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

[Lem23]

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.

That's pretty much the same for us too, and we've played a lot of games over the last (almost) 4 decades.

Oh, and Fate. There were a couple of people that thought it was ok-ish, no-one loved it, several of us hated it.

 

[pogre]

Oh, and Fate. There were a couple of people that thought it was ok-ish, no-one loved it, several of us hated it.

Our groups must have similar tastes. I read Fate and decided it was not my group's style, and so, never ran it.

 

[Lem23]

Our groups must have similar tastes. I read Fate and decided it was not my group's style, and so, never ran it.

It'd be funny if you were part of my group. Where are you based?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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.

I love the essentials options. Being able to choose a path that has fewer powers and more passive buffs or just stronger at-will powers is really nice.
I loved base 4e, but by the end of heroic I just wanted fewer powers and to be able to use them each more than once.

 

[pogre]

It'd be funny if you were part of my group. Where are you based?

I'm in central Illinois. I think I know the handles of folks that I have played with over the years who occasionally post on here. But who knows?

 

[Lem23]

I'm in central Illinois. I think I know the handles of folks that I have played with over the years who occasionally post on here. But who knows?

Ah, not from any of my groups then. Only visited Illinois once, and only for a few days. Good to see it wasn't just us though with those games.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Well, that is one way to look at AD&D. This is not particularly applicable to the original game, which is much less concrete in terms of exactly what play is like, more like a toolkit for making an RPG almost. Admittedly, in classic D&D, characters are NOT mechanically very heroic, they die at the drop of a hat.

However, I don't think that was the GOAL of D&D. The intro to the AD&D PHB, as well as examples of play and intros to Basic D&D indicate that the idea was a challenging game of player skill that lead quickly to a kind of heroic play where the PCs were the equivalent of Conan, Fafhyrd, etc. The rules certainly aren't very coherent with this, and 'Gygaxian Naturalism' certainly is a thing, along with inventory rules, XP as GP, etc.

 

[Argyle King]

Thinking more...

I think my biggest issue with 4E was that a lot of the world math just didn't make sense in the context of story. PCs were easily outpacing what supposedly legendary creatures were capable of doing.

The most fun I had when running 4E was when I mostly ignored the fantasy tropes and ideas embedded in the fluff of the game. ...which was a shame because I was in the minority of people who actually enjoyed many of the fluff changes.

The crunch of the game working in a way that conflicted with the style of story I wanted to tell was a difficult hurdle for me.

I loved how traps were designed and how encounters were built around the idea of a lot of moving parts.

I loved that monsters were easier to keep relevant for a wider range of levels.

I hated that monsters were so pathetic. I'm not looking for every encounter to be a meatgrinder, but it's weird when things are so heavily tilted in favor of the players. I did learn how to make this better, but -for me- I had the most success when I completely ignored virtually all of the "official" advice about running the game. To this day, I'm still baffled about what was going on at my table which was so drastically different than how the designers apparently played. At one point, I had started to rewrite encounter tables and drastically redesign a chart for how I was doing skill challenges. It's in an old notebook somewhere, but I never finished the work because I eventually started playing a system that wasn't D&D.

Solo monsters didn't work very well in the beginning. In time, later products and updates made them better, but it still never fully worked. I think I mostly abandoned using by-the-book Solos, in favor of using creatures based upon the encounter guidelines I wrote for myself. It started to turn into a lot of work though.

HP bloat was a problem for monsters (and 5th also has this problem sometimes). In many cases, higher level monsters weren't tougher; it simply took a few more rounds of them being massacred before they died.

I wish the disease track mechanic would have been used for more things. Saves could have been made less binary by having a sliding scale of effects, with the intent being to model the struggle of a hero to shake off something while continuing to fight.

I feel that Essentials was a step in the wrong direction. Honestly, in general -much like what I said above- I feel that I don't have much of an idea about how the designers played. The majority of things offered as ways to "fix" the game went the completely wrong way for me.

In the end, there are things from running and playing 4E which I have kept. I learned things from it that I can apply to other games, but I'm still baffled by what the vision for the game was intended to be. Every time I thought I knew, a change was made which went completely against what I was trying to get out of the game.

 

[Minigiant]

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.

Yeah, 4e felt more like a SquareEnix or Bioware game of the '90s and '00s.

I felt that the designers broke from tradition all over and didn't playtest enough in the biggest things they broke to get the number right.

Like I said in the 3e topic: 3E was the edition of "designers getting community feedback". 4e was the edition of "designers using community ideas, rushing it out too early, then patching it."

4e didn't go far enough where its should have. There was no reason to stick with the class names and should have focused on subclasses. They was no reason to load on some many surges to made it dungeon ready. 4e also went too far where it should have stuck to traditional stuff. The math was off. There should have been nonAEDU subclasses to replicate pre-4e power systems.

The beauty as it was so easy to adjust as you knew the expectations for everything and have the skeleton to homebrew anything. 4.5e could have been great. Ironically it would have looked a lot like 5e.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

I must have had money burning holes in my pocket when 4E came out. I bought the PH, DMG, and MM all at once. I skimmed through it quite superficially, and then never ran it nor had opportunity to play it. I said for a long time that I was willing to at least TRY it as a player but had absolutely no interest in running it as a DM. Ultimately, however, I just settled for a flat, hard, "This just doesn't interest me at all," because there are other D&D editions I am more familiar with and other games entirely that don't take the... dubious route that 4E took with its design. ANY and ALL other versions of D&D are ahead of 4E on my list of choices.

"Onto the Shelf of Forgotten Games it was placed long ago. There let it lie until the end of time... or I just throw it away, cuz who the hell else is gonna want those books?"