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

[Helldritch]

You 4e lovers sure have a thing for telling those of us who don't like your favorite edition why how we describe our dislike is wrong.

If somebody says "It felt video-gamey to me." why don't you just take them at their word?
Of course YOU don't see/feel it.
And it's not how I'd describe it.
But maybe that person is describing it the best they can.

Read my previous posts. I did say that it was a facet of 4ed I used to teach D&D to young/new players as it was way easier to make them assume their perceived role. What you see negatively, I see positively simply because it made thing easier for new comers to get into the game. It was a wonderful introduction to D&D. Was it perfect? Nope. But it was a good tool to introduce new players to the hobby. Was it my favorite edition? Far from it. 1ed was and will always be the best. 5ed is a close second. But 4ed was not bad.

 

[CleverNickName]

Some people can see the video games/MMORPG influence in 4E, and some people can't. Why keep trying to persuade others that they are wrong for seeing (or not seeing) it? As @Umbran suggested, that horse died long ago. I'm starting to regret even mentioning it.

Surely there are other pop culture elements from the mid-00s that influenced the tone, feel, and mechanics of this edition. Harry Potter, maybe? The Lord of the Rings films? Settlers of Cataan?

 

[CleverNickName]

I actually like combat. Is it bad that I liked combat?

Well of course not. It's not any worse than me not enjoying it as much, anyway. The sweet spot for me is 3-4 combat scenes per gaming session, each about 30-40 minutes. Our game sessions are about 4 hours long, and it's frustrating to have a single battle eat up an entire gaming session.

 

[Helldritch]

Well of course not. It's not any worse than me not enjoying it as much, anyway. The sweet spot for me is 3-4 combat scenes per gaming session, each about 30-40 minutes. Our game sessions are about 4 hours long, and it's frustrating to have a single battle eat up an entire gaming session.

You are absolutely right. Too much too long spoils the fun.

 

[Son of the Serpent]

Once you gave it a "true try" sure, but sometimes people don't actually like a thing even after giving it the benefit of the doubt. It's no different than other games or music/TV/movies, fandom has this bad habit of assuming anyone who doesn't like a thing must have not given it a fair chance, or "weren't playing it right" or some other nonsense. Maybe it's because I have always had such niche preferences but I will never understand why people struggle so much to avoid the reality that rational, decent human beings "understand" something but just don't like it or find it to be particularly good.

Granted, im able to tell whether i like a game really quick which makes people THINK i dont give every game a fair try, but thats not actually true. Im just far better than most at being able to tell quickly. I gave 4e a solid try. HATE it. Personal preference though. Others are free to like it. I wont get those 8 hours plus character creation time back. Hate it.

 

[Hussar]

You 4e lovers sure have a thing for telling those of us who don't like your favorite edition why how we describe our dislike is wrong.

If somebody says "It felt video-gamey to me." why don't you just take them at their word?
Of course YOU don't see/feel it.
And it's not how I'd describe it.
But maybe that person is describing it the best they can.

Is it really unreasonable to ask what that actually means though? All I know, from that statement, is there is something in the game, that I'm not seeing, that feels like it comes from video games to the other person, and that is a bad thing. No idea why it's a bad thing. No idea where it's coming from. But, I'm supposed to accept it as a valid criticism of the game. And, I notice, you cut off the other part there - where the person making that claim actualy hadn't played the edition and was simply parroting the meme.

Again, all you have to say is, "I don't like it." There, done. Cool. We're all groovy. "I don't like it because of the marketing" - totally understandable. We can both easily point to some extremely bone headed marketing ideas that WotC pulled in the run up and during 4e. Totally understandable. That's communication.

I don't like 4e because of blarfnarb doesn't actually tell me anything. "I don't like it because of (insert whatevery -ey you feel here)" only causes confusion. It's the opposite of communication. It's simply obfuscation to cover the fact that the person wants to justify why they don't like the game by providing "proof" that the game is bad. And, because the terms are so vague, they can mean virtually anything, and all that happens is we chase our tails for dozens of pages trying to pin down a common meaning. Heck, surf back a couple of months on En World and you'll see a lengthy discussion of 4e powers being "samey" and you'll find, in that thread, at LEAST six different, and sometimes contradictory, definitions of what samey actually means.

If the words you use actively confuse the issue, STOP using those words. Taking the standard approach of saying them louder and louder at the other person does not ever actually work.

 

[Zardnaar]

Played it onrelease didn't care for it. Tried again 2010.

Stuck with 3.5/of hybrid ended up going back to 2E and OSR.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Some people can see the video games/MMORPG influence in 4E, and some people can't. Why keep trying to persuade others that they are wrong for seeing (or not seeing) it? As @Umbran suggested, that horse died long ago. I'm starting to regret even mentioning it.

I think there are two separate things - one is people saying 4E "feels" video-gamey or MMO-ish. That's fine, I think. The other is saying it's actually directly influenced or takes elements from them. If you say that, you need to back it with evidence, and that's when the trouble starts.

Surely there are other pop culture elements from the mid-00s that influenced the tone, feel, and mechanics of this edition. Harry Potter, maybe? The Lord of the Rings films? Settlers of Cataan?

I think this is an interesting question. I don't think D&D is always influenced by super-current pop culture. I mean, just look at 3E or 5E, do we see any super-current pop-culture stuff in it?

I think the one way LotR and Harry Potter might be argued to influenced 4E and 5E is Arcane focuses. In 3E and before, if you're a Wizard, you cast spells with material components. You don't need nor benefit from staves, wands, orbs, etc. Then LotR came, with Gandalf and Saruman very much using their staffs to direct their magic, and Harry Potter with its wands, and they really reminded people that, in fiction, that sort of thing is kind of a big deal, that spellcasters of all kinds tend to direct their magic with tools, and that material components are typically a secondary thing. As 4E and 5E have tried to expand away from the purely Vancian approach of 3E and before, because people want non-Vancian or only quasi-Vancian casters, they made that part of the whole deal (in 4E it was a big part of equalizing casters and weapon-users, in that they both benefited from/required "+X" magic items to do their thing, rather than casters simply being "above that").

I think a lot of other bits of 4E were influenced by fantasy novels from the mid-90s onwards. 3E was strangely almost immune to being influenced by written fantasy - it was like the lead developers didn't read it. I mean, I'm sure they did, but it's hard to see much influence, with rather it doing it's own bizarre thing and kind of looking back at 1E and BECMI (though not the good parts of BECMI, sadly) for influence on most things. Literally the only literary influence I can think of in 3E is, bizarrely, a reference to Severian's sword from Gene Wolfe's books. Double-bladed weapons were definitely a Star Wars influence, though. It is odd that equipment seemed to be the main place 3E felt like it could innovate (with stuff like the sun rod too). This is unlike 1E and 2E, even. Whereas 4E embraced new abilities, new ways of doing things, which I think gave it a broader set of influences.

One thing I think that maybe hurt 4E a bit, and helped Pathfinder a bit, was the choice of new classes vs. what players seem to want.

For me, personally, the classes in 4E are nearly perfect, thematically. They are a sort of almost operatic high-fantasy, very much in a fantasy era which doesn't map precisely to a real-world historical period, not a more specific medieval or post-medieval or later era. They embrace stuff like the Feywild, Psionics, and so on. They're inseparable from the world-building.

But was that what people wanted? I saw a lot of people asking for "Gunslinger" or "Alchemist"/Artificer-type classes and an awful lot of the new classes in Pathfinder seemed to lean to a sort of late 1600s-1700s sensibility, of a lower fantasy, still clearly magical but almost colonial in tone. Artificer did eventually appear in 4E, but I often wonder if the sensibilities of 4E re: class theme-ing, which to me were so wonderful, missed a trick here. I hope not - I hope all the science-fantasy-ish, 1700s-1800s classes popular in PF and 3PP for 5E aren't really "what most D&D players" want, if only because the classes in 4E were so beautiful.

Re: The Eurogames explosion in board games, I don't know that there's direct influence, but I strongly suspect the massive board-games explosion my generation and the one younger seem to have been subject to (and seemingly still are - there are gaming cafes where I am and you regularly see hip 20-somethings in groups in there playing the nerdiest of board games) did cause WotC, when thinking "How do we move on from 3E?" to decide to double-down on the minis requirement, rather than getting rid of it.

5E went the opposite way, which I think was smart, because TotM is cheaper, easier to get into, and seems more social and people-focused, and I think that worked well with D&D's rising popularity as something different from board games, but appealing to a lot of the same crowd.

That is a fallacious argument. You can certainly understand that a game is not for you just by reading the rules.

I actually agree with this. You can't necessarily understand how a game actually play in depth, or a lot of nuances of complex or really-social games, but when you read the rules, you can often see things that just aren't going to work for you - dealbreakers and the like. This is especially true when you've both read and played dozens of TT RPGs. I mean, at this point, if I see a superhero RPG which involves classes, or just picking set powers from a list, or has segmented combat rounds to try and account for speedsters or the like, or certain other characteristics, I can tell that's "just not going to work for me".

That said, games can grow on one, if you keep an open mind and don't form hard-headed opinions about them. That happened with 5E for me. Initially with 5E, I could see a lot of smart design, but I could see a lot of flaws, and a lot of stuff that was missing, and would need to be in to work for me and my group. Eventually most of that missing material arrived, and whilst the flaws exist, they are mostly DM-side, so I always said I was willing to play 5E - and now I do. I also DM it, but I have more fun playing it (unlike 4E). So I'm glad I didn't decide to permanently stay away from 5E or the like.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

One huge difference being that the Satanic Panic influence that drove a lot of 2e design (and led to a lot of "it's pandering to the 'moral majority'" reactions) wasn't really an issue with the 3e-4e transition.

I do agree that 3E was generally a bit different, because so much had changed in RPGs in the 1990s that a much larger proportion of players saw a change as necessary. To be honest, if 2E had come out in, say, 1990 or 1991 rather than 1989, I think it would likely have been a vastly different design, and would probably have done a number of things 3E and later editions did (skill points and getting rid of roll-under for example).

Getting rid of roll-under was one of the worst design decisions they've made - and given some of what's been done over the editions, that's saying something.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

The survivors are heroic, in part because they survived.

Many non-heroes died in the attempt.

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.

I always got the impression from that intro that it was telling you what could happen, not what would happen; and that what was being presented was the end goal (i.e. what you could become by the endgame) rather than the journey toward said goal (i.e. nearly the entire the run of play).