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

[Yalım]

Mod Note:
As if there is one single "actual picture" of a community? As if two people in a thread here won't usually have different impressions coming from it?

Folks, the cross-venue drama is unlikely to be constructive. Please leave it be.

Much appreciated

 

[Aldarc]

Not in my experience. Though I don't think there is a large contingent of these folks. The few out there are extremely nasty and some of the things they say occasionally rubs off on otherwise good folks.

Your experiences vary from mine.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In my experience, if there is obnoxious, toxic anti-5e rhetoric and criticism, it comes mostly from some of the OSR communities and influencers rather than the comparatively smaller 4e communities. (If 4e was the current edition, however, I highly doubt that 4e would be immune to similar rhetoric. If anything, I expect it would be even more toxic.)

It certainly was during the 4e height. It just tended to get lost in the mass of 3e player opprobrium. Of course the OSR folks didn't like 3e much better, that's why OSR became a thing in the first place.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Your experiences vary from mine.

Yeah, from MY perspective I just see certain things about 4e which are pretty obvious from my perspective. There are some areas that could uncharitably sound like Git Gud maybe? I mean, I think few 4e practitioners really ever mastered encounter/scene generation very well. Part of that probably IS because 4e really is tightly focused on 'heroic action' and if you are making an encounter (as opposed to some social situation, etc where it is a lot broader game) you need it to be done in a fairly specific way to really be top notch. Maybe not everyone is able to do that or wants those specific types of action in play.

 

[clearstream]

It certainly was during the 4e height. It just tended to get lost in the mass of 3e player opprobrium. Of course the OSR folks didn't like 3e much better, that's why OSR became a thing in the first place.

I find edition wars hard to understand. Games evolve out of and influence one another. For example, 4e's action mechanics were an evolution of 3.5e design work done in Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords. And surely no one looks at 5e and fails to see how it hearks back to earlier editions? As much as they may have been influenced by WoW, the 4e designers were also responding to background RPG discourse, what was being done in other games, and well-known flaws in earlier editions.

 

[Pedantic]

I find edition wars hard to understand. Games evolve out of and influence one another. For example, 4e's action mechanics were an evolution of 3.5e design work done in Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords. And surely no one looks at 5e and fails to see how it hearks back to earlier editions? As much as they may have been influenced by WoW, the 4e designers were also responding to background RPG discourse, what was being done in other games, and well-known flaws in earlier editions.

Everyone says that about ToB, but I think 4e is a more radical departure than it gets credit for, specifically for establishing daily resources and standardizing resource schedules. Late 3.5 was all about experimentation with different class chassis, with Incarnum, the Tome of Magic and so on.

The edition war was as much about the end of 3.5 material (and iteration on it as a design direction) as it was about 4e itself.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I find edition wars hard to understand. Games evolve out of and influence one another. For example, 4e's action mechanics were an evolution of 3.5e design work done in Tome of Battle: The Book of Nine Swords. And surely no one looks at 5e and fails to see how it hearks back to earlier editions? As much as they may have been influenced by WoW, the 4e designers were also responding to background RPG discourse, what was being done in other games, and well-known flaws in earlier editions.

Almost all of them seem, well, kind of dumb to me too, but I get it a little more with D&D; over and above any virtue it may or may not have as a system, D&D is the primo system when it comes to networking/player access in the hobby, so if a new edition swings away from things you like (or worse, toward things you actively dislike) you have taken at least theoretical damage to your potential ability to find games/players, as the new edition isn't going to cut it for you, and there's normally at least some loss (often a fair bit) in extent groups to the older edition, and absolutely loss among newer players.

But again, people tend to react more strongly to the things that seem new (and bad) to them, not to what carried over. As I've noted any number of times I'm not a big D&D-sphere person (arguably wasn't in some ways even back when it was just about literally the only game in town) but even in games I've liked much better, if a game takes a turn in a direction I don't like--I just walk away. Or get used to it. I don't feel a need to launch volleys at it.

 

[pemerton]

Like it or not, with their purchase of TSR WotC made themselves custodians and curators of the game's entire history, not just the eiditons they themselves put out. As such, I feel they have a duty to support them all; similar perhaps to a car manufacturer having a duty to provide replacement parts for older models.

Huh? TSR was a commercial publisher. WotC is a commercial publisher. Books (and magazines and pamphlets) are not machines that need support.

When WotC purchased TSR, they acquired their inventory, and their intellectual property. What they did/do with either is up to them.

 

[James Gasik]

I think initially WotC did want to become custodians and caretakers of D&D, I feel that was the impetus behind the initial acquisition. But the WotC of today isn't the same company it was a quarter century ago. Different hands are at the helm, and it's all about monetizing the brand.

 

[pemerton]

I think initially WotC did want to become custodians and caretakers of D&D, I feel that was the impetus behind the initial acquisition. But the WotC of today isn't the same company it was a quarter century ago. Different hands are at the helm, and it's all about monetizing the brand.

What was TSR trying to do? Make money from the game, the brand, and games/hobbies in general!

Products of your imagination - they weren't giving away those products for free!