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

[AbdulAlhazred]

Isn't that what typical 4e looks like? How else would it be done?

LOL! You would say that, but of course our games are something like that too... I would not say we skip combats, just that each one is exciting and very dynamic.
4e is pure action adventure in a way no other D&D can emulate!

 

[happyhermit]

If I'm being generous I would say it's "funny" that for all the talk about how 4e had no association with WOW or similar games and anyone who says otherwise is must be an idiot or a horrible person, that almost all the comparisons I heard at the time were from people who liked WOW and 4e.

Heck, the Podcast I listen to that still plays 4e you can go back and hear episodes from back then and the WOW player is like "This is just like WOW!" and the GM uses comparisons to help players understand concepts (an encounter power is like your "cool-down"). I guess they are all just idiots.

 

[CleverNickName]

@Ruin Explorer has a good point. A lot of people have an axe to grind with the way the game was marketed and distributed, and with other decisions that were made around that same time.

I remember that there concerns of online piracy around the time that 4th Edition was released, and that might have prompted WotC to pull a lot of their digital content. And Paizo released their Pathfinder playtest material just a few months prior to 4E's release, which might have prompted WotC to remove all OGL-compatible materials. The press conferences and announcements had a weird flex to them that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. And so on.

A lot of big decisions were made at WotC in 2008, and few of them were popular. It's unfair, but it clearly affected peoples' opinions of the 4th Edition D&D product.

 

[Randomthoughts]

Isn't that what typical 4e looks like? How else would it be done?

Well, my conception of what was "typical" for 4e was the adventures and reported experiences (say on forums like these). When I read the published modules, I realized immediately they would not fit how I constructed my adventures as written and they certainly didn't match how my group played. There was a lot of combat encounters, and like I said, I dispensed with any "throw-away combats" meant to drain resources like dailies or healing surges. Instead, I mined adventures for cool encounter ideas, used "Battle Challenges" (a free form type of skill challenge) for attrition combats and tweaked short/long rests.

IIRC, there was a common complaint about combat taking too long. I didn't have that concern myself but I did see the reason for it. First and foremost, I tried to switch things up. Some sessions were pure role-playing with a skill challenge or two. Other sessions (like a dungeon crawl) was a sessions of combat encounters. Generally speaking though, I liked having one set-piece battle and a separate skill challenge each session. Playing Dark Sun (and its generally higher damage levels and cool monster abilities) also helped make the combats memorable.

 

[Haffrung]

I ignored 4E when it was released because I was returning to my roots at the time and playing an old-school style game.

However, about six months after Essentials came out I leafed through the books at my FLGS and I was fascinated. Something about the layout, the way the stats were presented, the digest format itself, screamed 'play me.'

So I picked up a pile of material (both players books, the DM's Toolkit, the Monster Vault, and the Rules Compendium) and started a Neverwinter Nights campaign. We had a blast.

What I liked:

Ease of play at the table. 4E was the first (and still the only) edition of D&D that reads as though it was designed employing modern 21st century instructional design. The moment I realized I could run an encounter with any monster and had no need ot reference anything other than the compact stat block in the adventure it was as though scales fell from my eyes. I didn't have to mark a page in the Monster Manual? I didn't have to record the spells an NPC prepared?

Clarity of the rules and ease in referencing them. The easist edition for me to learn. And not just the basics, but the complete system. No weird sub-systems that seem tacked on. No edge cases. And everything presented succinctly exactly where you would expect to find it, not buried in walls of text. Why isn't there a Rules Compendium for 5E?

The format. Love the digest books. Love the large fonts in the books. Love the pogs that came with the DM's Kit and Monster Vault. Love the affordable dungeon tiles. With the complete Essentials line I have a complete and evergreen RPG system with all accessories.

What I disliked:

PC generation and leveling. You pretty much need an app for this. And action/ability cards should have part of the game line, instead of printed from third-party sources.

Limited approach. You're playing fantasy superheroes, and you're only playing fantasy superheroes. Gritty play is not supported. Nor is exploration mechanically supported - everything is about the combat encounter.

Meh adventures. They didn't hit their stride with adventures until late in the product cycle, with Madness at Gardmore Abbey, Threats of the Nentir Vale (which is pretty much a campaign book), and the Hammerfast and Vor Rukoth sandboxes. The problem is the designers were trying to make old-school dungeon crawls with a system where you want to be avoiding trash fights. In my experience 4E shines when you make combat rare and climactic. Two, maybe three 30-60 minute combat sessions in a 4 hour session is the tempo you should be aiming for.

I'll happily play 4E any time, keeping in mind its somewhat narrow focus. It's a pleasure to prepare and run.

 

[pemerton]

I didn't run it like a typical 4e, and that's probably a reason why I enjoyed it so much. I focused on set piece battles instead of attrition combat and used Skill Challenges extensively

4e is pure action adventure in a way no other D&D can emulate!

So, to elaborate a bit on my response to Randomthoughts and what AbdulAlhazed has said: here's a summary of the first action sequence I ever ran in 4e (Jan or perhaps eary Feb 2009), largely cut-and-pasted from another recent 4e thread:

The first combat that I ran in 4e was the river ambush from Night's Dark Terror. I wrote up a group of foes - a reaver (3rd level human guard from the MM), a mage (2nd level human from the MM), a halfing (1st level slinger from the MM), a backstabber (a dagger-using variant of the 2nd level human bandit from the MM) and 10 1st level minions - some slingers, some stabbers - adapted from the MM human rabble. That was 750 XP worth of enemies.

I drew up a pretty simple map of a short stretch of river on an old (as in, acquired some time in the 1980s) piece of graph paper, with banks at either end a bit over 20 sq apart, a sandbar in the middle, with a tree at one end, and a sketch of the starting point of the PCs' boat (about 2 sq x 4 sq, plus some bits to squeeze into at the ends) and a raft (3 sq x 1 sq) by the bank for the bad guys. The bad guys' bank was wooded.

I had notes on the concealment provided by the woods, and the muddy terrain of the river banks (difficult, and also steep on the side opposite the bad guys and so requiring DC 10 Athletics to get up). I also had notes on the cover provided to the PCs by their boat, the Acrobatics DC (10) to stand in it, and the skill challenge needed to disentangle the boat from the chain that the ambushers use to stop it. This included a note that every dead minion is a skill challenge success (because they're the ones making sure the PCs don't interfere with the chain).

Given I ran this encounter 11 years ago my memory isn't perfect. But I have memories of PCs trying to jump from the boat (where they were sitting ducks for the slingers) to the sandbar. Some ended up in the water. The mage and reaver left the bank on the raft so that they could attack the PCs, and a group of minions also swam out. When I looked through my old notes they showed that, at one stage, the PC wizard was alone on the boat, the paladin was struggling through the water to the sandbar, the warlock was on the sandbar taking cover behind the tree, and the fighter was in hand-to-hand with e NPC reaver. I remember that the fighter won that fight, as that was where he acquired his Black Peak halberd, which was his specialty weapon until he reforged the Dwarven thrower Whelm into the mordenkrad Overwhelm.

I also remember that the encounter was difficult. The players found the terrain punishing at first, being stuck on a boat and only the fighter having Athletics training to swim to the sandbar - but being a dwarf and so fairly slow. The PCs were suffering hurt from the enemy slingers with their 20 sq range.

But it's pretty well-known that 4e delivers a reliable "heroic rally" for the PCs, and that must have happened here because the PCs prevailed in the end. The notes I found have the paladin having used one Lay on Hands plus his 1x/day multi-class Inspiring Word. I can't remember everything about the way this situation played out, but I do remember that the PCs took control of the raft, and took the NPC mage prisoner. (A couple of sessions later she got turned into a wight by a goblin shaman's necromantic magic.)

I don't think I could have designed this encounter without the advice from the DMG on how to use terrain and to integrate it with the enemy forces. The idea for the raft came from reading the vehicle chapter in Adventurer's Vault. And the mechanics were crucial to resolution, with the water and vegetation and mud and so on all manifesting in mechanical terms. But it didn't feel anything like a boardgame or a MMO. The fact that everyone was working from symmetrical power suites affected decisions, in the sense of Can you afford to use that yet, or do you want to wait until the raft is within range? But it wasn't the focus of the action.

What brought the fiction to life, for me at least but I think also my players, was the actual situation the PCs found themselves in, and the way that situation unfolded. Being in the water sucked for the warriors because they were heavily armoured guys trying to swim to a sandbar. The slingers were dangerous because they were missile troops attacking exposed enemies from a position of cover. Being stuck prone in a boat you don't know how to propel sucked because it should. Etc. The mechanics were crucial, but as means, not ends.

 

[atanakar]

Parallel to the development of the written rules for 4e there was also a digital version that was supposed to come out and provide virtual table top gaming for D&D. The person in charge of the programming was involved in a tragic murder-suicide. WotC canned the project.

That is why people keep saying 4e feels like a MMO. Just by reading the rules you can tell everything was written in a way it could be easily transformed into code.

If they had pull it off it would have been game changing.

Murder suicide:

Murder of Melissa Batten - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

WOTC:

 

[wingsandsword]

I think the general design would have been better applied to a different underlying property, possibly different genre, without the history and expectations D&D carried with it.

I'll definitely agree with this.

Many people's problems with it weren't that it was a bad game per se. . .it's that it was such a divergence from what people thought of as D&D, especially baseline core D&D.

If 4e had been released under some other name, it probably would have had a much more positive and less divisive reception.

 

[pemerton]

When I read the published modules, I realized immediately they would not fit how I constructed my adventures as written and they certainly didn't match how my group played.

We're ad idem with respect to all this!

my conception of what was "typical" for 4e was the adventures and reported experiences (say on forums like these).

I was probably teasing or joking a little bit in my earlier reply to you, but what you describe - which is completely consistent with my own experience - also fits what I saw from most other serious 4e players on these boards.

The idea that you'd do 4e by way of enconter-to-encounter attrition, for instance, just seems laughably wrong even on a cursory read of the books. In a game based around the encounter as the basic unit of play, all the action (including any attrition) has to be conceived of within the context of the encounter.

That's not to say that there won't be any encounter-to-encounter attrition. In our 4e campaign we had some moments of drama that resulted from the PCs being low on resources (two examples). But those are emergent by-products of the combination of encounter-focused play and the recovery pattern. They're not the point or the focus of play!

 

[teitan]

The WoW influence I think was a total misreading of the market. While there is significant crossover between D&D players, at least at the time, and MMO players, Hasbro banked too much on that trend thinking it was the future. It was a mistake that even Ryan Dancey made. To many people listened to Dancey a little too religiously after the success of the D20 System License and OGL when he kept harping on and on about WoW and other MMOs and trying to capture that audience. While I don't think 4e was a financial failure as some try to proclaim, it certainly wasn't with DDI subscriptions alone, it fractured the market. I think what made Habro turn on it was losing market dominance when Pathfinder started selling just as well.

I think it was a huge mistake on WOTC's part to include all new material in DDI. They greatly undercut book sales by making all the new rules content "free" under DDI. DDI was in general a failure that hurt the edition. It seems it was designed with VTT play to become the default and when that failed to materialize in an solid form in the DDI tools they lost a lot of potential money. While I think DNDBeyond is expensive to purchase e-books, the model is pretty good and they have been wise in not overpromising like Project Morningstar.