned. It’s like Hastur but you only need to say it once.

 

[Nightfly]

What is it about 4e that makes people take everything so personally?

BOB: 4th edition had many good points, but also some bad points
FRAN: My mother is a what???

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I agree that was a big part. There were a couple of others that spring to mind.

- Characters reduced to a suite of powers with different cool down times. You could almost imagine them lined up on a quick bar.

- Powers duplicated across classes that are variations of the same power. Overwhelmingly focused on combat. I remember seeing this in the book of nine swords and thinking that a bad moon was rising.

For real: What, in any way, makes these things "with different cool down times"?

You have exactly three options. Things you can use all the time, things you have to take a quick rest before you can use again, and things you have to get a good night's sleep to use again. That's literally how all 5e features work too. If 4e gave you that feeling, why doesn't 5e?

As for the latter: I find that at least half the time people claim it was "duplicated across classes", it's only at an extreme, nearly-meaningless level of abstraction. "Oh, that's a power that does damage and slows, therefore EVERY power that does damage and slows is a duplicate of this one!"

 

[EzekielRaiden]

What is it about 4e that makes people take everything so personally?

BOB: 4th edition had many good points, but also some bad points
FRAN: My mother is a what???

The problem is, that's not what Bob is saying here.

Instead, it is:

Bob: "4th edition had many good points, but also some bad points."
Fran: "Would you care to mention some?"
Bob: "Oh, well on the good side, it was tactically rich and it addressed many fans' complaints that some classes are just better than others."
Fran: "Yeah, I'd say it's fair to point to those as some of its best traits. How about bad points?"
Bob: "Oh, it required you to always use perfectly-balanced, level-locked combats, enforced rigid and inflexible roles on every character, and turned Fighters into Wizards."
Fran:
Bob: "What?! Jeez, don't take things so PERSONALLY."

By which I mean, if you're going to criticize it, criticize it for problems it actually had, not merely parroting objectively false Edition War memes. That's why people "take everything so personally".

Several things 4e did exceedingly poorly:

1. Its visual presentation in general. The "sleek, modern" manual-like format, rather than the Ye Olden Dayse Upon Ye Parchment look, was pretty clearly a bad move.
2. Skill challenges' presentation--and, worse, their usage in MANY, MANY official adventures--was objectively awful, driving players away from the thing that was supposed to conclusively demonstrate that 4e was about more than just combat. Skill Challenges, especially with a couple very small tweaks, are actually an extremely cool and useful subsystem, but the absolute hate they got for how awful most example SCs were (which, objectively, they WERE awful!) means we'll probably never see them come back.
3. Having borked math for several things (stealth, SC stuff, a few other things), and (as I theorize) designing the game so players "get worse" relative to equal-level combats to passively encourage teamwork, but which instead angered players, thus leading to crappy "feat tax" fixes.
4. Having more than half of the introductory adventures be straight-up feculent. Awful, completely antagonistic to many of the things 4e was designed for, etc. This was one of the worst errors 4e made, and nobody claiming to "criticize" 4e ever talks about it.
5. Albeit for highly understandable reasons (the tragic murder-suicide, with both people holding critical positions), the objective failure of the digital tools, then further compounded by the switch to Silverlight which was then almost immediately canned by Microsoft. Imagine a world where 4e beat Roll20 to offering the world's first online, accessible VTT!
6. Expanding the game to provide a wider spectrum of fundamentally mechanically distinct options. As much as I think the "every class is so samey" complaint is disingenuous in a lot of cases, it is true that hard, sharp differences in fundamental building blocks were thin on the ground and stayed that way for too long. Some of this was intentional--most of the hard, sharp differences in fundamental gameplay in 3e are the very things that so thoroughly cemented the ultra-supremacy of spellcasters--but IMO the PHB2 should have gone much further with more varied mechanical expression than it did.
7. Failing to court the old-school fanbase, right as the OSR movement was kicking off. Which is really sad, because the "4thcore" community showed how well 4e can actually be used for old-school-like "are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President" experiences if you try. In fact, not only did 4e do this exceedingly poorly, there's a number of places where it almost seems like they were actively trying to piss off "grognard" players, which is exceedingly stupid!
8. Failing to publish "inherent bonuses" rules WAY earlier. That should've been a free supplement at launch, not something buried halfway through the DSCS book a year and a half after the PHB1.
9. Frankly, the whole "paragon multiclassing" concept. It's just...really, really bad, but coming off of 3rd edition, folks were absolutely going to be demanding cool multiclass stuff. (Frankly, MC in general is weak beyond your intro feat, but that's "complicated issue mixing good and bad" territory, not "exceedingly poor" performance.)

I'm sure I could come up with more. There are PLENTY of things to criticize about 4e. "Your roles are totally rigid", "you can't have combats that aren't level-locked", and "all classes are absolutely 100% the same" are not in that set.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Did my J just kick in or is something wrong with the editing of that post?

If you're speaking of post #58, it would seem that some of the time, the Reddit embedding breaks, and causes the page to become like 10x longer than it should be. I've no idea why.

 

[TerraDave]

There is a difference between “resurgence” and being a curiosity. It is also amusing to see the return of the list of fails. Many things listed, yet not all (Gleemax, never forget).

But 4e lives on. 5e 2024 is full of it.

 

[TheSword]

For real: What, in any way, makes these things "with different cool down times"?

You have exactly three options. Things you can use all the time, things you have to take a quick rest before you can use again, and things you have to get a good night's sleep to use again. That's literally how all 5e features work too. If 4e gave you that feeling, why doesn't 5e?

As for the latter: I find that at least half the time people claim it was "duplicated across classes", it's only at an extreme, nearly-meaningless level of abstraction. "Oh, that's a power that does damage and slows, therefore EVERY power that does damage and slows is a duplicate of this one!"

5e does to some extent. Short rest cool downs were obviously taken from 4e. Before that point powers were limited by a number of uses per day or they weren’t. Nobody is saying it is identical to WoW they are saying it is influenced by it. It’s probably better to say inspired by MMORG be it WoW, Guild Wars or any of the others. I really don’t understand why it enrages fans of 4e. I’m not saying it makes it a worse game. Just not to everyone’s taste.

Perhaps this is related to your point on building blocks but when the wizard can use a power that can does 2d6 + Int in a 15’ cube, a fighter can do 2d6 + Str in a 15’ cube and a rogue can do 2d6 + Dex in a 15’ cube then folks are going to say powers are duplicated.

All this is to say. If you read my original post you will see that I said I’m sure 4e could fun when it isn’t being expected to carry the mantle of D&D. The argument was never that 4e wasn’t a well balanced, combat focused, board-game-like rpg. It was that it departed too far from what fans expectations of D&D were, on a whole host of issues.

You make very good points about why 4e failed. They might have been why the edition ended prematurely. I’m not sure most people got that deep Into it though. It’s simpler than that. In transplant terms the host rejected the edition for being too different.

You’re point about introductory adventures, that is crucial, they are incredibly important. They’re the shop display window of the system. Our group bought all the books, created characters, played an adventure we bought and at the end of the eight hour session, basically said were never doing this again. Then we found Pathfinder.

On a side note, dire adventures is why Eberron never became as big as the forgotten realms. Great ideas but no way of demonstrating how cool they were in practice.

 

[Staffan]

There is a difference between “resurgence” and being a curiosity. It is also amusing to see the return of the list of fails. Many things listed, yet not all (Gleemax, never forget).

But 4e lives on. 5e 2024 is full of it.

I don't know. It might be different in 5.5, but 5.0 has a lot of things that superficially look like 4e but actually work quite differently. The main "false friends" are:

• The 4e short rest is 5 minutes, the 5e one is 1 hour. This creates very different effects. 4e encounter powers are literally meant to be used every encounter, with only a short breather after each one. 5e short-rest powers, on the other hand, only get 1-3 uses per day. It also affects healing between encounters, but not as much as the next item.
• Hit Dice are not Healing Surges. Depending on class, healing surges gave you a pool of maybe 2-4 times your nominal hp you could access when short resting and, to some degree, even mid-fight. But it also acted as a limiter on almost all other healing – healing potions and healing powers almost all relied on healing surges to work. This meant that healing magic was primarily used to access the pool mid-fight, not to increase your overall endurance. In addition, the number of healing surges you have are more-or-less constant from level to level, and each one increases in power in proportion to your max hp. Hit dice, on the other hand, have a constant power but increase in number. So an ability that lets you spend a healing surge for healing (or for something else) will always give (or cost) a relevant amount of healing, while a Hit Die will lose in both relative potency and value over time.
• Rituals work very differently. In 4e, almost all non-combat magic is a ritual, and rituals are open to anyone paying the feat tax. Each ritual then costs money both to acquire and to cast. Things like long-range teleport, long-term condition relief, divinations, shelter, and so on – all rituals, which means they don't compete with combat magic for resources. But in 5e, "ritual" is just a tag some spells (almost all 1st level) have that let you cast them without spending a slot at the expense of some time.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

5e does to some extent. Short rest cool downs were obviously taken from 4e. Before that point powers were limited by a number of uses per day or they weren’t. Nobody is saying it is identical to WoW they are saying it is influenced by it. It’s probably better to say inspired by MMORG be it WoW, Guild Wars or any of the others. I really don’t understand why it enrages fans of 4e. I’m not saying it makes it a worse game. Just not to everyone’s taste.

Because people used it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over as an insult, openly and intentionally. Dismissing anything anyone might enjoy from it because it's a computer game, so it's rigid, incapable of doing anything other than the one specific thing it is instructed to do; it's mindless, just a "grindfest" with no thought or creativity or responsiveness from the player; and because it's a massively multiplayer game, it's cheap lowest-common-denominator drivel and trash, not engaging imaginative fantasy; etc., etc., etc.

That's why 4e fans react so negatively. We've dealt with literally 15 years of people using this as a wedge issue to "prove" that 4e could never have been D&D. To "prove" that 4e is mindless and stupid and antagonistic to creativity and (this is an exact quote) "impossible to roleplay". To "prove" that it's nothing more than button-mashing and user-interface and "paying a monthly sub" rather than being a REAL gamer who uses REAL creativity etc. etc.

Like, to put this into perspective: Imagine how Superman fans feel when, after decade upon decade of people deriding their favorite superhero as "boring" and "pointless" etc., they talk with a new person who has critical thoughts about (say) the DCAU Superman character, but they open with, "I know Superman is mostly not very interesting to watch, but..."

You're almost certainly going to push a berserk button. Even if you don't mean a single negative thing by it, you are explicitly using a phrase that was and still is used ALL the time as a naked insult.

Perhaps this is related to your point on building blocks but when the wizard can use a power that can does 2d6 + Int in a 15’ cube, a fighter can do 2d6 + Str in a 15’ cube and a rogue can do 2d6 + Dex in a 15’ cube then folks are going to say powers are duplicated.

The problem with this is, you invented all of those powers. You didn't look them up. I guarantee that you didn't. Mostly because there is no such Fighter power. Period. I can guarantee you that no such Fighter power exists, despite not having an encyclopedic knowledge thereof. I will look it up myself after posting this to confirm, and if I find such a power, I will explicitly and directly apologize and concede this point, not just to you, but to anyone else who ever makes it. That's how supremely confident I am that you are simply, flatly incorrect.

All this is to say. If you read my original post you will see that I said I’m sure 4e could fun when it isn’t being expected to carry the mantle of D&D. The argument was never that 4e wasn’t a well balanced, combat focused, board-game-like rpg. It was that it departed too far from what fans expectations of D&D were, on a whole host of issues.

Ah. yes. This again.

I have no time nor patience for those who claim that 4e isn't D&D. I will not respond to this argument beyond these two sentences, because it's always been a trash argument from day 1, no matter how much you couch it in delicate phrasing.

You make very good points about why 4e failed. They might have been why the edition ended prematurely. I’m not sure most people got that deep Into it though. It’s simpler than that. In transplant terms the host rejected the edition for being too different.

It didn't fail, except by failing to meet utterly unreasonable production targets. But it's not hard to see why you would continue pushing this claim.

You’re point about introductory adventures, that is crucial, they are incredibly important. They’re the shop display window of the system. Our group bought all the books, created characters, played an adventure we bought and at the end of the eight hour session, basically said were never doing this again. Then we found Pathfinder.

On a side note, dire adventures is why Eberron never became as big as the forgotten realms. Great ideas but no way of demonstrating how cool they were in practice.

Yes. I put a significant load of blame on those utterly craptacular, execrable adventures.

Guess who was a lead author on several of them?

Mike Mearls. I didn't specify it earlier, though I alluded to it. May as well spell it out now.

You can, I think, understand better why I have such a low opinion of his design acumen.

 

[TheSword]

I have no time nor patience for those who claim that 4e isn't D&D. I will not respond to this argument beyond these two sentences, because it's always been a trash argument from day 1, no matter how much you couch it in delicate phrasing.

Unfortunately this is the crux of the matter, and rationalizing each individual change doesn’t help that.
I freely concede that the example is an exaggeration. The specifics may vary but the broader point applies. Though when the response is this vitriolic definitely not going deeper into this!

[Backing away slowly, then closing the cellar door, before pushing a kitchen cupboard in front of it]