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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Trickster Spirit" data-source="post: 7664431" data-attributes="member: 6701829">Mearls has talked before about how while the core books and the Red Box sold very well to new players, follow up research showed that those purchases didn't translate to large numbers of new players sticking with the game. There certainly were newcomers between 2008-2014 for whom 4E was their first edition, and have stayed with the hobby since then, but to hear Mearls tell it the jump from the Red Box to the full game was too drastic - you can see how this influenced the design of 5E in the difference between the two games' onboarding curves. That said, though I was never a fan of 4E, I will defend it in that I think it probably pulled in as many new players as 3.x before it (at least over the same time period; 3.X lasted nearly twice as long so I suspect that overall it brought in more to the hobby). Anecdotally I have heard of several groups of all new players starting with 4E; anecdotes aren't evidence of course, but in terms of non-gamers walking into the stores and buying their first book of D&D I haven't seen any evidence that 4E turned away more newcomers than 4E. After all, newcomers weren't comparing 4E to preconceived notions of D&D, they were judging it based on whether it was fun or not - I have many criticisms of 4E, chief of which it was that it focused too heavily on tactical gameplay I find personally uninteresting, but I don't think anyonce can say 4E was somehow intrinsically "un-fun", especially not at the low levels first time players would start at.Rather, I suspect that 4E simply wasn't able to bring in *enough* new gamers to compensate for the edition split. Experienced D&D fans who found it unfamiliar either never adopted the new edition, or, as I saw mentioned recently on ENWorld (don't recall the specific thread) started campaigns with 4E but eventually left after a drawn out period of long-term dissatisfaction. Personally I think 4E's ultimate fatal flaw was combat length - I've read comments from people who have otherwise said 4E was their D&D of choice stating that ultimately it was slogging through hours-long fights that led to them moving on to another game. I think the two streams of attrition (the initial splitting of the player base and groups leaving the game due to grind-y combat) was simply too much for even an otherwise very good rate of new player uptake to make up for.</blockquote>

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