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

[Staffan]

I'm always fascinated by this statement. I don't think it's wrong in any way; I've seen this opinion offered up by a ton of people who are casual D&D enjoyers to believe it isn't true for them.

But try as I might, I can't see it; to me if it has elves and wizards and throwing d20s around, it feels like D&D. I can't grok which sacred cows were removed that are actually essential to the D&D experience.

As the saying goes: first impressions last. So just looking at the three core books:

• Gnomes and half-orcs were removed in favor of tieflings, eladrin, and dragonborn.
• Barbarians, bards, druids, monks, and sorcerers were removed in favor of warlocks and warlords.
• Rangers lost their magic and animal companions in favor of being a purely martial class.
• Fighters lost flexibility and became solely melee-oriented defenders, losing the ability to be heavy-hitters or range-focused.
• People got the impression that many spells were removed, although in many cases they were just reassigned as rituals. But the system could have been clearer that rituals were where non-combat magic lived now.
• Casters had significantly fewer spells to play around with – I believe it topped out at four dailies, four encounters, and two at-wills (and maybe some utilities). By comparison, a 10th level cleric in 3e would likely have 23 spells of level 1 through 5.
• I believe the PHB didn't have any summoning spells. Even once they showed up, they were basically just a reskinned DoT rather than summoning an actual creature with actual stats.
• Metallic dragons.
• Pure elementals – as I recall, the MM1 only had mixed ones.
• Frost, cloud, and storm giants; and the giants that remained were given much more elemental natures.
• Lots of celestials.
• Wish-list magic items to fit builds as opposed to finding what the DM chose to place and then having to sell and buy/make them.
• Lots of magic items were gone to make room for a variety of +X items with a single special ability.
• Great Wheel removed in favor of World Axis, with all of its knock-on effects.

There are probably some other things that got removed that I forgot. Some of these are positive changes, but still feel different. Others got fixed in later supplements, e.g. missing races/classes, but at that time the impression had already been made.

 

[Mannahnin]

I've got a theory it can be narrowed down to two points of design aesthetic that 4e didn't account for:

1. Mundane prowess must be modeled through general systems for it to feel mundane.
2. D&D magic must be at least partially universalized to be recognizable as D&D magic.

That is, if you want your fighter to feel like a general reflection of the warrior archetype, it has to be primarily using or modifying actions that are available to all characters. I think this might be slightly less true of the rogue (given it originally was defined having access to a unique, additional skill system), but if you're going to write a skill system, the rogue should probably have class abilities that key off stuff written inside it.

The second point is that D&D magic has to be fairly universal; fireball can't be something only your wizard does, it must also be something that NPC wizards cast and that monsters deploy.

This is a good one, yes.

There's a certain quasi-simulationist strain to traditional AD&D which strives to maintain the pretense that the things Fighters do are not magical.

It ignores the defying physics which is going on in killing (or just in fighting in melee AT ALL) a 10' troll, or 50' or 100' giant or dragon,with a 3' long sword, and squints past the narrative nature of hit points, to latch onto the use of "mundane" actions and mechanics for non-casters to do their thing. Special abilities which can only be used a limited number of times per day or per encounter strain the credulity of players accustomed to this view of the game/world. 1E Oriental Adventures included some, but Ki abilities can be rationalized as a strain of magic.

5E brought some back (Action Surge, Second Wind, Fighting Spirit, for example), but it does it in limited number. 4E put fighters and casters in the same mechanical framework, and for a lot of folks a really big part of the core of D&D is that casters DO NOT operate using the same framework as non-casters.

The same perspective (drawn from AD&D, IMO) also tends to assume that anything (magical or non-magical) a PC or NPC does could theoretically be learned by another PC or NPC. That PCs and NPCs are fundamentally the same and play by the same rules. This is one way 3E really fulfilled (IMO) one of AD&D's core premises. In a way no other edition ever did. Even AD&D. Changing away from that entire mindset/design philosophy again is almost certainly another reason a lot of 3E players found 4E objectionable.

I'll submit that out of every edition of D&D I ran since B/X, 4e was the first one that made encounter/monster design fun for me, rather than solely necessary overhead. I think because of the rock solid monster framework. Coupled with some decent at-launch encounter building guidelines, plus rapid iteration across published adventures (not HPE, though) and LFR -- to show how much better and stronger encounter design could get within 4e.

I will also give a shout-out to people pushing the 4e envelop like Fourthcore, the Worldbreaker monsters (was that Angry DM?), multi-stage boss monsters... it was a pretty glorious time for "monster + encounter tech" in my experience / opinion.

Oh yes, absolutely. While you can elevate 4E encounters by designing interesting terrain and situations (like one would in any edition), just out-of-the-box monster statblocks in 4E do a ton of the heavy lifting to make encounters interesting.

The monsters are designed to be flavorful and tactically dynamic in ways 5E monsters aren't and in ways 3E monsters take page-long statblocks and lots of homework to try to achieve.

The sample encounter/monster combos in the monster manuals were solid, but really just picking a small mix of monsters (two or three different Goblins, say, with different roles) and then using their abilities tactically at the table would almost always suffice for an interesting fight.

 

[payn]

As the saying goes: first impressions last. So just looking at the three core books:

• Gnomes and half-orcs were removed in favor of tieflings, eladrin, and dragonborn.
• Barbarians, bards, druids, monks, and sorcerers were removed in favor of warlocks and warlords.
• Rangers lost their magic and animal companions in favor of being a purely martial class.
• Fighters lost flexibility and became solely melee-oriented defenders, losing the ability to be heavy-hitters or range-focused.
• People got the impression that many spells were removed, although in many cases they were just reassigned as rituals. But the system could have been clearer that rituals were where non-combat magic lived now.
• Casters had significantly fewer spells to play around with – I believe it topped out at four dailies, four encounters, and two at-wills (and maybe some utilities). By comparison, a 10th level cleric in 3e would likely have 23 spells of level 1 through 5.
• I believe the PHB didn't have any summoning spells. Even once they showed up, they were basically just a reskinned DoT rather than summoning an actual creature with actual stats.
• Metallic dragons.
• Pure elementals – as I recall, the MM1 only had mixed ones.
• Frost, cloud, and storm giants; and the giants that remained were given much more elemental natures.
• Lots of celestials.
• Wish-list magic items to fit builds as opposed to finding what the DM chose to place and then having to sell and buy/make them.
• Lots of magic items were gone to make room for a variety of +X items with a single special ability.
• Great Wheel removed in favor of World Axis, with all of its knock-on effects.

There are probably some other things that got removed that I forgot. Some of these are positive changes, but still feel different. Others got fixed in later supplements, e.g. missing races/classes, but at that time the impression had already been made.

Looking over the list, a lot of folks probably think big deal on most of them. That the list is that long and not complete shows there was something left behind for just about everybody. For 4E fans, it was probably a price worth paying to move into that design space. For other folks, it was just another thing changed to add to the pile of changes that upset folks. Misery loves company too.

 

[eyeheartawk]

It ignores the defying physics which is going on in killing (or just in fighting in melee AT ALL) a 10' troll, or 50' or 100' giant or dragon,with a 3' long sword, and squints past the narrative nature of hit points, to latch onto the use of "mundane" actions and mechanics for non-casters to do their thing. Special abilities which can only be used a limited number of times per day or per encounter strain the credulity of players accustomed to this view of the game/world. 1E Oriental Adventures included some, but Ki abilities can be rationalized as a strain of magic.

I'm one of those who detests the idea of Anime Fighting Magic fighters, but as you level and fight more and more powerful foes, that just breaks down. They can't simultaneously be just a built dude with a sword and doing huge chunks of damage to an elder dragon at the same time.

At the end of the day, you're going to have to Naruto run up the side of that dragon with glowing eyes or whatever.

 

[Pedantic]

It ignores the defying physics which is going on in killing (or just in fighting in melee AT ALL) a 10' troll, or 50' or 100' giant or dragon,with a 3' long sword, and squints past the narrative nature of hit points, to latch onto the use of "mundane" actions and mechanics for non-casters to do their thing. Special abilities which can only be used a limited number of times per day or per encounter strain the credulity of players accustomed to this view of the game/world. 1E Oriental Adventures included some, but Ki abilities can be rationalized as a strain of magic.

Yeah, from a 10,000 mile design view, 4e was very clarifying about what the "mundane" aesthetic means in D&D to a chunk of players. You can't just take feedback like "it's not realistic" or "I just want to be an average guy who picked up a sword" or "they gave fighters spells" on their face, and I think pointing back to a general set of abilities shared by all characters gets to what all of that stuff is actually swirling around.

5E brought some back (Action Surge, Second Wind, Fighting Spirit, for example), but it does it in limited number. 4E put fighters and casters in the same mechanical framework, and for a lot of folks a really big part of the core of D&D is that casters DO NOT operate using the same framework as non-casters.

The same perspective (drawn from AD&D, IMO) also tends to assume that anything magical a PC or NPC does could theoretically be learned by another PC or NPC. That PCs and NPCs are fundamentally the same and play by the same rules. This is one way 3E really fulfilled (IMO) one of AD&D's core premises. In a way no other edition ever did. Even AD&D. Changing away from that entire mindset/design philosophy again is almost certainly another reason a lot of 3E players found 4E objectionable.

Speaking from a sharply limited subset of players who (more or less) started to play with 3e, I had internalized this not as a design goal, but as an actual norm of the entire medium. It simply did not occur to me that you could design a game where this wasn't true, or that if you did, then it must be a mistake or an error. It's hard to explain how much 4e was a massive culture shock at the time.

In retrospect, I've gone back and looked at other games and third party products from the time and had to completely reevaluate them as a result of that shift. There's whole products I would have simply evaluated as bad or incomplete design at the time that I can see the basis for now.

 

[Mannahnin]

Speaking from a sharply limited subset of players who (more or less) started to play with 3e, I had internalized this not as a design goal, but as an actual norm of the entire medium. It simply did not occur to me that you could design a game where this wasn't true, or that if you did, then it must be a mistake or an error. It's hard to explain how much 4e was a massive culture shock at the time.

In retrospect, I've gone back and looked at other games and third party products from the time and had to completely reevaluate them as a result of that shift. There's whole products I would have simply evaluated as bad or incomplete design at the time that I can see the basis for now.

Yuuup. This sort of thing is (and used to be moreso) endemic in the hobby. To the level of "fish have no word for water". It's such an unquestioned assumption for a lot of folks.

You can see it in RPG marketing all through the 70s and 80s and into the 90s, pitching how "realistic" games are, as a selling point. By which I think they mean a) that how the rules model things that exist in the real world looks a lot like how they DO work in the real world, or close enough to feel intuitive in their outcomes, and b) that the game is inherently a physics engine, for simulating a world. Rather than the prime priorities being to be a fun game to play and to create satisfying stories.

Gary in his comments in the 1979 DMG was already reacting against the constraints of this design philosophy, but it's definitely one of the major assumptions of a lot of RPG design, and you see it in (of course) the zine and hobbyist discussions documented in The Elusive Shift and elsewhere.

And I think that it really does originate in that "shift" from wargames (which, at least for historical ones, really WERE trying to simulate real things and have as realistic a set of rules as possible) to role-playing games, where the priority was no longer historical simulation but exciting adventure and satisfying and dramatic character interaction.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

But try as I might, I can't see it; to me if it has elves and wizards and throwing d20s around, it feels like D&D. I can't grok which sacred cows were removed that are actually essential to the D&D experience.

It’s all matters of taste, and tastes are idiosyncratic.

In my case, one of the biggest annoyances was the radical redesign of the multiclassing system. Requiring feats- that didn’t have a uniform benefit structure- to multiclass left a very bad taste in my mouth because multiclassing was one of the main design tools I used going back to my days playing AD&D. Hell, I didn’t even like the overall benefits of the better multiclass feats.

And even so, 100% of my 4Ed PCs were multiclassed. So that particular mechanism got to grind on me every session.

Which is also core to why I felt 4Ed would have worked better as a classless toolkit RPG system as opposed to constraining it into one with classes with targeted escape mechanisms to emulate multiclassing from earlier editions.

 

[cavalier973]

This may or may not relate to the “mundane fighter” issue, but 0e, 1st level fighters weren’t normally able to successfully attack a troll; it took four of them making a successful attack roll, all at the same time, in order to score a hit. When a fighter reached level 4 (Hero), however, attacking trolls became possible. At level 8 (Superhero), the fighter could tell if there were an invisible creature nearby, could force morale checks on low HD enemies, and could grant morale bonuses to retainers and mercenaries.
Also, the fighter could attack multiple times each round.

A fighter could cast spells, with the right equipment (a sword of wishes, a ring of spell storing, etc.), but, there were no “fighter-specific” spells.

 

[Mannahnin]

It’s all matters of taste, and tastes are idiosyncratic.

In my case, one of the biggest annoyances was the radical redesign of the multiclassing system. Requiring feats- that didn’t have a uniform benefit structure- to multiclass left a very bad taste in my mouth because multiclassing was one of the main design tools I used going back to my days playing AD&D. Hell, I didn’t even like the overall benefits of the better multiclass feats.

And even so, 100% of my 4Ed PCs were multiclassed. So that particular mechanism got to grind on me every session.

Which is also core to why I felt 4Ed would have worked better as a classless toolkit RPG system as opposed to constraining it into one with classes with targeted escape mechanisms to emulate multiclassing from earlier editions.

I was also a multiclassing fanatic pre-4E, and initially tried multiclassing with some of my first characters, but found it unsatisfying.

For me, though, it turned out that the greater complexity and wealth of options available to single-classed martial characters made them exciting to me for the first time. I could play a single-classed Thief all the way to 30th, and a single-classed Fighter to 20th (two examples from two of the first campaigns I played in) and be happy as a clam with them, not needing spells to feel like I had cool abilities.

And then later in the edition they came out with Gestalt & Hybrid Multiclass characters, who scratched that "true" multiclass itch, but I mostly was enjoying the novelty of satisfying single-classed characters.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah, the moment you want to limit usage of abilities temporally, there are only a limited number of approaches. I suspect something like an "Extra Effort Pool" everyone had that fueled some special techniques would have gone over well with some, but it also would have felt fiddly to people in the D&D sphere (you saw things like it outside it halfway often) and making the recovery cycle work the way you wanted might not have been trivial. Encounters and Dailies had the advantage they made their design fairly easy.

I would have preferred the pool (like what Level Up uses to fuel combat maneuvers et al) over what 4e did. To me easy design is if anything a mark against using a particular approach. Certainly it's not a good reason IMO to go that way.