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

[payn]

Maybe. Probably. I mean, it seems like there's a rather decent market for "D&D but with more" right now as it feels like some people kind of age out of trying to make 5E what they want it to be.

I think that D&D+ market either needs patience or they need to move to Pathfinder is what they will discover.

PF2 is very much sits between 3E, 4E, and 5E when it comes to mechanics and such. It doesn't directly copy 4E as much as it takes a lot of its lessons to heart and puts their own spin on them. I don't think it'll be a real substitute for what 4E was and how wild some of the powers were, at least until you get to later levels (which would probably be my biggest critique: there are some really awesome powers, but they should really move up the feat leveling schedule by like 5 levels). I really love it, but I don't think it's fully in the vein of 4E like Lancer or 13th Age aspire to be.

Yeap, but also I think there are some folks where playing 4E it’s alternatives, or PF2 is not enough. It must say D&D on the label.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I think that D&D+ market either needs patience or they need to move to Pathfinder is what they will discover.

Honestly kind of felt like Wizards could have put out a book or even a line on it, with softcovers instead of hard but more supplements to try and feed that. But I can also see why they are focused on what they think is working.

Yeap, but also I think there are some folks where playing 4E it’s alternatives, or PF2 is not enough. It must say D&D on the label.

Brand loyalty is a hell of a thing. At a certain level I have always thought that the 4E divide was only somewhat about the edition itself, and somewhat about a lot of older players who had watched the game change over time and just looked at 4E as a jumping off point. Straw that broke the Camel's back and all that. I knew two early 2E players who were basically like that and went back to 2E during that period.

 

[Parmandur]

I think the D&D market has two general camps. The casual player who doesn’t need an onslaught of supplements and complexity, and the hard core that does. 3E and 4E tried to cater to the latter, 5E did not.

Folks may wonder where the fans of complexity and supplement go and I think the answer is pathfinder going forward. Not everybody is going to like that.

I think it's a slightly finer gradient than that, and further that for even most hardcore players...5E release schedule looks like an onslaught of supplements and complexity.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I’d argue there’s a bit more nuance than that.

A: I don’t like 4e because of X.

B: can you explain why you don’t like it?

A: I don’t like it because of A, B and C.

B: well that kinda explains it. Those things aren’t really part of X. You’ve added that on your own as well as misinterpreting this bit. If you instead do this, then all your problems go away.

A: You insufferable jerk! How dare you suggest that I’m doing anything wrong. You are badwrongfunning me and you hate gaming!!!! Raugggghhhh!

Is typically how the conversation goes.

For me that A reads as, "I don't want to do that. That is not fun for me. Therefore, because of A, B, and C, I don't like X.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Could be, I mean it is beyond any shadow of a doubt true that people who were playing 3.x would have simply never even heard of, let alone cared one lick about, 4e if it had been published by "Giant Fantasy Brain Books" and was called "Heroic Adventures" or something. It would have sold the obligatory 3-5 thousand copies and gone right out of print, like 97% of all other heartbreakers. That's just the reality, TTRPG is a tiny industry which basically has room for one dominant product, which has ALWAYS been D&D, it got there first, and it is unlikely to ever be replaced in that spot, despite some people wishing the contrary. So, what pleased me immensely was being able to have a slightly different take on D&D that could actually be high enough profile that I could count on having players. Even today at least people know what it is and it's actually quite easy to find people to play with. None of that would be true for some off-brand version, nor would it have gotten 20+ supplements, etc.

And, honestly, 'legacy' TO ME is not much of a word. I have my Holme's Basic book, my LBBs and supplements, my 1e and 2e books, I can play those anytime I want. I don't need every new D&D game to slavishly stick to the letter of whatever was decreed in 1974 on the back of a napkin. So the entire argument that it is some 'betrayal' or something (note @Imaro's statements) is ludicrous in my mind. WotC owes nothing to older editions, they stand on their own. Heck nowadays they'll even sell you PDFs of large parts of the TSR back catalog!

If WotC hadn't felt they owed something to previous editions, they wouldn't have made 5e the way they did. Remember that it was 2014 WotC 5e that got crazy popular, not what they've done with it in the last few years. I remain very interested in seeing how 5.5 actually does amongst the silent majority who don't pay much attention outside of game night.

 

[Yalım]

I won't speak for Lancer or 4e, but I've certainly seen people say things about PF2e that were sufficiently counterfactual that assuming they haven't played the game is the charitable assumption. ("Bad at the game" on the other hand is just playing the same form of the dozens as "Git gud" is in the video game sphere).

There's plenty of that in every edition in my experience, but I see it frequently used as the default way to knock down complaints.

In an exchange about how 4e classes feel too similar (fighter & paladin in this particular discussion), I got: "The people who repeat that line over and over did not play a lot of 4e, straight up. It's one of those internet only lines that gets regurgitated as truth even though classes played extremely differently."

In response to disliking vancian casting as default in PF2: "Only bad on the surface, focus spells and staves/wands/scrolls help mitigate the problems. Plus, once you get the game sense for it, it becomes even less punishing."

Or this bizarre exchange about disliking 4e's marking, which was described as a way to pull aggro: "There was no aggro mechanic in 4e. There was a mechanic to let defenders hit enemies that ignored them. You clearly have no experience with what you are talking about."

The conversation is usually some variation on:

1. Person X writes some criticism of a game
2. Person Y says "once you're good this isn't a problem" or "have you even played [game]?"
3. X say "yes"
4. Y repeats that X must not be very good or X must not have actually played. Predictable internet argument occurs.
5. Continue until someone gives up or a moderator locks the thread.

As a person who didn't join this forum until 2010 and posted very little until 2023, it's weird to hear so many references to 4e always being disparaged and 5e never getting ragged on. My experience since I joined D&D-related social media in 2006~07-ish has been the diametric opposite. 4e fans telling me that my distastes are skill issues & constant ragging about 5e. I remember on GitP in 2014-ish there were hundreds of pages of threads making fun of 5e, with snarky thread titles like "The 15-Minute Designer Workday" and "Desperately Playing It Safe".

 

[Justice and Rule]

There's plenty of that in every edition in my experience, but I see it frequently used as the default way to knock down complaints.

In an exchange about how 4e classes feel too similar (fighter & paladin in this particular discussion), I got: "The people who repeat that line over and over did not play a lot of 4e, straight up. It's one of those internet only lines that gets regurgitated as truth even though classes played extremely differently."

Can you link to the thread so we can see it ourselves? Cherry-picking a single comment from Reddit is not exactly a convincing argument.

In response to disliking vancian casting as default in PF2: "Only bad on the surface, focus spells and staves/wands/scrolls help mitigate the problems. Plus, once you get the game sense for it, it becomes even less punishing."

I honestly don't see what's wrong with this. Sometimes people have in-built biases that make it hard to actually see how the mechanic works or prevents them from using it as intended. That's not meant to be insulting, but simply that sometimes people don't realize they are doing something wrong or missing something because they aren't looking for it in the first place. This is pretty common in PF2 because things are relatively similar, but different: my immediate thought is to how AoOs are rarer but more important in the action economy and activate more often, which means things like tripping take on new value compared to 5E. It's something that you might miss (in fact, a mid-sized YouTuber missed it when talking about PF2), but it can really change how you use certain tools.

Or this bizarre exchange about disliking 4e's marking, which was described as a way to pull aggro: "There was no aggro mechanic in 4e. There was a mechanic to let defenders hit enemies that ignored them. You clearly have no experience with what you are talking about."

Again, link? It's easy to cherry-pick people, but that doesn't really give us an actual picture of the actual community and thread.

The conversation is usually some variation on:

1. Person X writes some criticism of a game
2. Person Y says "once you're good this isn't a problem" or "have you even played [game]?"
3. X say "yes"
4. Y repeats that X must not be very good or X must not have actually played. Predictable internet argument occurs.
5. Continue until someone gives up or a moderator locks the thread.

I mean, we get these in any system. I'm reminded of people telling 5E players that Martials are actually great, you just gotta "improvise" and such. If you want to show that this is endemic, you might want to link to the threads rather than giving us a few posts.

As a person who didn't join this forum until 2010 and posted very little until 2023, it's weird to hear so many references to 4e always being disparaged and 5e never getting ragged on. My experience since I joined D&D-related social media in 2006~07-ish has been the diametric opposite. 4e fans telling me that my distastes are skill issues & constant ragging about 5e.

I mean, that's not my experience from being online for 15 years now, but sometimes you don't see certain things because your biases simply conceal them. As someone who didn't like 4E and over time came to really appreciate it, I really don't share your opinion and I've seen way more unfair criticism of 4E than any two other systems out there. I'm not even in love with the system, but I know who catches what online, and there's nothing quite like watching dozens of people say "This is just a wargame" that probably makes people a bit more stiff in their welcomes when you come at them with old arguments.

I remember on GitP in 2014-ish there were hundreds of pages of threads making fun of 5e, with snarky thread titles like "The 15-Minute Designer Workday" and "Desperately Playing It Safe".

If that's the worst 5E got, then honestly it should count itself lucky.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think it does a lot of what 4E does but isn’t a copy. Though it also has epic level play without bounded accuracy, an over abundance of classes, monthly adventures, and is ever expanding. Essentially an alternative to 5E in every category.

My feeling is that 4e, PF2e, 13a, and 5e just occupy certain spaces within the range of reasonable D&D-esque, d20-derived, systems, but within that space they're not especially close. So, 4e is over to one edge on "shared class structure" and the other 3 are over in the 'not shared' category, with some variation, for instance. BA is an odd concept that only 5e, of any D&D-like that I know of, has really ever tried. I'm not particularly enamored of the results. The skill system that came out of it is rather bad in some ways, for instance. The problem fundamentally is, if you are going to have a certain range of power levels within the game, you need a certain degree of progression, and the VERY VERY simplest way, which actually seems to work fine in the other 3 games, to do that is a monotonically increasing attack and defense bonus.

I mean, I get the theory, a whole bunch of orcs can threaten a 10th level fighter! Yeah, in theory... But have you ever tried to run 50 orcs? I mean, it gets old quickly and they can only actually threaten the fighter if they can all focus attacks on him, which is unlikely to transpire in any decently designed scenario. Within the limits where such things are likely to be actually reasonable, 4e manages to handle it anyway, you can have level 1 goblins jumping a level 5 party. It will be fairly predictably a lopsided fight, but I actually did it, with goblins! It worked. Heck, amusingly the goblins dice got hot and the PCs discovered that their steamroller had sprung a bit of a leak... Pitted a Carrion Crawler (level 7 standard Soldier) against a level 1 party and that worked too! So I never was sold on it that much.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If WotC hadn't felt they owed something to previous editions, they wouldn't have made 5e the way they did. Remember that it was 2014 WotC 5e that got crazy popular, not what they've done with it in the last few years. I remain very interested in seeing how 5.5 actually does amongst the silent majority who don't pay much attention outside of game night.

I think WotC is a business and they make what sells to the best of their ability. They decided that a game less different from 3e than 4e was would shift more units off the shelves, enough to defray any development cost, and they produced that product. I guarantee you that's how management views it.

I would be interested in a '5.5e' or something like that, but I'm already 100% sure it will be too much like 5e to make any difference for me. My feeling is WotC basically gave up any likely momentum to actually experiment with the game when they pretty much ditched every real innovation of 4e. I mean, the type of people that got excited about 5e in 2014 are never going to go along with ANY changes that aren't mild and largely cosmetic. That's the bind WotC is in now, they've defined themselves as the provider of 'old fashioned stuff' in the RPG world. That works for a while, but eventually it will stop working. Maybe at that point there will be a change of stewardship and a 6e that really innovates again, but I don't see that happening in the next few years.

 

[payn]

My feeling is that 4e, PF2e, 13a, and 5e just occupy certain spaces within the range of reasonable D&D-esque, d20-derived, systems, but within that space they're not especially close. So, 4e is over to one edge on "shared class structure" and the other 3 are over in the 'not shared' category, with some variation, for instance. BA is an odd concept that only 5e, of any D&D-like that I know of, has really ever tried. I'm not particularly enamored of the results. The skill system that came out of it is rather bad in some ways, for instance. The problem fundamentally is, if you are going to have a certain range of power levels within the game, you need a certain degree of progression, and the VERY VERY simplest way, which actually seems to work fine in the other 3 games, to do that is a monotonically increasing attack and defense bonus.

I mean, I get the theory, a whole bunch of orcs can threaten a 10th level fighter! Yeah, in theory... But have you ever tried to run 50 orcs? I mean, it gets old quickly and they can only actually threaten the fighter if they can all focus attacks on him, which is unlikely to transpire in any decently designed scenario. Within the limits where such things are likely to be actually reasonable, 4e manages to handle it anyway, you can have level 1 goblins jumping a level 5 party. It will be fairly predictably a lopsided fight, but I actually did it, with goblins! It worked. Heck, amusingly the goblins dice got hot and the PCs discovered that their steamroller had sprung a bit of a leak... Pitted a Carrion Crawler (level 7 standard Soldier) against a level 1 party and that worked too! So I never was sold on it that much.

I actually like BA and dislike 5E skill system which I don’t blame on BA.

I like BA because it makes sense of why a world has level 1 up to level 20 beings seemingly living side by side. PF2 you can send a bill on orca at a level 10 PC and they won’t break a sweat. Both solve math problems of the past in different ways. So largely it’s a matter of how you want the power fantasy and/or setting sim.