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

[Joshua Randall]

1. Stop engaging with obvious click-bait material.

I kinda miss the days when ENW had a rule that you couldn't do a drive-by posting of a link to your other blog / YouTube / IntaTweetBook / whatever. So when I saw this one I was (A) curious why it was still up, forgetting that we live in a more enlightened time when drive-by posts are allowed; and (B) initially kind of excited to learn about the 4e Renaissance. I don't get out much, so there could easily have been an actual 4e resurgence that I missed.

3. Start with more positive discussions. [...] You want to talk about the good things with 4e? So do I!

Oh Jacob. You sweet summer child. There have been many attempts at positive discussions of 4e over the years. They are inevitably drowned in seas of edition war tears.

 

[mamba]

If you are convinced that @Alphastream and the WotC employees cited have some reason to hide facts about 4e's success or failure, I'm not going to try to disabuse you of that notion.

I am not convinced of that, it could be accidentally vague, it could be bad memory or a lack of actual data.

The point that remains is that it was the worst selling edition, sales tanked fast, and attempts to revive it with Essentials failed. Resulting in it also being the shortest lived edition (unless you count 3.5 and 3e as separate but 4e and Essentials as one).

Was it a good game? It certainly was different and divisive and found its fans. I am not sure why the fans have to try to pretend that it did well and only WotC’s greed and unreasonable expectations killed it. It can be good and not commercially successful (enough), it can be bad and a hit, the two are not closely correlated.

Most TTRPGs never are close to as successful as D&D, does that mean they are all inferior? I don’t think so.

So focus on what was good about it instead of trying to rewrite how it fared in the marketplace.

Tell us about the games in this supposed resurgence and what is good about them and how they carry the 4e torch, but maybe also how they differ. Seeing Draw Steel in that list makes it feel pretty broad. It shares some high level design goals with 4e, but mechanically it is very different.

 

[Chemo]

I see the lie propagated by 4e haters that it didn't sell is still alive and well to this day, charming.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

@Joshua Randall If you're not being part of the solution, then you're part of the problem. Like I said, let the haters hate. Since you've decided to be one yourself, I'll just let you be and let you do what you do.

 

[mamba]

Essential material is literally completly compatible. It did not replace anything.

yes, it is compatible, but it gives alternatives to the ‘vanilla’ 4e classes that are more traditional. You can play with just Essentials and do not need any prior 4e PHBs or MMs. It clearly was an overhaul of 4e in reaction to criticism.

You can argue for it being a new (and compatible) edition or against it, there are arguments for either perspective.

Even so, 4e and Essentials combined sold worse than 3e or 3.5 individually I believe. Would have to look at Ben Riggs’ statement again.

 

[BrokenTwin]

Maybe 4E enjoyers wouldn't be fighting over the details of whether 4E sold well or not so much if the 4E haters didn't bring it up literally every time 4E is mentioned? Unless you happen to have direct access to WotC sales data, it's all at best second hand conjecture anyway.

* For the record, I don't care whether 4E sold as well or worse than 3.x or whatever other edition you want to compare it to. I just want to stop hearing about that talking point.

And a number of the examples upthread specifically call out D&D 4E as a direct inspiration (like Gubat Banwa). LANCER is Shadow of the Demon Lord fused with D&D 4E in vast swathes of its design language, but in a mecha setting. Heck, it really isn't that hard to argue that Pathfinder 2 has a lot of D&D 4E in its DNA.

Having said that, I don't know if there's any (relatively) popular 4E retroclones at the moment, but I'm not even sure that's possible with the more restrictive license that 4E operated under.

 

[eyeheartawk]

Having said that, I don't know if there's any (relatively) popular 4E retroclones at the moment, but I'm not even sure that's possible with the more restrictive license that 4E operated under.

You can.

You would just literally have to restate everything in your own language in those core books and publish it under the OGL. Nothing like that exists. Probably because it's a ton of work.

ORCUS comes closest and even that isn't all that close to being a true 4E retroclone in the vein of something like OSRIC.

 

[mamba]

I see the lie propagated by 4e haters that it didn't sell is still alive and well to this day, charming.

I see the lie that it sold well is still being propagated, charming…

Would be nice if you could show some actual numbers to show that it is indeed a lie. All I have seen is some vague tweets by guys who probably do not even have the actual data or talk about initial sales rather than lifetime sales and people conflating the two.

The only one I am aware of with sales data (incomplete for 3e) is Ben Riggs, and he said it sold worse than 3e, without giving actual numbers

 

[BrokenTwin]

If I was a more conspiracy-minded individual, I feel like I could make a solid argument that WotC wanted 4E to fail. Between an ad campaign that actively attacked their customer base, a more restrictive license, an errata strategy that seemed designed to make it frustrating to stay up to date and give the impression that the base system wasn't playtested (exacerbated by the monster math taking three MMs to get properly dialed in)... Probably more accurate to say that it was a comedy of smaller bad decisions more than anything else that led to 4E's terrible general reception (not talking about sales, but general impressions).

Which is a darn shame, because I loved a lot of what made 4E 4E. Healing Surges were fantastic, and I wish more systems would implement a similar system (5E's hit die system is a shadow in comparison for me). Encounter design was amazing compared to other editions (early solo design aside). The weapon your martial uses actually mattering while not hard locking them into using a single type of weapon. And the Warlord not returning for 5E is an outright crime. Primal being a separate power source from Divine. I even liked Monks being categorized as Psionic, though I also understand why some folks didn't like it. Heck, the Psion in 4E was great too.

 

[Joshua Randall]

If I were going to retroclone 4e I'd actually start with 13th Age, which gives you a lot of the chassis you need, and conveniently is under the OGL itself so you don't have to worry about the 4e GSL.