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

[cavalier973]

4e was the first pen and paper d&d I’d played. I liked it.

I spent far more time creating characters for it than I actually played it. It was really fun to create characters for.

Combat was a slog though (pre Monster Manual update days). 1 action with usually a 50% to 60% chance of working also meant many turns you did nothing (I guess some powers had miss effects or granted multiple attacks but yea).

Roleplaying was there but even more than long combats, the idea of really balanced but ultimately winnable encounters seemed to detract some from roleplaying choices really mattering.

I had fun with 4e and still like building characters for it more than for 5e but I like 5e better overall. I would still play a 4e game if a dm wanted to run it.

4e is certainly an edition where optimizing stats improves the gameplay experience.

 

[Staffan]

I thought there was a substantial blow-up about the Faerun map getting some changes for 3e.

As I recall, the map changes were mainly about changing the Sword Coast to be more of a straight north-south line as opposed to going more eastward the further south you got. The reasoning was basically that they didn't want to "waste" 1/4 of the map on open sea. There were some more changes to actual communities on the map, because someone thought the 2e population numbers didn't make sense and wanted them to be more in line with actual medieval/renaissance cities, with Waterdeep going from IIRC over a million to around 200,000 people (and about a billion chickens for sale). I think there were some other changes where they reduced the size of "nothing areas" like the Shaar, for mostly the same reason.

But again, this wasn't presented as something like "Grumbar has won a major victory against Istishia and as a result a lot of land has been reclaimed from the sea", but more like "Oh, this? Turns out the new cartographer measures things in a different way which is supposed to be more accurate." But then of course it got changed back in 5e (not sure about 4e).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I know it will just fall on deaf ears, but ... can't we just stop having the same discussions about 4E when we're one and a half editions away from it? Much like if you don't like Skills and Powers, let it go in 2025.

Well, we still get discussion about 3e; may not be quite as fraught, but its still like 20 years back now.

 

[Voadam]

3e Forgotten Realms map changes were discussed in Dragon. They thought the original scale with huge open spaces was too spaced out so they literally took a map and sliced vertical sections out to make it more compressed east to west.

I was not getting Dragon at the time and FR was not my main setting (I was into Greyhawk and Ravenloft) so I blinked and missed it when I got the 3.0 Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, the giant overall map and distance scale changes were not the details I was really noticing.

Changing the realms map and scale apparently did not sit well at all with people who were really into the Realms and had collected a dozen of the interlocking consistent maps from AD&D realms products which were no longer accurate.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Then you are an inferior person whose taste in games makes you sub-human.

I am, of course, being sarcastic; but my responses do seem to be the attitude of the anti-4e crowd.

Mod Note:

Everyone: as a general principle, let’s be very careful with the use of sarcasm. That post could have set someone off if it were much longer before the humorous intent were revealed.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Since I’m in the neighborhood…

I enjoyed 4Ed as a FRPG, and it had certain elements I thought it handled better than any previous edition of the game. To this day, the 4Ed Warlock is my favorite version of the class.

But it never felt like D&D to me. Too many sacred cows slaughtered; too many core assumptions altered

That said, IMHO, the 4Ed system as a whole would have been an awesome framework for a classless toolbox RPG system. I could easily envision it sans those particular restrictions supporting really good sci-fi or low/medium supers campaigns.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Too many sacred cows slaughtered; too many core assumptions altered

Am I allowed to say this to someone with the staff member tag? I’ll risk it.

YES, and that was EXACTLY 4E’S POINT. It was the first edition of D&D brave enough to slaughter those cows and alter those assumptions in the interests of creating an innovative game.

Sadly, given the years of vicious and childish backlash, WOTC decided to retreat back into the status quo.

 

[SteveC]

Well, we still get discussion about 3e; may not be quite as fraught, but its still like 20 years back now.

That's true, but people rarely have as strong a negative opinion about 3X as 4E. I played a lot of 3x and, after my last game of it, vowed never to play high-level versions of it again. But there are a ton of people who still play it or Pathfinder 1E, so my Event Horizon level discussion of 3X is truly not helpful. You don't have the automatic descent into the same points of why it's a terrible edition again and again. I don't think that, without a [+] tag, it would be possible to discuss 4E without it turning into a flamewar that the poor mods will eventually have to intervene in.

I'm very much a "to each their own." I would happily participate in a 4E discussion where we talked about some rules or setting issues, but all we seem to come back to is the same arguments. And I get how many people don't like 4E, I really do ... but it just feels like some point of honor to disparage it. And since it's an edition I really enjoyed (and would still be playing if I could get everything to work over VTT), you're going to see me in threads like this, unfortunately.

 

[Kannik]

I often got the impression at the time that WotC could care less whether or not fans of older editions liked 4e at all, because what they really wanted were new fans and new wallets.

I wouldn't go that far. As I noted upstream, a lot of the marketing humour at the time was very inside-baseball/self-referential that would've confused newcomers. They surely misjudged how certain things might land (again, like satire or sarcasm it's likely going to go awry with some), but I never got the sense they didn't care about me and my 20ish years of playing to that point.

 

[Morrus]

Nope.



Then you are an inferior person whose taste in games makes you sub-human.

I am, of course, being sarcastic; but my responses do seem to be the attitude of the anti-4e crowd.

Dial it back, please. When you start making work for me, I start getting irritable.