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

[Ruin Explorer]

The relentless unwillingness among 4E fans to accept that this is true for people who played 4E is one stark difference.

That is a very edition-war-y and frankly not cool comment. No-one has said anything about "3E fans" or the like. And you use no qualifiers like "some" or "a few", so you mean "all". Which is just not fair or reasonable.

It's also really sad that you make an blanket insulting generalization about everyone who enjoyed an edition right after accepting that some people did have problems with 3E.

4E fans are, as a whole, well aware of it's issue. Several times in this thread, I, for example, have outlined numerous issues with 4E, and even why we stopped playing it. Yet I am certainly a "4E fan" in general. So your comment applies to me. Which is deeply unfair and I think it's unfair to almost everyone posting in this thread. I strongly suggest you edit it to reflect the fact that only a small minority of "4E fans" feel that way.

And there are fans of every edition who deny it has any flaws. It's not a 4E thing. I've played since 1989, so I've seen people have flaw-denial attitudes about every single edition back to and including OD&D. Indeed the OSR era was always amusing to see people dug-in defending ancient games with obvious flaws.

Oh yes, and let's not forget to add in the whole idea that dislike of 4E is a premeditated "malicious" thing.

This is very disingenuous. You skipped the rest of my quote where I said that this was rare, and only a few individuals, off-ENworld, who mostly spread misinformation on their own blogs.

You are acting as if I'm saying that about all people who disliked 4E. Why?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My sentence was too short (pressed for time). What I wanted to say is the 4e is far less misunderstood that some of the 4e fans would have us believe. (that's it for me. have an excellent day everyone).

Fair enough, that's certainly true.

 

[Dausuul]

You can do a lot of things with 4E, but you can't seriously try to interpret it as a physics engine, the way you could with 2E or 3E.

It is true that many people seriously tried to interpret 2E and 3E as physics engines.

 

[wingsandsword]

I've been playing 3X in some form for 20 years now (at least coming up fast...) and there are things that are cliche complaints about the system which are NEVER a problem at my table.

Same.

Almost 20 years of playing 3.x. . .and a LOT of the problems that people allege with the system are things I've never seen, or only saw when I'd play with some group I didn't normally play with.

I think that many of the "big" problems with 3.x people allege aren't inherent problems with the system, they're problems of a mindset of how it's played, that some play styles may work better with some editions.

For example, I think I noted this in the thread on playing 3e, that Vow of Poverty was never a problem or "broken" feat for our group, because we had players that were roleplaying it properly and not looking to abuse it or find ways around it, they really wanted to play a character that eschewed wealth and worldly goods, and that feat gave them a way to roleplay that and still stay a contributing member of the party.

People complained about how complicated high-level combat was. . .yet most games never got above 10th level, and the typical dungeon crawl was at low levels, with higher level games having fewer fights per session, which tended to be plot-based, as higher level adventures started to pivot to politicking, planar travel, building keeps and estates, and things that didn't involve rolling initiative constantly. That always seemed to be the natural progression of the game, and 3.x works well for it, but if you keep the game in a constant stream of fights, the game IS going to grind to a halt.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

By 2e PHB standard, clerics just worshiped the vague concept of "Good" or "Evil"

Page ref to this in 2E PHB? I have my copy open right now and this claim appears to be directly contradicted by the text:

"The cleric may be an adherent of any religion (though if the DM designs a specific mythos, the cleric's abilities and spells may be changed - see following)."

and

"The cleric receives his spells as insight directly from his deity (the deity does not need to make a personal appearance to grant the spells the cleric prays for), as a sign of and reward of faith, so he must take care not to abuse the power lest it be taken away as punishment." P33 original AD&D 2E PHB.

Seeing nothing at all to support your claim. All refs are to a cleric following a specific deity.

I mean, we were talking about 4E being misunderstood, but it's funny to see 2E misremembered/misrepresented in this way.

What happened to the spells/rituals you said were removed?

 

[Aldarc]

In short, despite having played D&D with us since 2e she never felt part of the group because she didn't like they way rules were written. With 4e and the power cards, she had the game in front of her and it was easy to grasp and play. And I agree with her that it was one of the qualities of 4e. It was clear and upfront. She also liked 4e because her rogue was badass and delivered as much damage as other classes, which I also agree is a good thing.

Based on you and your wife's experience with 4e, is there anything that 5e could do better that 4e did or anything from 4e that you would like to see in future editions?

My grip with 4e is that as a DM I felt I was playing a wargame against 4-5 other players. It felt more and more exhausted after games as the PCs gained levels. I have never felt so tired with another edition of D&D. I just quit.

I didn't ask about yours, but appreciated nonetheless.

 

[pemerton]

Really? You didn't think a Fighter having say, 12 Healing Surges/day was a bit much? 16 CON will get you that. That's 1/4 of your HP/surge. So if that Fighter had, say, 100 HP, they could get through 400 HP in a single adventuring day before they ran out of HP and HS. Or 300 HP before they even ran out of HSes.

My experience was that, even running Long Rests, "as intended", not every session start, it was pretty much impossible to run out of HSes. The Rogue managed it once or twice in our entire run of 4E (he absolutely panicked both times, it was hysterical but still). I did once get the Fighter down to 0, but he was on full health, and the biggest boss of the entire campaign was dead on the floor in front of him, and they'd intentionally skipped a Long Rest that would actually have been fine to ensure the bad guy couldn't escape.

Being low on healing surges, or down to zero, was pretty common in our campaign. I think I linked to a couple of examples earlier in this thread (or some other recent thread): linked again.

And actually my first link in this thread was to a session that began with the PCs:

out of encounter powers and ha[ving] 3 surges across the party . . . a short rest . . . let them regain encounter powers, allowed the paladin to heal up to full from his ring, and then allowed some healing involving sharing the surges around the party (the ranger-cleric has the Shared Healing feat; our table convention for short rests and healing powers is to allow spending regained encounter healing at the end of the rest).​

After this they went on to win a combat against Osterneth the Bronze (MM3-ed from Open Grave).

Healing surges were the baseline pacing tool in our game: when the PCs were geting low, I would know - as GM - that it might be time to relax some pressure so that they could take an extended rest.

 

[Imaro]

Jein. Even if there are people who understood 4e and disliked it, IME, there remains a lot of misunderstandings about 4e out there, even by those who desired to play other systems instead.

Eh, I think determining whether you enjoy a game and being able to express why you don't enjoy a game are two different things. While many people may not be able to articulate why they didn't enjoy 4e, I don't really think they are mistaken about whether playing/running it for them was an enjoyable experience or not.

 

[Aldarc]

Eh, I think determining whether you enjoy a game and being able to express why you don't enjoy a game are two different things. While many people may not be able to articulate why they didn't enjoy 4e, I don't really think they are mistaken about whether playing/running it for them was an enjoyable experience or not.

Sure, you are right. My point here, however, is that there remains a lot of misunderstandings about 4e that are floating around discussions about 4e that is independent of whether they liked the game or not.

 

[Imaro]

Sure, you are right. My point here, however, is that there remains a lot of misunderstandings about 4e that are floating around discussions about 4e that is independent of whether they liked the game or not.

And I guess my point is that often the inability to express the exact reason(s) one didn't like 4e are used as a way for it's fans to dismiss or outright invalidate one's claim of not enjoying the game.