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

[JiffyPopTart]

4e's spellbook is definitely a bit more abstract. OTOH what if it was written so that spells did NOT disappear? It could have been, but it would have added little, as few are the cases where you would want to go back to most lower level dailies, and the few that are THAT GOOD, like Sleep, you can always just keep. In AD&D each spell was an entire plot element and capability that had potentially infinite applications, so it makes a lot more sense there. Most powers are just combat tricks in 4e, any of them is fairly applicable and you don't desperately need to go back and memorize Wall of Iron instead of Fireball, like you would in 1e.

Other than 4e wizards have always been the Swiss army knife of casters. If they had a beefed up spellbook and prep time they were pretty powerful.

When you know you are headed into Ice Gulch to fight Frost Giants you dont study your cold based spells.

4e, you just picked whatever at will and encounter spells you want and we're stuck with them until you levelled up. Daily and Utility slots were slightly adjustable, but only with two choices instead of one.

This invalidates the traditional lore of ancient wizards with dusty times of forbidden knowledge...and it's the only edition to do so. They did attempt to alleviate this by creating the ritual system, and that does go some way to helping even things out, however a 4e wizard doesn't feel like any other editions wizard.

 

[Horwath]

We played 2 campaigns, I think that they were to 9th and 11th level.

It had some very good things and some very bad things. Kind of neutral in the end. Maybe that is why it is hated so.

So, the bad things

1 - AEDU; while this is also a great thing and I liked the initial idea, problem was that ALL classes goth the same amount of AED on the same levels. You could play with AED ration in the Utility part, but that was not so impactful, by design OFC.

2 - Number treadmill, and ofc the same treadmill for everyone. While again, in theory +1/2 per level is nice, simple and efficient way to show progress of your character it again falls into the same AED pit trap. All characters get the exactly the same bonuses on everything. Attack, AC, defenses, checks, skills... And when everyone gets the same on everything, they might just get nothing on nothing.

3 - Too much HPs. Or to little damage output, or BOTH.
fights were long and started to get boring after 4 or 5 round as on your lower levels (up to 5th), by the 3rd or 4th round EVERY class defaulted to that one at-will "auto-attack". Not saying that it does not come down to same in 5e, but it does have more variety in cantrips and they scale in damage much faster.
Dealing 6 damage per round as wizard, without even having a thrill of an attack roll is the definition of boring.

Stealth missions were almost impossible as most guards HPs were too high to be killed with an "alpha strike".

4 - magic items. While I do not mind "MagicMart" and for low level magic items I would liked it in any location that could support it, 4E took 3.5E MagicMart and turned to 11 or maybe even 111.

And all item, except few cool low level ones were +1,+2,+3,+4,+5,+6 fixed modifiers with one(and only one) special ability that was ranked in +1 to +4 market price modifier.

Again, all felt completely the same, and enforced the number thread mill.


The good:

1 - AEDU: while being bad overall, I have to say that it was a great idea on drawing board.

If they only mixed up the AED ratio between different classes, they could have sell that to us much better.

I loved that Encounter powers could be used in almost every encounter.
5 minutes is short rest. It's a breather. You wind down from adrenaline, drink some water(or ale) take few bites of your trail rations and be on your way.

1hr short rest is not a short rest.
In most sports halftime break(or 1/3rd or 1/4th) are between 5 and 15 min.

in 99% of cases, if you can manage to get 1hr break time, you can manage an 8hrs break time.


2 - Bounded accuracy: yes, I know you will say that I am crazy(maybe I am), but this works in variant that you remove +1/2 bonus per level on everything.

then bonuses are close to 5e.

You starting ability in point buy would be 18 for primary attack stat and you could boost it up to 24 with all ASIs that you can use on a single stat.
If you had attack expertise, it would go from +1 to +3 at epic levels and magic items got you +0 to +6
that is +4+1+0=+5 at 1st level and +7+3+6=+17 at 30th level
in 5E you have +3 stat at 1st level, goes to +5 stat later, proficiency from +2 to +6 and magic +0 to +3.
so;

4E(without +1/2): from +5 to +17 for attack bonus(levels 1-30)
5E: from +5 to +14(levels 1-20)

Here we have our origin of bounded accuracy.


3 - At-wills
Now, I am in the camp that loves at-will magic.
at least minor ones.
I could remove all attack cantrips, but those utility ones are for me now a must for spellcasters.

4E cemented the use of at-will, but as with most things in 4E, any good idea gets bad implementation.


4 - Healing surges.

Much better idea that Healing Dice in 5E.

I don't know how they managed to use a good idea and ruin it like that.
Oh wait, they did make 4E...so that kind of explains it.
Some things had to make it through the cracks.

5 - Ritual casting.
No need to explain, most of us loves it in 5e.

6 - minions.
I liked 1HP mooks that if left alone would deal lots of damage over few rounds.

 

[happyhermit]

...
4e, you just picked whatever at will and encounter spells you want and we're stuck with them until you levelled up. Daily and Utility slots were slightly adjustable, but only with two choices instead of one.
...

It's easy (for me at least) to forget this, especially because a lot of 4e fans are big proponents of it, but the whole "Everybody is on the same AEDU" wasn't at all intentional. They tried a bunch of things that didn't work until Mearls came up with AEDU which worked, but they weren't really happy with. They ran out of time and left it at that, with the intention of taking another crack at it in the future.

ETA; Mearls and Baker.
Also, for all the talk of "killing sacred cows", "feels like D&D" was an important design goal for 4e. How well they succeeded is up for debate (I think most people will agree not as well as 5e on that criteria) but the idea that they didn't care about it is unfair.

 

[Helldritch]

I both played and DMed it. And guess what? I loved it. But like any editions it had good and not so good points in it.

The really good
1) The ease of learning. It was really easy to teach the game to a new player. Much faster than any previous editions (even 5ed is not as easy to learn).
2) The preparation time was short. You could build encounters and adventures in a moment's notice. It was so fast that I could prep and 8 hour session in about 1 to 2hours depending on how much details I wanted to write down.

The good
1) Finally the martial classes could compete for damage with the casters. No more CODZILLA!
2) Clerics/Healers had something to do beside healing or CODZILLA!
3) The cantrip were now an at will power. This is the single most impressive thing that 4ed brought. Yes, 3rd editions had them but they were limited. Now the cantrips were usable by the casters. They now felt like true user of magic able to weave arcane power at all time. This was both refreshing and a nice way to make sure casters could always do something useful.
4) Rogue like class were deadly! Critically so. Never turn your back on a rogue was never truer than then.
5) Monster stat block were usable from the get go. No more : Ok, this dragon is also a 10th level caster... which spells should it have....
6) The minions! This was a great idea! It was almost like a movie where the heroes hack their way into the "minions" like a hot knife through butter and finally gets to the real elite guards and now must do a real fight. Used correctly and sparingly they were a great narrative ploy. But they also led to a problem that you'll see further down the post.
7) The importance of terrains was crucial and made up for really good memories.

The not so good.
1) Roles were a bit too MMORPGs. (Dare I say WoWesque? Ruin Explorer?). I was a competitive player in the days and the difference between a tank and a defender is barely noticable (mechanically different yes, but the end result is the same. This is what I called aggro through maneuvering denial). Though the healer role isn't really comparable to the leader it can be said that it is close enough for the untrained eye to be treated as such. DPS and CC are there from the get go. And a CC can be a DPS too. Just as in a certain MMORPG. But, again, it was not such a bad thing.

In fact, it was helping the young (new) players to learn the game that much quicker. I was still teaching how to play D&D in a Youth Center and it helped lowering the learning curve by a lot. They could all relate to the WoW roles.

But It was a bit too determining for a character. Role swapping can be fun but once committed to a role, it was a lot of work to get out of it. (well, you could but at one power change per level...)

2) Feats. As in 3.xed, feats were a bit too prevalent. I much prefer the 5ed approach to feats. It was a good customization of character but again some feats were almost a no brainer and you were supposed to take them. If not, then... But the problem was not as prevalent as the 3.xed (the tax feat...) so I put it at not so good.

3) The additional PHB... One PHB ok, 2 PHB? Mmmm Okish. 3 PHB? You're trying to squeeze money out of my pocket. 4 PHB (what do you think Martial, Arcane, Primal and Divine power books were?) That is way too much for an edition that was so young. Too much choice only leads to confusion. I Stick with only the first two in my games. But I had the rest, as usual. I just didn't like them enough to incorporate into my games.

The Bad...
1) The adventures. If they wanted to kill the game, it was the way to go. Some of you might have had good times with the published adventures but we did not. In fact, I recognized their design flaws almost immediately and I fell back to create my own adventures very fast. This avoided a lot of pitfall that other DM I knew fell into.

2) Skill challenge. A good idea. A reallllllllllly bad mechanic.

3) The monsters. Their stats block were easy to memorize (The same problem is there in 5ed) and it led (in some of my game) to a meta game where the players were trying to distinguish which monsters were minions and which were not. This is why that I said (earlier) that minions had to be used sparingly. Otherwise the players would divide their attacks among any number of opponent to "fish" for the minions. In hindsight and in retrospect, minions should have required about two average attack damage per tier to be destroyed. They could have been some kind of lesser opponents that would hit a bit less, were a lot less tougher than their normal counter part but could act as a filler for a number of opponents. I am still unsure on how I would've implemented it but I'm sure you see the direction I would've taken.

4) The HP bloat. Again, more HP leads to needlessly longer fights. We do have this in 5ed too but since the number bloat from cumulated spells and what not isn't there anymore this is less of a problem than in 3.xed.

5) Tactical combat. About the same as in 3.xed, combat could take a long time because of the too many different tactical options/combinations. The streamlined version of 5ed is better.

Again, I really enjoyed the 4ed. It had strong points going for it. I was not present in the forums at that point. I was working long weeks at our power plant and I was working as a volonteer in our local youth center in addition of my own gaming groups, my family and my WoW games. I took a three year iatus from DMing as our factory closed and I went to a different region to work in an other power plant. I almost played Wow exclusively for 3 years then our factory reopened and I went back to my home region and restarted my groups. From 2012 to the start of 5ed we played both 4ed and D&D Next (the playtest versions of 5ed). (I still have the files from 2013 up to summer 2014 ). So yes, I remember 4ed and I really liked it.

 

[Horwath]

So to add, what could have been done, and what some people did with 4E to make it better:

1 - cut all monster/npc HP by half

2- cut all PC health by 25%

3 - remove +1/2 per level treadmill

4 - add more 1st level at wills to all classes, but different amount

5 - modify 1st level at-will epic level progression that was usually 2×effect of 1st level.
move that to 11th, and add 3×effect on 21st level.

6 - add option to trade Encounter powers for Daily powers.
I.E. trade 3rd level enounter for 1st level daily or 5th level daily for one 3rd and one 1st level encounter power.
That way you have character that is more focused on encounter or daily nova's.

7 - cut magic items base bonus max from +6 to +3.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

To me this is kind of like how someone can correctly argue "This cat is nothing like that one, it's a different breed and colour entirely." when in the context of the larger cat family they are nearly identical, let alone among mammals or animals in general.

That doesn't really work at all. Roles aren't like cat breeds. That you think they are "nearly identical" in the larger context supports my point. The differences are absolutely huge, and they not "oh different fur lolz". It's more like the difference between a whale and a triceratops, and you're like "Well they're both endotherms so they're just the same in the wider context!". We can re-contextualize anything so it's "just the same". Not least 4E. The differences you're seeing as vastly important, "in a wider context" are meaningless. That's where your "cat breed" analogy works better - "all the forms of D&D are like cat breeds - some people see vast differences but in a wider context they're nearly identical". This is a terrible, irrational argument that is not subject to logic and actively hinders understand. And it can be reversed on anyone using it.

The notion of roles has been present in games since forever, including, in various forms, in D&D. Claiming it was MMO-influenced because it had roles - something MMOs had only recently acquired, and that most still didn't have, and indeed WoW barely bad, just doesn't hold up.

For example; 4e classes having discrete powers on AEDU, everybody getting new powers on leveling up. From a game design point of view you can draw a lot of parallels to WOW (and other games including non-D&D ttrpgs).

Comparisons to WoW here are arbitrary. Games before WoW had literally the elements you described, and had them in forms closer to what 4E had!

That you're picking WoW whilst admitting "non-D&D TTRPGs" also had this stuff (which they did, as did other video games, indeed, Guild Wars was significantly closer than WoW) demonstrates what I've been discussing, that people picked "WoW" because it was big in pop culture, and could be used as a slur, even though it didn't actually didn't hold up to examination (D&D itself invented "new powers on level up", for god's sake, that's why MMOs have them! Well that and Rolemaster, oddly, but that's a long story).

In contrast, you can look at other editions; Vancian casting, very asymmetric classes, different recharge rates, different abilities gained on lvl up, etc. There are simply few parallels to draw with a game like WOW.

This is flatly wrong. WoW of that era still had asymmetric classes, different recharge rates, different resources, different abilities gained on level up and so on. You seem to be thinking of modern WoW. But that's anachronistic. This was WoW from 2007 and before. Vanilla and The Burning Crusade. Not Cataclysm or later. And "a game like WoW"? So say, EverQuest? That had all of that except Vancian casting - but 4E didn't have MMO-style magic/casting at all. EverQuest was completely modeled on D&D on a really fundamental level.

This is a key problem with comparisons. MMOs virtually all used either resource-management systems which were nothing like AEDU, but rather like "spell points" systems of various kinds, or like other things entirely, which have no possible point of comparison in 4E or other D&D (WoW of that had Rage and Energy as well as Mana, for example).

And this was a problem at the time. People who made comparisons to WoW who had played WoW often made reference to stuff "influencing" 4E, when that stuff wasn't actually in WoW when 4E was developed (4E came out mid-2007), or when it was in non-MMO games (tabletop or computer) long before WoW. Sometimes they claimed things were WoW-influenced when WoW literally didn't have that thing at all, not even arguably.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I always felt 4e more console RPG influenced than MMO influenced?

It felt more like a late 90 to late 00s Western or Japanese RPG than a MMO. Those RPGs were influenced by D&D but narrowed down and reienforced was each class was supposed to do. Console RPGS had classes that were narrow in scope but rarely failed at their "job" (whether or not you wanted that job was a different story). There was customization of abilities but enough to hit mulitple "jobs" unless that was the point.

That way your party can go from killing slimes and rats, to bandists and zombies, to orcs and giants, to dragons and demons all the way to main villian's sky fortress. And everyone mattered as the way combat, exploration, and socialization neer changed. It just got bigger.

Yes. This is a better understanding that reflects the realities of the situation. The closest video game to 4E is something like one of the Final Fantasy Tactics games, which were from exactly that era.

And to be fair - some people at the time said this, and I didn't argue with them, because yeah, clearly there were valid similarities. And Guild Wars, 2005, was another game with similarities to 4E, and which was itself at least partially inspired by M:tG and games like Final Fantasy Tactics (even if it was real-time).

But because WoW had just added roles (in Jan 2007), when 4E came out and also had roles (Mid-2007), people immediately claimed 4E was a "copy" of WoW, or that the roles were the same (which as I've explained, they factually aren't - and they don't achieve the same things). And this kept on being used as a slur, because WoW was seen as a "dumbed-down" version of D&D that was stealing players from people's groups so they could do "dumb stuff in a video game", and people anachronistic stuff to it, saying 4E had copied stuff not even WoW at the time, or that had been in TT RPGs and video games since the 1990s or the like. It just got increasingly ridiculous (and increasingly obvious that people had either not played WoW or not played 4E or both) as time wore on.

What always got me, as someone who played 4E, was that there were dozens of very legit criticisms you could hurl at it.

1) The errata, the huge constant pounding waves of errata. You could surf them, but they were a hell of thing!

2) The monster math being completely borked at launch and not fixed for a while (we homebrew-fixed it using discussions here, but it was borked).

3) The lack of non-combat abilities. In real play it was often not an issue, but it did feel weird, even to me. Rituals helped, but they didn't fix it. It's not that there were none - it's just that there were few.

4) People had too many Healing Surges, which meant they often seemed like a trivial resource.

5) 4E was a poor game for attrition combat, and that meant a lot of older D&D adventures or styles of adventuring didn't work with it. 5E's design is too far the other way (nothing but extreme attrition combat works well), but it's a valid flaw. This was big! Why people didn't focus on this instead of other stuff, I have no idea? I suspect too many people were playing 3.XE games with 5MWD so actually 4E was better at attrition combat than any table that allows 5MWD (which was a huge number of 3.XE and PF tables, to judge from online discussions).

6) Skill challenge mechanics - This got house-ruled and homebrewed so fast I barely remember the initial rules, but they were bad. As people say, good concept, bad rules. Pity 5E hasn't really used it.

7) Combat becoming a slog at higher levels. At lower levels, it ran faster than 3.XE/PF does at similar levels, because there was so much less to check and so many fewer generalized rules in play (you could rely on what was on your character sheet more - like 5E), but at higher ones, ooof...

And I could go on. There were always tons of legit criticisms of 4E.

But what did people want to use as criticism? Irrational comparisons to WoW, some of them about things that literally weren't in WoW (or weren't in 4E). SIGH. HUMANS. I love humans but sometimes I despair of them.

 

[Helldritch]

@Ruinexplorer
Strange, I clearly remember being searched and asked for being a tank in the various dungeons on release. (I was a warrior). The role was there. It was not called tank but searching for a protect warrior was a real thing. Maybe my memory is fuzzy. It seems to me that I always been a tank in WoW (Especially in Burning Crusade). But it must be because the roles were slowly taking their sweet spot in the different dungeons. Yes the leveling was asymmetrical but it was easy to compare the roles in WoW and in the 4th edition a few years later. But I do agree with you that Cataclysm formalized the whole thing. It was informal before that but it was there nonetheless.

And as I said earlier, I do not think that this was a bad thing. It was much easier to explain the different roles of the characters to new players. 4ed was really easy to understand because of this and young players had something to relate to. They knew WoW so it was easy for them to find their "niche" class and preference.

 

[Hussar]

As I said upthread, the MMO comparisons are because 4e was designed for organized play. It's the RPGA edition.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That's a weird way for someone to try and pitch it, especially in 2E. Up that point, that had never been an aim that the rules had tried to deliver on.

Personally, the game had been advertised to me as an alternate world, with natural ecosystems, that I could explore and manipulate in any way my character was capable of - like Ultima Online, if it was actually real.

It's interesting, isn't it? People want different things, get excited by different things. Also people hear what they want to some extent. If someone had said "an alternate world with natural ecosystems" etc. but had ALSO said "you can be a valiant knight fighting against evil, saving peasants", I would be been interested in the latter, but forgotten the former.

You say it had "never been an aim", but I don't agree, and I suggest that Appendix N shows very clearly that this was always a significant subtext in D&D. It was an aim. It wasn't the main aim - but neither was what you're saying - that was another subsidiary element, an emergent element.

And let's not get too far into "that the rules had tried to deliver on", because that would need another whole thread about "Intentionality and consciousness of rules design in D&D", and that's a massive topic. The fundamental approach to adding rules and why rules exist in the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, the 2000s and arguably even the 2010s has changed regularly and become so more aware of decisions and consequences and so on. It's a fascinating topic, but a complex one. Suffice to say, 1E/2E wanted to evoke the worlds and events of fantasy novels, even if they weren't good at it. If 1E was a political party, it'd be one of the points on it's election manifesto, even if it never actually properly addressed it during its term in office.