D&D 4E Ben Riggs' "What the Heck Happened with 4th Edition?" seminar at Gen Con 2023

How long ago did that happen? Give me a break. We're talking now not nearly 15 years ago.

At any point in time? At any point in the past ten years have the forums become so vitriolic that certain topics had to be banished to sub forums?

Other than a few people, most people remain largely positive about 5e overall. Eight UA’s in and we’re still not seeing any really nasty pushback.
 

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At any point in time? At any point in the past ten years have the forums become so vitriolic that certain topics had to be banished to sub forums?

Other than a few people, most people remain largely positive about 5e overall. Eight UA’s in and we’re still not seeing any really nasty pushback.
The only thing that I can think of is when people propose adding something like the 4e Warlord (or maybe the Psion) to 5e. There was a period where the Warlord had its own sub-forum. But a lot of that was rooted in anti-4e/Warlord sentiment rather than 5e per se.
 

At any point in time? At any point in the past ten years have the forums become so vitriolic that certain topics had to be banished to sub forums?

Other than a few people, most people remain largely positive about 5e overall. Eight UA’s in and we’re still not seeing any really nasty pushback.
You know, the warlord and DOAM subs were technically about 5E.
Ninja'd
 



At any point in time? At any point in the past ten years have the forums become so vitriolic that certain topics had to be banished to sub forums?

Other than a few people, most people remain largely positive about 5e overall. Eight UA’s in and we’re still not seeing any really nasty pushback.
So now not liking or wanting a specific feature introduced in 4e to be added into 5e is considered being anti-4e? That's an absurd position.
 



I think those were just the lightning rod items.
Yeah, the Warlord became pretty emblematic of 4e, so it tended to attract attention from all sides of the 4e debate.

As an aside, one thing that I find fairly interesting is how many warlords (and the like) have been added by 5e-adjacent systems, including from a fair number of people who were never part of the Edition Wars because they came in the hobby in the midst of 5e. For example, the upcoming DC20 RPG has its version of the Warlord, but the designer by all accounts only started playing tabletop roleplaying games with 5e.
 

Once again for the umpteenth time I am never upset by people's preferences. Those Warlord threads did not just feature people discussing their preferences. They also featured bizarre psychoanalysis of how even liking to play that archetype meant you wanted to boss around your fellow players and absurd shouting wounds back on takes in a game where you recover all hit points sleeping overnight. It's not just I don't like it. It's this thing is bad, and you should feel bad for liking it (and in the case of the Warlord it might even mean you are a bad person).

This is the strong throughline of a lot of online 4e criticism. It never stops at the game. It instead puts those who enjoy/enjoyed the game in the crossfire by assuming they don't care about things like coherency, game lore (which many 4e fans care about deeply) and even roleplaying. In particular this bizarre caricature of a 4e fan as only caring about tactical combat when for many of us a big part of what we like about the game was wanting to have the game work with less combat and having binding mechanics for stuff besides fighting.
 
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