4E - 18 Months Later: Love it or hate it?

[chriton227]

I voted "mixed bag", I like it well enough to keep playing with my established group which has embraced it, but not enough to be willing to run it regardless of the group. I guess my real opinion is "I guess a 4e game is better than no game".

One thing I found interesting about this poll is the distribution of the responses. I expected a bell curve, instead there is a strong bimodal distribution towards love and hate. To me that shows how polarized the community's opinion of 4e is.

 

[Mallus]

I fall somewhere between 'like it' and 'love it', but I voted 'love it' since I'm in a generous, post-holiday weekend mood today.

To sum up my response to 4e: it provides all the rules support I need of the kind I don't like to create myself --like a nifty, balanced fighting engine-- and what it doesn't have a lot of --interesting fluff, 'rules for roleplaying', whatever they are-- I don't need (because I'm quite happy doing that sort of thing myself).

Full disclosure: I play 4e with a great group of people, we've created a fantastic homebrew setting, and we don't use modules, 1st-party or otherwise, at all.

 

[Festivus]

I LOVED 4E when it first came out. Each successive expansion book has made me less and less enamored with it. I am down to "LIKE". I like the monster books, I like DMing (it's so easy to do) but I don't really like the power creep that I see with each new book.

 

[renau1g]

Love it from a DM POV, Love it from a player POV, just worry about Festivus' point about power creep. Same for any addition though... at least WoTC has been fairly decent with errata, and of course, for home games you can drop seomthing if you don't care for it (like in my game there was no RRoT before the nerf)

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Let me just say that if I could go back in time and stop 4e from being made, but at the cost of the extinction of the human race, I'd do it.

 

[MacMathan]

There was love, but I just did not get to play 4E that much.

So I would hang out at places like ENWorld, and read all these nasty things about 4E, and even believe some of them....

But whenever we manage to get back together, the love returns.[/Qat UOTE]

I have to echo that sentiment. Sadly it has resulted in less time being spent on EN. There just seems to be so many big name/high post count haters that the background noise becomes unappetizing.

 

[Rolflyn]

Couldn't decide between "mixed bag" and "dislike". 4e doesn't provide what I really want in an RPG. I would choose another game to play instead, but it isn't yet on my "will not play ever again" list. On the other hand, there are some good ideas in 4e, and I enjoyed at least one session of it. Final vote: mixed bag.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

Like it. Best D&D rendition so far.

It's not nearly as interesting to argue about as earlier editions though; there's Expertise but otherwise there're no big powder kegs lying around. Some still argue about alignment, but it's meaningless now so I couldn't care less. And there are occasional warm topics like bear shamans and iron armbands, but...other editions just had so much more bizarreness to debate.

 

[Kralin Thornberry]

voted "love it" especially after trying to play a pathfinder/3.x game yesterday. The fact that every time my turn came around my action was "stab it with my short sword" reminded me that 4E gives so many more combat options.

And as far as role playing goes, I don't need rules to tell me how to do that...

 

[Kunimatyu]

I used to love 4e. Now I find that Savage Worlds does everything I need an RPG to do, and with less clunk and time-consuming combat than 4e.

If combat wasn't designed to fill an hour timeslot, I'd like 4e a lot more.