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

[teitan]

I said in the 3e thread: «wait until we get to 4e.»

179 posts in less than 24 hours. 4e Paragons are alive and kicking! Good for them. ;-)

you were mighty right! Morgan Freeman should be narrating you right now. He’d have to call you Andy though.

 

[wingsandsword]

Welll obviously people thought it because Pathfinder took off like a rocket. And by that I meant people knew something was coming, not that it was decreasing in popularity. When supplements like the snow and sand sourcebooks came out people were actively posting here that maybe WOTC was running out of ideas and that Star Wars Saga Edition was a rest run for ideas for a possible 4e. There was a lot of speculation from about early 2006 onward to the announcement. When the licenses were pulled from Paizo & MWP.

Pathfinder was publicly released for sale in August 2009, over a year after 4e came out. It was announced publicly on March 18, 2008, when 4e had already been announced and it was already clear that 4e would be a total break from the 3.x design lineage. It's success was as an alternative to 4e that was being sold in stores. The open public beta was released at Gen Con 2008, after the June 2008 release of 4e. It's success was as a competitor to 4e, not 3e.

Yeah, sales started to slump for 3.5 late in its run, but I think that's because WotC got into a rut with what they were making, not due to an inherent fault or obsolescence of the edition. They wanted a fast-moving stream of new hardcover books, crunch-heavy, mostly setting-agnostic, and a lot of players had all the "crunch" they'd need. The only setting-specific stuff they were doing was Forgotten Realms, and that tended to focus on stuff in the current era of Faerun, not in other times (like the Netherese era) or other parts of Toril (like Kara Tur, Maztica, or Zakhara. . .much less Osse or Katashaka, those continents have NEVER been explored in any official work)

I remember the snow and sand sourcebooks and thinking that I didn't need an entire sourcebook on that, that there was enough guidance on the subject in the core rules for any desert or arctic adventures I'd need to run. I remember posting once in that era here that I had enough D&D books to last a lifetime, at least in regards to "crunch". WotC could have leveraged their other D&D IP's for things that 3rd party publishers couldn't compete with and didn't feel redundant to existing works.

There were other directions they could have taken. Paizo had been saying for years that their annual "Campaign Classics" edition of Dragon was their most popular. They could have had limited-run revivals of Planescape, Spelljammer, Birthright, Al Qadim, Kara Tur, Maztica, Mystara (and its various sub-settings like the Hollow World or the Savage Coast) or Dark Sun. They could have had a 3e version of 2e's "Historic Reference" series about playing D&D in low-magic quasi-historic settings. After they had to cancel d20 Modern because of Hasbro's rules about "brands", they could have tried a remake of Urban Arcana from that rebranded as a D&D branded urban fantasy setting.

They could have pursued licenses to make D&D adaptations of existing fantasy novel series.

They could have done an actual Greyhawk line, and an actual Greyhawk setting book (there hasn't been an actual Greyhawk campaign setting book since 1e, just random supplements set in that setting!)

They had a lot of options if they wanted to pivot from generic crunch-heavy hardbacks while keeping the generally popular 3.x rules framework.

 

[teitan]

Pathfinder was publicly released for sale in August 2009, over a year after 4e came out. It was announced publicly on March 18, 2008, when 4e had already been announced and it was already clear that 4e would be a total break from the 3.x design lineage. It's success was as an alternative to 4e that was being sold in stores. The open public beta was released at Gen Con 2008, after the June 2008 release of 4e. It's success was as a competitor to 4e, not 3e.

They could have done an actual Greyhawk line, and an actual Greyhawk setting book (there hasn't been an actual Greyhawk campaign setting book since 1e, just random supplements set in that setting!)

They had a lot of options if they wanted to pivot from generic crunch-heavy hardbacks while keeping the generally popular 3.x rules framework.

I’m not sure where you are getting that I think PF was competing with 3.5 but okie dokie. Didn’t say that. I mentioned when the magazines were pulled from them and Dragonlance was pulled from MWP in 2006. Paizo started Pathfinder as a “magazine” shortly after in support of 3.5. Then when 4e was announced they wanted to see the new license and then opted for doing a new version of the OGL rules. I’m aware of the timeline.

You are demonstrably wrong on Greyhawk though. From the Ashes was an early 2e setting boxed set that covered the post Greyhawk Wars developments of the setting. That was released in 1992 with Forgotten Realms style support in a line of regional sourcebooks and adventures under the guidance of Carl Sargent. Then in 1998 after the WOtC buy out they revamped Greyhawk again with two books that would have been a boxed set to relaunch the world, The Greyhawk Player’s Guide and The Adventure Begins by Roger Moore. Plus they launched it with the adventure “Return of the 8” and a small line of books like The Scarlet Brotherhood by Sean Reynolds. Then in 3e they had two overview books on the setting, the smaller more Gygaxian in size D&D Gazeteer and the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer. The latter was a very in depth book on Greyhawk with little in the way of mechanics but followed on from the set up in the GH98 material and was the foundation for the Living Greyhawk campaign and a much more thorough examination of the setting than we had seen in any previous version of the campaign setting books/boxed sets.

as to crunch versus fluff content, around the time of Silver Marches there was a widely read post by Sean K. Reynolds about how corporate was pushing to have the D&D team focus on crunch over fluff because the crunchy books sell. Sean was trying to rally everyone to buy the fluff heavy Silver Marches to show the people in the front office that fluff books sell. It didn’t get the numbers the front office was looking for and crunchy books became dominant. Note new people had just moved into the driver’s seat of D&D and Sean left the company shortly after. Things haven’t really changed. Back then adventures didn’t “sell” either so the famous 3e adventures were a late system development. Red Hand and Slaughtergarde, Eye of Gruumsh etc. the bean counters didn’t want content that was limited to one person in the group.

 

[teitan]

Bards Rumors

this is the aforementioned article from Reynolds from that time period.

 

[humble minion]

I mean, with the 1E-2E transition, I heard a lot of the same things as with the 3E-4E transition. "It isn't necessary!" "It's pandering to kids today" "They're trying to make me rebuy all my stuff!" and so on. So it wasn't unprecedented. But in 1989 there was no OGL allowing the use of all 1E's rules and no massively powerful 3PP publisher to potentially publish a continuation of 1E and get their books into shops. Indeed TSR were aggressive in litigating against 3PPs in the TSR era.

I think it's pretty clear that community opinion was pretty split on whether 4e was necessary. The 2e-3e transition was much less ambiguous, TSR was floundering financially, only kept afloat by the profits they made on Drizzt novels. When WotC took over there was initially widespread dread they'd turn D&D into a collectable card game, but with the new management 3e was generally accepted as a necessary turning of the page. It's easy to forget how many oddball 2e 'crunch' books showed up at various times - remember Player's Option? I think the need for a clean sweep was broadly accepted.

I don't think it was that clear or unanimous for 3e-4e. I can see arguments on both sides. Personally, I had a huge 3/3.5e collection i and wasn't looking forward to seeing it all become obsolete, but I was 15 levels into DMing a campaign and the fundamental system flaws (the maths problems, the save-or-die thing, the 15 minute adventuring day, the enormous stat blocks, the huge amount of player option material of which only a tiny proportion was ever used) that weren't really an issue at lower levels were just smacking me in the face every time i started to prep for a session. And my players were never really into the optimisation game, thank goodness, it could have been much uglier. And I look at products like Sandstorm and I wonder ... why? I was really, really ready for a new edition.

But on the other hand - 3e (or 3.5e, I lump them together) was still everywhere. It was dominant on the FLGS shelves. It was still popular to play. There were still some innovative books coming out (I loved Book of Nine Swords, personally!) and the third-party market was strong once it started to consolidate a bit from the early explosion. Paizo's Dungeon magazine was at its height of success with the first Adventure Paths. There was a bit of a shift towards more narrative driven systems here and there in the wider RP community, but I could see why some people feared that the 3e-4e transition could go the way of the White Wolf's transition from Vampire the Masquerade to Requiem - blowing up something that's going well out of a desire to tear it up and do it better, and losing a lot in the process (WW pretty much ceased to exist over that, tbh). Bit of fear the baby was being thrown out with the bathwater. And yes, the tone WotCs 4e marketing took about 3e didn't help that side of things much.

So 4e came along at a time when the community was split about whether it was necessary, and left a trail of dead sacred cows in its wake, and was accompanied by a few tone-deaf comments from WotC, arguably dismissive comments about what is and isn't 'fun' even in the core books and a few disastrous early rules issues - remember skills challenges? It was up against it from the start.

Pathfinder grew out of this controversy imho. WotC didn't sell a majority of the community on the need for a 4e in the first place, then sold even less of the community on the idea that their 4e was the one that was needed. And, to be honest, Pathfinder got a huge leg-up because Paizo had significant community visibility for running Dungeon for some time, and because, frankly, the setting and adventure material they were putting out was far, far superior than WotC were producing in early 4e.

My group found ourselves in the middle. Nobody had the remotest interest in moving to 4e once they'd seen what it was, and at a high level in a pre-existing campaign the switch to Pathfinder seemed like a lot of work and headaches and rebalancing and character redesign and rules relearning to shift to a system where the maths were no less broken at 20th level than they were in 3.5e. So we decided to just finish the campaign in 3.5e and then I'd step down as DM and let the next guy pick the system for the next campaign. None of which ever happened, but that's more to do with group breakup than anything to do with editions.

But I'm sure my experience wasn't universal. The success of PF shows how much enthusiasm there still was for the fundamental d20 ruleset which I'd burned out on, and plenty of people took up 4e and enjoyed it too despite my personal dislike of it. Still, I think the general success of 3e/3.5e/d20 in rescuing D&D from a fading bankrupt joke into an ecosystem with an absolute bonanza of content wherever you look and an open licence in perpetuity made it really hard for WotC to call time on it without casing a storm, no matter how much I personally wanted the maths for stacking bonus types and ability drain to be simpler to work out on the fly and for dice rolls to matter again at high levels. In hindsight I think the eventual 4e/PF split and acrimony was probably inevitable from the day the OGL went live, to be honest. WotC could have marketed the 4e rollout less abrasively sure, and a more incremental version of the game would have ruffled fewer feathers and burnt fewer bridges, but I think the die was cast by then.

 

[billd91]

Pathfinder supplanted 4e at the top for the same reason that the World of Darkness did - it took a period when nothing was being released and won that period. The last 4e book published was Into The Unknown: The Dungeon Survival Handbook in May 2012 - a book that was literally half full of adverts for D&D dungeons (and that was comfortably the worst 4e splatbook). Pathfinder overtook D&D between late 2012 and the launch of 5e in 2014 because WotC was literally not producing any D&D content other than the systemless Menzobaranzan book that no one asked for.

ICv2's data has Pathfinder tying D&D in Q3 2010 while Essentials and Dark Sun would have been fresh, then overtaking D&D in Q2 of 2011, not late 2012.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I ran 4E right when it came out and very much enjoyed the experience. Ran three (?) different campaigns using 4E including a short Gamma World campaign (which was postapoc 4E). At no point did it ever feel like it wasn't Dungeons & Dragons. It was always D&D. Yes, the game mechanics were different in a lot of places, but so what?

Now my having said that (and those that know me here on the boards will probably recognize where I'm going with this)... I readily admit that I just don't care about game mechanics all that much. I don't put much stock in them. Which is why all the changes to the mechanics in 4E (the introduction of AEDU, healing surges, roles etc. etc. etc.) did not bother me a lick, nor did they affect how I played or ran the game. I've always played D&D as a "improvised play" first, a "boardgame" second. So for me... I never had (and still never do) have any problem whatsoever with changing to new rulesets as they come up, and then not using the rules in them that don't work for me, or changing the rules that could work for me better, or re-fluffing the rules and ideas to give me what I want in the "improvised story", so on and so forth. And I readily admit that these are so in-grained in me that I am incapable of truly comprehending how many others are unable or unwilling to do it as well. It just baffles me how much "Playing RAW" really and truly is instilled in so many players that changing enough of them at some point completely changes the game for them. It's no longer "Dungeons & Dragons". That just boggles me.

So for instance... right at the beginning there was a huge bruhaha about the fact you couldn't play an "archer fighter". Which seemed odd to me, because the ranger was right there. The archer archetype was available for everyone to use, and it was GREAT in my opinion. But through many, many arguments in threads here on the boards... it became clear that for many players, what was written in the book was sacrosanct. An "archery fighter" was not in the game, because the Fighter was the Fighter, and the Ranger was the Ranger, and never the twain shall meet. Players honestly felt that in order to have an "archery fighter" there had to be a part of the Fighter class that gave archery, otherwise it wasn't an "Archer Fighter". The Ranger isn't the Fighter, the Ranger is the Ranger... and it didn't matter that the Ranger did everything they would want an "archery fighter" to do. They were unwilling or unable to just "change the fluff" and use the Ranger class as their "archer fighter".

Or the players who wrote off 4E after a while because the errata document just became longer and longer and longer as the designers kept trying to "balance" all the powers and rules of the game to each other. And they'd say there were now too many changes to the game... that they had crossed out, and tabbed, and rewrote all these edits and papers into their books which completely broke and deformed them... and that WotC was now forcing them to buy new Player's Handbooks so that they'd have all the changes cleaned up and together in one place. And how good could 4E really be if it required all this errata?!?

And here I am thinking as I read all this on the boards... "THEN JUST DON'T USE THE ERRATA!!! IF IT'S TOO MUCH, THEN DON'T WORRY ABOUT IT!" Completely and utterly flummoxed that other people just couldn't and can't do that. If it was written down, then they had to use it. And if there are changes, then those changes need to be well in hand. They can't be ignored, because they are the rules, and the rules ARE the game. And there are some people that would prefer there not be errata at all, so that they don't have to see that it exists. Because if it exists then they have to use it. And if they use it... the printed book they currently have is basically kindling because it's out of date, and they feel like WotC is scamming them by making them buy a "cleaned up" version of book..

All of these things and how other people see D&D really came to the fore for me during 4E. And its not like things have really changed... these same exact issues are cropping up for people playing 5E too. It is a thing that I have thankfully (to my mind) have been able to completely fly above and not be concerned about at all. Did 4E have rules issues? Sure, but I changed them to make them less, just like I did for 3E, and just like I do for 5E. And the only reason I stop playing any edition now is just because a new one comes out and I like playing the latest and greatest (so that I'm along for the ride with most of the playerbase).

Just don't ask me to play 2E or earlier and go back to counting down and Negative AC... that's a game mechanic I don't have any desire to play with OR try and "fix".

 

[Neonchameleon]

For me 4e was expected as soon as what, to me, was the obvious and utterly shameless cash grab of D&D 3.5 happened a mere two and a half years in and became imminent after the PHB2 tried filling in more areas - after all selling Forgotten Realms book #37 or Eberron book #29 is well into diminishing returns.

I also later looked at Heroes of the Elemental Chaos, saw the Elementalist and said "At last! Now they even have the simple caster I'm not sure what they can add without a complete rework" (and simple characters are why I'm a huge fan of Essentials even if I'll never play a Slayer).

 

[Neonchameleon]

ICv2's data has Pathfinder tying D&D in Q3 2010 while Essentials and Dark Sun would have been fresh, then overtaking D&D in Q2 of 2011, not late 2012.

Interesting. I'd thought it was 2012 - not that Essentials had bombed quite that hard.

 

[happyhermit]

Pathfinder supplanted 4e at the top for the same reason that the World of Darkness did - it took a period when nothing was being released and won that period. The last 4e book published was Into The Unknown: The Dungeon Survival Handbook in May 2012 - a book that was literally half full of adverts for D&D dungeons (and that was comfortably the worst 4e splatbook). Pathfinder overtook D&D between late 2012 and the launch of 5e in 2014 because WotC was literally not producing any D&D content other than the systemless Menzobaranzan book that no one asked for.
...

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.

That doesn't really work at all. Roles aren't like cat breeds.

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.

I have heard rumors of this "Book of Nine Swords" that you speak of, but whether it is myth or legend I cannot say.

In other words, I know it supposedly inspired a lot of 4E but I never read it. There were a lot of influences for 4E. I can't find the quotes now but I could have sworn the devs talked up borrowing concepts from video games quite a bit initially.

Don't forget as well that they had plans to make what was effectively going to be an online MMORPG with a DM running things. Never happened of course and I kind of doubt they ever had the budget to make it really work but at the time everybody was trying to cash in on the MMO craze.

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

Too Many Renewable Powers, Not Enough Attrition: Also in the 'didn't-feel-like-D&D' category, we spent a lot of time experimenting with systems in which all powers were limited use at-will powers that had recharge mechanics. I blame myself for thinking something like this could work. In truth the system didn't start feeling right until Mike Mearls and Rich Baker came up with the at-will/encounter/day split that put power attrition back into the game. For a look at what the earlier game looked like, see the 3E Book of Nine Swords which basically distilled the then-current version of 4E into a martial arts combat framework. It was fun, but not what you'd want for the whole game of D&D.

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

AM: What about from a more aesthetic point of view - a lot of esoteric races now made core to the game. Like the eladrin, their ability to teleport. What was the thinking there? Was that to attempt to introduce the anime feel? Was it catering to this manga taste that has developed? Was it something else, just trying to not be Tolkien?
AC: We wanted the Players Handbook to represent a broad crosssection of races, not only from an in-game cultural standpoint but also from players psychographics. And this is a good lesson you can learn from a lot of online games, MMOs. You don't want all your races to look the same, you don't want them to all act the same. You want different kinds of players to be attracted to different kinds of races. So there is a niche out there for the evil-curious, slightly bad-boy type of character.

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

As far as I know, 4th edition was the first set of rules to look to videogames for inspiration. I wasn’t involved in the initial design meetings for the game, but I believe that MMOs played a role in how the game was shaped. I think there was a feeling that D&D needed to move into the MMO space as quickly as possible and that creating a set of MMO-conversion friendly rules would help hasten that.

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.