D&D 4E Edition Experience - Did/Do You Play 4th Edition D&D? How Was/Is it?

[teitan]

You don't even have to go outside this website; Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present to see that Pathfinder tied with D&D back in 2010. By Q2 2011 it had lost it's top spot for good.



Okay, you are missing the point completely. Simply stating which factors are important in determining whether mechanics or games are similar misses the entire point.



So much is slashed and burned these days but I have some stuff. Bo9s was similar to early 4e design, but many of the concepts didn't pan out.
Spotlight Interview - Rob Heinsoo

The Truth About 4th Edition: Part One of Our Exclusive Interview with Wizards of the Coast


RPG Codex Interview: Mike Mearls on Dungeons & Dragons and D&D Next :: rpg codex > doesn't scale to your level


Now, Mearls qualifies by saying he wasn't part of the initial meetings, but Heinsoo credits him with AEDU, so his thoughts on sources of inspiration are significant to say the least.

BURN!

 

[fearsomepirate]

This is going rather far afield, and might be better for another thread, but I've always found Greyhawk to be staggeringly hard to get into, because of a dearth of good materials

I'd never heard it described as an actual campaign setting release, I'd always thought that was just an update for metaplot events. That was one reason I'd never tried to track it down when I became curious about the setting.

If you want to treat Greyhawk as a full setting, you need to dig through old Dragon articles and cobble together stuff from a hodgepodge of material released over decades.

What I do is treat the 1e setting box as a bare skeleton to build my own setting from. I really prefer having cues to hang my own ideas on more than I want a really detailed book that requires me to spend a significant amount of time reading and learning fake history.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Oh, I had blocked out all the interrupts and reactions in combat. We lost track of where we were in initiative so many times as a result!

Almost everyone at our table was using the online character creation app to manage their characters. Very quickly I realized that if I need to use a computer to manage my character or campaign, that's not a game for me.

For me, coming from 3.XE, it didn't get to "deadly slow" until after about 13 when the interrupt/immediate action/reaction stuff got totally out of control.

One other issue is that it was apparently designed to be computer-managed.

 

[teitan]

This is going rather far afield, and might be better for another thread, but I've always found Greyhawk to be staggeringly hard to get into, because of a dearth of good materials

I'd never heard it described as an actual campaign setting release, I'd always thought that was just an update for metaplot events. That was one reason I'd never tried to track it down when I became curious about the setting.

I know that in 1998, when I was first getting into AD&D and was learning about it, when I was curious about Greyhawk (largely as the place where all the named spells in the PHB came from), when I asked about it, they pointed me to the used book shelf and said that they often get used copies of the 1e Greyhawk hardcover in and that was the last general introductory work to the setting that had been made.

I know that in much of the AD&D 2e era, it seemed TSR was actively trying to kill the setting. The 1996 Planescape book On Hallowed Ground literally said that Oerth was dying and its gods fading from existence and that people beyond that world knew it wouldn't be around much longer, and that at most a handful of the Gods of Oerth might survive if they got followers on other worlds. I always took that as an implied editorial note from TSR at the time that they didn't want to do anything with the setting.

There really hasn't been a good way for players to get into that setting in a very, very long time. Certainly nothing as accessible or approachable as the various Forgotten Realms books, or even the 3e Dragonlance campaign book.

For what was one of the original, core settings of D&D, and what was the presumed default setting of 3e, they did absolutely nothing with it for a very long time other than Living Greyhawk, which, if you weren't RPGA, was something people generally ignored.

Hence my suggestion that if WotC was looking at things they could have done with 3.5e instead of tossing it out to make 4e, they could have produced Greyhawk setting materials, (or other settings, which had been treated with equal disregard during 3e).

Yes, WotC had pressure from corporate to do otherwise, which was a critical flaw. That same corporate mindset is what gave us the toxic, alienating 4e marketing "3e is WrongBadFun" campaign, after all.

yeah that 1e hardcover wasn’t even a campaign setting book but more akin to the Forgotten Realms adventures hardcover, updating The core assumptions of the setting to 2e. It wasn’t even a very good book.

 

[pogre]

I enjoyed the 4th edition rules and my group playtested them. I ran a regular campaign using the first few modules released, and that was a mistake. Less than a year after the rules were published my group wanted to change. It was a shame for me, because I enjoyed running the game.

My group has always been pretty laid back, but 4th edition D&D was one of only two games they did not enjoy. The other was WFRP 3rd edition.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's certainly not at all well-suited to things like superheroes, or urban intrigue, or the like.

Actually wait, let me step that back. Superheroes would be terrible, but actually moderate-fantasy urban intrigue stuff which was very combat-focused, a sort of Blades in the Dark/Dishonored-type setting could probably work pretty well for it. Better though than high/heroic fantasy? I'm not sure about that.

You know what, I can think of one setting 4E could have done better than D&D - Earthdawn. 4E instantly reminded me of Earthdawn (a staggeringly amazing game when it came out, btw), and that vibe never entirely went away. That's very much high/heroic fantasy in the D&D mould. I also think it might have been good as a Planescape-specific RPG, like "D&D: Planescape" the RPG - 4E would have done that masterfully.

Wow that was actually an interesting thing to think about, but I'm interested if you have anything to add too!

Eh... I don't quite see why you dis 4e's engine as a superhero system. You'd have your 'Jr Heroes', sort of the early X-Men, as Heroic Tier PCs. Later they would elevate into the Paragon Tier, becoming legendary characters of great power. Finally they would graduate into the level of engaging cosmic forces, becoming profoundly trans-human and eventually achieving an apotheosis. Admittedly, a lot of comic book superheroes don't follow a growth curve like this, but that's more a business/marketing kind of thing (don't kill off your cash cows, Flash has been around for 70+ years now frex). Even Marvel/DC eventually started writing stories with character growth and retirement, replacement with new generations. So nothing in this model would really be against the genre. In terms of the actual mechanics, it seems fairly well-suited.

Likewise, it worked pretty well for Gamma World as a science-fantasy game. I think they hacked it a bit too much, but even straight 4e works pretty well in that milieu.

I don't think a Blades-like game would work. 4e's mechanical engine is too much rooted in a power curve model in which the PCs achieve very high levels of relative power compared to ordinary people. It is quite hard to use that to work out a "no matter what you do, you're doomed to be crushed by this crapsack world" which is basically the thematics of BitW. Similar problems would arise with secret agent games, Lovecraftian horror, detective fiction, most urban fantasy, etc.

You could do a game that would pretty well emulate the gist of something like Age of Adepts though! AoA has a lot of pseudo-mechanical elements and specific world details that wouldn't quite mesh with 4e, but you could run a 4e campaign that pretty well emulated the central concept. You might want to do some tweaking of rules and build alternate classes to really get it dead on, but even vanilla 4e would work for that. In some ways AoA is a great resource to use in terms of imagining what the real implications of the extreme power curve of D&D-like games might evolve into. Its world has some interesting features (albeit overall it is a bit silly).

 

[Uni-the-Unicorn!]

I never really played the Essentials set. Can anybody who did comment on how they felt to play and run for compared to the original classes? From a quick browse, it did feel like they were more distinct than the original classes (not a value judgement).
But man, trying to figure out whether the Essentials were "D&D 4.5" or just more splat books was... difficult.

We played with both in the same game. We treated like a splat book, not a change to the game

 

[teitan]

This is going rather far afield, and might be better for another thread, but I've always found Greyhawk to be staggeringly hard to get into, because of a dearth of good materials

I'd never heard it described as an actual campaign setting release, I'd always thought that was just an update for metaplot events. That was one reason I'd never tried to track it down when I became curious about the setting.

I know that in 1998, when I was first getting into AD&D and was learning about it, when I was curious about Greyhawk (largely as the place where all the named spells in the PHB came from), when I asked about it, they pointed me to the used book shelf and said that they often get used copies of the 1e Greyhawk hardcover in and that was the last general introductory work to the setting that had been made.

I know that in much of the AD&D 2e era, it seemed TSR was actively trying to kill the setting. The 1996 Planescape book On Hallowed Ground literally said that Oerth was dying and its gods fading from existence and that people beyond that world knew it wouldn't be around much longer, and that at most a handful of the Gods of Oerth might survive if they got followers on other worlds. I always took that as an implied editorial note from TSR at the time that they didn't want to do anything with the setting.

There really hasn't been a good way for players to get into that setting in a very, very long time. Certainly nothing as accessible or approachable as the various Forgotten Realms books, or even the 3e Dragonlance campaign book.

For what was one of the original, core settings of D&D, and what was the presumed default setting of 3e, they did absolutely nothing with it for a very long time other than Living Greyhawk, which, if you weren't RPGA, was something people generally ignored.

I wanted to point out a couple things. Back then, the RPGA was pretty big. They made membership free at a certain point and the loving campaigns were extremely successful so Greyhawk wasn’t “ignored” so much as exclusive by design.

that said, you really ought to check out the Living Greyhawk Gazeteer. It was mark market published and really well done. It’s the best version of the setting.

 

[jasper]

I played ONCE. A college friend invited me to the lfgs to play. The group reminded me of some of goobers, I played with in High School. One got ticked off that they didn't want him to dm. So he stormed off to another table to work on his campaign. Took another half hour to decide on the dm. After a total 95 minutes, I told them I was going to take a bathroom break, if we didn't have a game started within 5 minutes of my return, I was walking out. We played for about 2 hours before, I was tired of it all.
Note I now play and dm for some of those goobers. My college friend occasionally plays with us.

 

[billd91]

Eh... I don't quite see why you dis 4e's engine as a superhero system. You'd have your 'Jr Heroes', sort of the early X-Men, as Heroic Tier PCs. Later they would elevate into the Paragon Tier, becoming legendary characters of great power. Finally they would graduate into the level of engaging cosmic forces, becoming profoundly trans-human and eventually achieving an apotheosis. Admittedly, a lot of comic book superheroes don't follow a growth curve like this, but that's more a business/marketing kind of thing (don't kill off your cash cows, Flash has been around for 70+ years now frex). Even Marvel/DC eventually started writing stories with character growth and retirement, replacement with new generations. So nothing in this model would really be against the genre. In terms of the actual mechanics, it seems fairly well-suited.

I can see why 4e might not work very well for superheroes, particularly compared to other games designed for it like Mutants and Masterminds. Part of the genre includes using powers in weird and unique ways to solve the problems of the current episode that I don't think the power structure in 4e is well-suited to (and M&M's extra effort handles really well).

4e always struck me as reasonably well-suited for kung fu action where the AEDU structure fits the conventions of the action sequences in the movies - basic strikes abound (at will), but special moves get used only once for the coolness of the move in the action sequence. Of course, this perception may be somewhat colored by my first reading of the 4e PH while waiting at the drive in for it to get dark enough for Kung Fu Panda to start.