Flipping the Table: Did Removing Miniatures Save D&D?

Dungeons & Dragons is doing better than ever, thanks to a wave of nostalgia-fueled shows like Stranger Things and the Old School Renaissance, the rise of actual play video streams, and a broader player base that includes women. The reasons for this vary, but one possibility is that D&D no longer requires miniatures. Did it ever?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay​

Wait, What?​

When Vivian Kane at TheMarySue interviewed lead rules designer for D&D, Jeremy Crawford, about the increased popularity of D&D, here’s what he had to say:

It’s a really simple thing, but in 5th, that decision to not require miniatures was huge. Us doing that suddenly basically unlocked everyone from the dining room table and, in many ways, made it possible for the boom in streaming that we’re seeing now.

In short, Crawford positioned miniatures as something of a barrier of entry to getting into playing D&D. But when exactly did miniatures become a requirement?

D&D Was a Miniatures Game First (or Was It?)​

Co-cocreator of D&D Gary Gygax labeled the original boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons as “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” Gygax was a wargamer himself, which used miniature games to wage tabletop battles. His target audience for D&D were these wargamers, and so use of miniatures – leveraging Chainmail, a supplement he created for miniature wargaming – was assumed. Miniature wargaming was more than a little daunting for a new player to join. Jon Peterson explains in Playing at the World:

Whether fought on a sand table, a floor or a yard outdoors, miniature wargames eschewed boards and the resulting ease of quantifying movements between squares (or hexagons) in favor of irregular scale-model terrain and rulers to measure movement distance. Various sorts of toy soldiers— traditionally made of wood, lead or tin, but by the mid-twentieth century constructed from a variety of alloys and composites— peopled these diminutive landscapes, in various attitudes of assault and movement. While Avalon Hill sold everything you needed to play their board wargames in a handy box, miniature wargamers had the responsibility and the freedom to provide all of the components of a game: maps, game pieces and the system. Consider that even the most complicated boardgame is easily retrieved from a shelf or closet, its board unfolded and lain across a table top, its pieces sorted and arranged in a starting configuration, all within a span of some minutes— in a pinch the game could be stowed away in seconds. Not so for the miniature wargamer. Weeks might be spent in constructing the battleground alone, in which trees, manmade structures, gravel roads and so on are often selected for maximum verisimilitude. Researching a historical battle or period to determine the lay of the land, as well as the positions and equipment of the combatants, is a task which can exhaust any investment of time and energy. Determining how to model the effects of various weapons, or the relative movement rates of different vehicles, requires similar diligent investigations, especially to prevent an imbalanced and unfair game. Wargaming with miniatures consequently is not something undertaken lightly.

D&D offered human-scale combat, something that made the precision required for miniature wargaming much less of a barrier. Indeed, many of the monsters we know today were actually dollar store toys converted for that purpose. It’s clear that accurately representing fantasy on the battlefield was not a primary concern for Gygax. Peterson goes into further detail on that claim:

Despite the proclamation on the cover of Dungeons & Dragons that it is “playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures,” the role of miniature figures in Dungeons & Dragons is downplayed throughout the text. Even in the foreword, Gygax confesses that “in fact you will not even need miniature figures,” albeit he tacks onto this “although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought.” These spectacular battles defer entirely to the Chainmail rules, and thus there is no further mention of miniatures in any of the three books of Dungeons & Dragons other than a reiteration of the assertion that their use is not required. The presence of the term “miniature figures” on the cover of the woodgrain box is, consequently, a tad misleading.

James Maliszewski states that this trend continued through Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:

Even so, it's worth noting that, despite the game's subtitle, miniature figures are not listed under D&D's "recommended equipment," while "Imagination" and "1 Patient Referee" are! Elsewhere, it is stated that "miniature figures can be added if the players have them available and so desire, but miniatures are not required, only esthetically pleasing." The rulebook goes on to state that "varied and brightly painted miniature figures" add "eye-appeal." The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, though published five years later in 1979, evinces essentially the same attitude, saying "Miniature figures used to represent characters and monsters add color and life to the game. They also make the task of refereeing action, particularly combat, easier too!"

Gygax himself confirmed that miniatures weren’t required in a Q&A session on ENWorld:

I don't usually employ miniatures in my RPG play. We ceased that when we moved from CHAINMAIL Fantasy to D&D. I have nothing against the use of miniatures, but they are generally impractical for long and free-wheeling campaign play where the scene and opponents can vary wildly in the course of but an hour. The GW folks use them a lot, but they are fighting set-piece battles as is usual with miniatures gaming. I don't believe that fantasy miniatures are good or bad for FRPGs in general. If the GM sets up gaming sessions based on their use, the resulting play is great from my standpoint. It is mainly a matter of having the painted figures and a big tabletop to play on.

So if the game didn’t actually require miniatures and Gygax didn’t use them, where did the idea of miniatures as a requirement happen? For that, we have to look to later editions.

Pleading the Fifth​

Jennifer Grouling Cover explains the complicated relationship gamers had with miniatures &D in The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games:

The lack of a visual element may make spatial immersion more difficult to achieve in D&D than in more visually oriented games; however, this type of immersion is still important to the game. Without the visual component to TRPGs, players may have difficulty picturing the exact setting that the DM lays out. Wizards of the Coast's market survey shows that in 2000, 56 percent of gaming groups used miniatures to solve this dilemma…Because D& D combat rules often offer suggestions as to what you can or cannot do at certain distances, these battle maps help players visualize the scene and decide on their actions…Even though some gamers may get more interested in the visual representation of space by painting and designing scenery such as miniature castles, these tools exist more for showing spatial relationships than for immersing players visually.

In essence, Third Edition rules that involved distances seemed to encourage grid-based combat and miniature use. But the rise of Fourth Edition formalized grid-based combat, which in turn required some sort of miniature representation. Joshua Aslan Smith summed it up on StackRPGExchange:

The whole of 4th edition ruleset by and large is devoted to the balance and intricacies of tactical, grid-based combat. There are exceptions, such as rules for skill challenges and other Role Play aspects of the game (vs. roll play). To both maximize the benefits of 4th edition and actually run it correctly you need to run combats on a grid of 1" squares. Every single player attack and ability is based around this precept.

This meant players were looking at the table instead of each other, as per Crawford’s comment:

Part of that is possible because you can now play D&D and look at people’s faces. It’s people looking at each other, laughing together, storytelling together, and that’s really what we were striving for.

It wasn’t until Fifth Edition that “theater of the mind” play was reintroduced, where grids, miniatures, and terrain are unnecessary. This style of play never truly went away, but had the least emphasis and support in Fourth Edition.

Did the removal of miniatures as a requirement truly allow D&D to flourish online? Charlie Hall on Polygon explains that the ingredients for D&D to be fun to watch as well as to play have always been there:

Turns out, the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons was designed to be extremely light and easy to play. Several Polygon staff have spent time with the system, and in our experience it's been a breeze to teach, even to newbies. That's because D&D's 5th edition is all about giving control back to the Dungeon Master. If you want to play a game of D&D that doesn't require a map, that is all theater of the mind, you can do that with Skype. Or with Curse. Or with Google Hangout. Or with Facetime. Basically, if you can hear the voice of another human being you can play D&D. You don't even need dice. That's because Dungeons & Dragons, and other role-playing games that came after it, are all about storytelling. The rules are a fun way to arbitrate disputes, the maps and miniatures are awful pretty and the books are filled with amazing art and delicious lore. But Wizards of the Coast just wants you to play, that's why the latest version of the starter rules is available for free.

D&D’s always been about telling a good story. The difference is that now that our attention – and the camera or microphone – can be focused on each other instead of the table.

“What 5th edition has done the best,” according to game designer Kate Welch, “is that idea of it being the theatre of the mind and the imagination, and to put the emphasis on the story and the world that is being created by the players.” That’s the kind of “drama people want to see,” both in their own adventures and on their screens.

If the numbers are any indication, that makes D&D a lot more fun to watch.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Of course, familiarity also makes things fade into the background. After the 1e DMG defended hps, the remaining issues with it were just lived with so long they faded away - to the point that even /fixing/ them, would draw the abstraction of the system back into the limelight, again.
<snip> the only plausible explanation that doesn't paint the complainer as blowing smoke while working some nefarious agenda, is the power of familiarity. When the keywords weren't labeled as such and faded into the baroque mosaic of Gygaxian prose, they were just an unexamined part of broader understanding of the whole game.

IMO this is a huge part of it. 4E in many respects was a vastly more consistent game than prior versions of D&D, absolutely. Its very presentation rubbed that difference in the face of experienced players.

In another thread, I think, someone mentioned that 4e had so many more conditions than 3e or 5e and that was one of the things that slowed it down. 4e had 18 conditions. 3e has 40, 5e has 15.

I mentioned the issue. The thing about 3E and 5E is that conditions don't seem to be nearly as common as 4E. 4E certainly had fewer total number of conditions than 3E but many more classes dished them out than before. In prior versions of the game they were relatively rare except for the caster characters or, of course, monsters. Nearly any character class dished out conditions and many builds were intricately synergized to make use of conditions granted by someone else. This was cool in many ways, but like a lot of things they could get to be too much. Some powers would have conditions that superseded another one, such as slow being superseded by immobilization. A lot of times I'd find myself thinking of whether I wanted to use a particular power due to the fact that I might end up blocking out someone else's or making mine not matter. Most notably, I'd get annoyed playing a defender in a party with another defender because people would constantly supersede my mark. Yeah, that's on them I suppose, but the thing is that the system really demanded a lot of players; quite a few I played with didn't seem to be up to the job.

Analogy: Sometimes I want a burger with a plain bun, some good deli cheese, and mustard with a decent lager or ale, not 48 day aged wagyu beef with balsamic reduction sauce drizzled out of a squeeze bottle on brioche topped by microgreens and raclette and IPA made with yeast from the brewer's beard. IMO 5E is more like the basic burger done really well (for the most part) whereas 4E was much more like the 48 day aged wagyu in terms of all the options. To be clear, I don't have a ton of nostalgia for 1E's pretentious bizarreness and and BTB 2E's slightly cleaned up version. That's kind of like making overcooked burgers back in the '70s with supermarket meat and Kraft slices and drinking Schlitz. I'm happy to have modern innovations, but 4E (for my taste) was too much.

I will say this: I'm quite sure coping with Gygax's writing helped my GRE Verbal score.

 

[Tony Vargas]

IMO this is a huge part of it. 4E in many respects was a vastly more consistent game than prior versions of D&D, absolutely. Its very presentation rubbed that difference in the face of experienced players.

That sounds like such a mean thing to do, if you assume consistency is bad...

The thing about 3E and 5E is that conditions don't seem to be nearly as common as 4E. 4E certainly had fewer total number of conditions than 3E but many more classes dished them out than before.

More classes able to impose some of 18 conditions doesn't necessarily translate to more than 40 conditions coming up in play.
Monsters still impose conditions, for instance, regardless of class distribution, and an all-caster party could certainly impose a tremendous amount in 3e - they were just even more likely to end the fight outright in doing so.

In prior versions of the game they were relatively rare except for the caster characters

But it's not like casters were rare in the party. If you go back and read some of the old story hours from that era, for instance, you see some all-caster parties - and never see no-caster parties.

Most notably, I'd get annoyed playing a defender in a party with another defender because people would constantly supersede my mark. Yeah, that's on them I suppose,

Imposing a mark is voluntary, so you could choose not to overwrite a mark - once one defender has gotten chewed up enough, the other can start marking - such tag-teaming could really mess with enemies' focus fire.

I will say this: I'm quite sure coping with Gygax's writing helped my GRE Verbal score.

Heh - It is a nerd game, afterall...

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

That sounds like such a mean thing to do, if you assume consistency is bad...

Nope, but the very fact that many things that had been part of the game for a long time were basically dumped out---heck they changed the entire cosmology and alignment system!---was jarring, to say the least. Again, as I've said before, there were cool aspects to the 4E cosmology and a lot of 4E's design. However, when a brand so drastically decides to change core parts of its identity and then rub its audience's collective faces in those changes... look out.

More classes able to impose some of 18 conditions doesn't necessarily translate to more than 40 conditions coming up in play.
Monsters still impose conditions, for instance, regardless of class distribution, and an all-caster party could certainly impose a tremendous amount in 3e - they were just even more likely to end the fight outright in doing so.
But it's not like casters were rare in the party. If you go back and read some of the old story hours from that era, for instance, you see some all-caster parties - and never see no-caster parties.

Oh, I played a lot of 3.X, mostly 3.5, and ran a good bit of it too so I recall. I'm not saying 3E didn't have its burdens. Notoriously, high level "fighter math" could get pretty nuts, especially for players who were slow at mental arithmetic. That said, I don't ever recall needing the likes of condition chips to keep track of all the conditions or having to go through a play loop where I'd check for synergies and then figure out what conditions I had on me that blocked me from doing things basically every round, though.

Imposing a mark is voluntary, so you could choose not to overwrite a mark - once one defender has gotten chewed up enough, the other can start marking - such tag-teaming could really mess with enemies' focus fire.

Yes, tactically savvy players would do that and it was indeed one of the things that 4E did very well. Unfortunately, a lot of folks wouldn't remember without prompting, get greedy for immediate damage, or would forget due to long turn length, which meant it was a burden to keep them from busting up carefully laid plans. 4E with a group of really tactically savvy players capable of keeping turns fast was fun for those reasons, though I still felt it was very wargamey. One reason I embraced 5E so much was how much faster its turn length seemed to be.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Nope, but the very fact that many things that had been part of the game for a long time were basically dumped out---heck they changed the entire cosmology and alignment system!---was jarring, to say the least.

To existing players deeply invested, yes. New players, not at all. And that's how it always seemed to play out, too, IMX. New players would understand and take to the game easily, those jarred by it's changes wouldn't just complain about the changes, they'd find faults that weren't there, or complain about issues the game had always had.
The disequilibrium of coping with so many changes, even if they were uniformly for the better, also opens your eyes to issues you've grown comfortable in ignoring.

It's uncomfortably analogous to process of social change.

Oh, I played a lot of 3.X, mostly 3.5, and ran a good bit of it too so I recall. I'm not saying 3E didn't have its burdens. Notoriously, high level "fighter math" could get pretty nuts, especially for players who were slow at mental arithmetic

That's gotta be the least of it. Maybe if you were good at the mental arithmetic of optimal power attacking you could drag your fighter into Tier 4, able to solidly excel in one area.

It was the casters, particularly the Tier 1s, that suffered from the greatest complexity in 3.x, of course. On top of build complexity & a little more varied uses of mental arithmetic, there was the vast pool of spells to optimally prep every day & optimally cast as meeded...

. That said, I don't ever recall needing the likes of condition chips to keep track of all the conditions or having to go through a play loop where I'd check for synergies and then figure out what conditions I had on me that blocked me from doing things basically every round, though.

I guess you weren't the one using a white board to track spell durrations. And, as much credit as we gave 4e for tactical depth in a given turn (and as much grief as that got for slow turn cycles), 3e (and often earlier eds) tended to front load those considerations in planning sessions and pre-casting - until an effect got dispelled or anything else unexpected happened, then the responsible caster needed to reevaluate and think about his next turn tactically.

It was another if the many changes. Yes, 4e eliminated more than half the conditions, and far more than half the named bonuses, and that was a simplifying consolidation, but it also put daily resources and at least the option of applying effects (depending on build) to every character class & concept.

Yes, tactically savvy players would do that and it was indeed one of the things that 4E did very well.

Ive run for a lot of new players over the decades, and a lot if casuals since Encounters (IMX, 'casual player' just wasn't a thing for about 20 years prior to that), and they'll just naturally attack different targets, no matter how simple and obvious focus fire may be, it's not intuitive it's a result of the way hps model damage.

So, yeah, there's a sophomore stage of tactical savvy where dueling marks might be a tad problematic (and overlapping defender auras worse), until you think to talk to each other, before and after that, though it's a pretty decent 'aggro' mechanic, even the aura version.

, though I still felt it was very wargamey. One reason I embraced 5E so much was how much faster its turn length seemed to be.

D&D started as a wargames and kept characteristics thereof, throughout. Probably one if those negative qualities habitually ignored until 'in your face' changes re-eopen your eyes to it.

Turns go faster in 5e, yes. Heck most turns probably went faster in 3e, even though, IMX, you could easily fit as many combats into a session.
Some classes just traditiomlly have fewer and faster to resolve actions available to them. An attack roll can be over in seconds if the choice or target is fixed (melee type in a 'static' combat), and the attack roll obviously low. That's a very fast turn. That could happen in 4e, as well, but everyone had the option to do something more, of they'd chosen a power at level-up that had more to it, and used it. Other classes could traditionally have much more involved turns, casters could, by mid level 3e have more slot/wand/scroll buttons to choose from than any 30th level 4e character.

So one thing going on was that casters were getting less time on their turns, and had a longer wait for their turns to come up again. And, with anyone able to take a more involved turn, if they wanted to, a lot did.

OTOH, a lot if the decision complexity of a traditional, especially a 3e Tier 1, caster could be front-loaded before the fight. Picking spells for the day after gathering as much information as possible, scrying, planning, pre-casting, etc.

That was very much the experience I had when first switching to 4e. Our group had played 3.0/5 for the full run, and had always been able to get 3 combats into a session, pretty consistently. 4e came along and we started noticing that turns took longer and rounds longer to come back around. We also noticed that, in some combats the monsters would 'die too soon,' before some cool gambit or combo could be completed.

But, strangely, we were still doing 3 combats per session. The most evident reason was rules - in 3e we were always looking up, parsing and, debating rules. In 4e we still looked up rules (no giant DDI character sheets, yet), but they were clear, and didn't often need to be looked up again, let alone debated.
But, the other thing was that there was less 'analysis paralysis' before combat: the wizard only prepped a few spells, picking from 3 alternatives per slot, at the start of the day, the cleric & paladin didn't need to, at all. There was no pre-cast buff-layering, no rock/paper/scissors/lizard/Spock of prepping & planning & making/buying...

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

To existing players deeply invested, yes. New players, not at all. And that's how it always seemed to play out, too, IMX. New players would understand and take to the game easily, those jarred by it's changes wouldn't just complain about the changes, they'd find faults that weren't there, or complain about issues the game had always had.
The disequilibrium of coping with so many changes, even if they were uniformly for the better, also opens your eyes to issues you've grown comfortable in ignoring.

Sure, though IMO WotC brought a lot of that on themselves by doing things like wholesale changing the cosmology and alignment systems as well as forcing every character to be a Vancian spellcaster in function. That really bugged the heck out of a lot of people I played with. "Wait, I'm a fighter but I have all these powers...?"

It's uncomfortably analogous to process of social change.

It's not analogous, it is an example of social change.

That's gotta be the least of it. Maybe if you were good at the mental arithmetic of optimal power attacking you could drag your fighter into Tier 4, able to solidly excel in one area.

The multiple attacks and all the damage dice got annoying even if you precomputed things like Power Attack. I used color coded dice, which helped a ton, and that's something I continue to do---I wish other people would do the same. Kind of like wearing Dial. (Not the Dial, I'm totally allergic to it.)

I guess you weren't the one using a white board to track spell durrations.

Actually that was me, but at that point it was a very high level campaign and we were tracking buffs. Mostly though I don't recall needing to do that but it was very, very useful in 4E.

And, as much credit as we gave 4e for tactical depth in a given turn (and as much grief as that got for slow turn cycles), 3e (and often earlier eds) tended to front load those considerations in planning sessions and pre-casting - until an effect got dispelled or anything else unexpected happened, then the responsible caster needed to reevaluate and think about his next turn tactically.

Yeah, that certainly was the case but I tended to feel that every turn in 4E was like that, especially at higher levels. 4E ran smoothly and well at low levels.

It was another if the many changes. Yes, 4e eliminated more than half the conditions, and far more than half the named bonuses, and that was a simplifying consolidation, but it also put daily resources and at least the option of applying effects (depending on build) to every character class & concept.

Exactly. A lot of the consolidation was good IMO. I long felt that 3.X was too granular in a lot of areas, particularly skills.

Ive run for a lot of new players over the decades, and a lot if casuals since Encounters (IMX, 'casual player' just wasn't a thing for about 20 years prior to that), and they'll just naturally attack different targets, no matter how simple and obvious focus fire may be, it's not intuitive it's a result of the way hps model damage. So, yeah, there's a sophomore stage of tactical savvy where dueling marks might be a tad problematic (and overlapping defender auras worse), until you think to talk to each other, before and after that, though it's a pretty decent 'aggro' mechanic, even the aura version.

A lot of people never seem to get out of that sophomore stage IMO.

D&D started as a wargames and kept characteristics thereof, throughout. Probably one if those negative qualities habitually ignored until 'in your face' changes re-eopen your eyes to it.

That and the fact that minis were assumed with all distances given in terms of squares. Bow ranges got quite small, for instance.

Turns go faster in 5e, yes. Heck most turns probably went faster in 3e, even though, IMX, you could easily fit as many combats into a session.
Some classes just traditiomlly have fewer and faster to resolve actions available to them. An attack roll can be over in seconds if the choice or target is fixed (melee type in a 'static' combat), and the attack roll obviously low. That's a very fast turn. That could happen in 4e, as well, but everyone had the option to do something more, of they'd chosen a power at level-up that had more to it, and used it. Other classes could traditionally have much more involved turns, casters could, by mid level 3e have more slot/wand/scroll buttons to choose from than any 30th level 4e character.

Yes, this is why I say that 4E made everybody a Vancian caster. Not literally but in terms of the rules, particularly in the original version pre-Essentials. So every character had that burden.

So one thing going on was that casters were getting less time on their turns, and had a longer wait for their turns to come up again. And, with anyone able to take a more involved turn, if they wanted to, a lot did.

Interrupts and attacks on a minor action were hell and often led to a "wait, whose turn is this, anyway?" I hated being in a party with a barbarian or a PHB2 bard.

That was very much the experience I had when first switching to 4e. Our group had played 3.0/5 for the full run, and had always been able to get 3 combats into a session, pretty consistently. 4e came along and we started noticing that turns took longer and rounds longer to come back around. We also noticed that, in some combats the monsters would 'die too soon,' before some cool gambit or combo could be completed.

I tended to find that 4E monsters had too many hit points and not enough offense. I would frequently up their damage and cut their hit points to about 75%.

 

[Tony Vargas]

as well as forcing every character to be a Vancian spellcaster in function. That really bugged the heck out of a lot of people I played with. "Wait, I'm a fighter but I have all these powers...?"

The added complexity of puting 'manuever' on every Martial power, 'spell' on the arcane, etc, and burying the 'power' generalization in a sidebar somewhere might've helped.
But, seriously, only the Wizard was Vancian. And saying that having a daily makes you a caster in function is factually false, and extremely contentious phrasing.
It is fair to say that players long accustomed to the innately imbalanced and genre-contrary D&Dism of giving only casters high-power, limited use abilities, could jump, wrongly, to that conclusion. But it is important to understand that they were absolutely wrong to do so, and that continuing to do so, knowingly, was s hallmark of h4ter edition warring.

It's also yet another example of the phenomena: in 4e, no single-class fighter could cast a spell, not even metaphorically, in 5e a single-class fighter of the Eldritch Knight martial archetype begins actually, litterally, casting, actual spells at 3rd level, and it's a non-issue.

It's not analogous, it is an example of social change.

A trivial one.

The multiple attacks and all the damage dice got annoying even if you precomputed things like Power Attack

Always seemed pretty minor to me, though I'd mix Power Attack and Combat Expertise with Spring Attack, reach, & Combat Reflexes to force a modest degree of tactical interest onto a fighter build. Problem was at low levels you were left cursing opportunities that passed you by before you had the right feat; while by the time you had the full set and could pull those cool tricks, they were obviates by the types of foes you faced and the magic your party brought to the table.

Actually that was me, but at that point it was a very high level campaign and we were tracking buffs.

I keep doing that, sorry...

Yeah, that certainly was the case but I tended to feel that every turn in 4E was like that, especially at higher levels. 4E ran smoothly and well at low levels.

It really depended on the table and how you came at it.
You actually could play paragon or epic 'cold," say with pregens, but combat ran much slower than if you were playing a character that you'd leveled up, 'organically,' yourself. For established players, the first few times could be really slow, too, until you got used to actually having choices, as a non-caster, and as a caster, to your one optimal use of a daily, at best, swinging an encounter rather than 'pwning' it.

Exactly. A lot of the consolidation was good IMO. I long felt that 3.X was too granular in a lot of areas, particularly skills.

I've long had a pet peeve over long skill lists and open-ended skills, 3e had both, not nearly so bad as many other games, but as bad as D&D ever had it.

That and the fact that minis were assumed with all distances given in terms of squares. Bow ranges got quite small, for instance.

Not because they were in squares, though. 3e used 5' squares, and let you convert from ft to aquares, constantly. 4e used 5' squares for everything and simplified it. Both were spuriously criticised as 'grid dependent' compared to AD&D, which used scale inches that could be either 10' or 10yds, depending, and didn't match the scale of the minis it was used with, which was closer to 1" = 6' anyway - That's not "grid independent," just needlessly complicated

5e's roughly between 3e & AD&D, that way.

Yes, this is why I say that 4E made everybody a Vancian caster. Not literally but in terms of the rules, particularly in the original version pre-Essentials. So every character had that burden.

That is incorrect, even metaphorically, in terms of rules: only Wizards (pre-Essentials) prepared spells each day, only they had that 'burden' (of superior versatility)... And it was a much smaller burden.

Interrupts and attacks on a minor action were hell and often led to a "wait, whose turn is this, anyway?" I hated being in a party with a barbarian or a PHB2 bard.

Minor action attacks were beloved of Charop (so suspect), but virtually identical to 5e bonus action attacks, and less complicated than 3e iterative attacks - and also much less common than either. And, it's not like 5e bonus actions have the shield of tradition or familiarity.
Off-turn actions are needed to render cyclical turn based initiative less absurd, and 3.0 through 5e all use them. 5e, arguably, not enough to avoid the cyclical round becoming absurd. In 4e, power choice could allow you to all but specialize in them, or eschew them almost entirely.

I tended to find that 4E monsters had too many hit points and not enough offense. I would frequently up their damage and cut their hit points to about 75%.

You'd rob yourself if some of the fantasy/action genre cadence of combat that way, but half hps/double damage was a commonly-mentioned variant (though I can't say I ever saw anyone use it - the closest was one convention game where the DM doubled all damage, PC & monster, after (on?) the third round.)
The 13A escalation die could have been nice for 4e, if Heinsoo had thought of it 6yrs earlier...

 

[Lanefan]

5e uses keywords much as 4e does, but it just buries them in the text (so we have to read through a paragraph of text to learn that a fireball does fire damage).

Er...don't take this the wrong way, but anyone who has to read through anything and rely on finding a keyword to specify that a fireball does fire damage is...well...I'll be charitable and just say they're either overthinking it or underthinking it.

Sheesh!

This creates an illusion of resemblance to AD&D, but in fact I don't think 5e uses much natural language at all to mediate between the mechanics of class abilities (including spells) and the fiction. It uses keywords in much the same way that 4e did.

One reaction I had to all the keywords, first in 3e and then further on seeing 4e, was that their constant use made the whole game feel more...I suppose prepackaged, for lack of a better term. In and of itself this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but along with it came a strong sense of things having been tweaked and shoehorned in order to make them fit these keywords, rather than be more freeform.

They also came across as an obvious statement that the same company that designed M:tG was now also at the helm of D&D.

 

[MichaelSomething]

So if I want people to like 4E, all I need to do is rewrite all the powers into Gygaxian prose??

 

[Sadras]

So if I want people to like 4E, all I need to do is rewrite all the powers into Gygaxian prose??

This is an interesting question. I have often wondered how could one improve on 4E - presentation as well as the actual system, including to make it easier to tinker with.

EDIT: And when I mean improve - I mean a natural evolution of that style game. And no, I don't mean 5e

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

The added complexity of puting 'manuever' on every Martial power, 'spell' on the arcane, etc, and burying the 'power' generalization in a sidebar somewhere might've helped.
But, seriously, only the Wizard was Vancian. And saying that having a daily makes you a caster in function is factually false, and extremely contentious phrasing. <snip>

I said "in function" and...

It is fair to say that players long accustomed to the innately imbalanced and genre-contrary D&Dism of giving only casters high-power, limited use abilities, could jump, wrongly, to that conclusion. But it is important to understand that they were absolutely wrong to do so, and that continuing to do so, knowingly, was s hallmark of h4ter edition warring.

That's the part many people really didn't like, myself included. All right if you'd rather, it's high-power, limited use powers. I'm willing to buy it for casters, to some degree, but it really bugged me for martial characters. Various people came up with post hoc rationalizations "Think of it as picking your moment to shine" or other things, but ultimately until Essentials the martial classes felt weird and wrong to me. And yeah, I held my nose and played them, but I really, really hated daily powers for martial characters. Encounters were annoying, but bugged me less. They were a classic example of forcing the same logic onto every type. I was much happier with stances, which I think was a clever idea that really should have been kept in 5E and used more for a number of characters. The limited resource in this case is the choice of which stance you're in. IMO this would work great for the bard rather than being a full spellcaster, where different songs work as different stances.

(Yes, I really dislike the general Vancian "fire and forget" mentality applied broadly. I'm OK with it as being part of how D&D functions for some class types like the wizard and as a compromise for priests, but absolutely don't want an extension of it.)

It's also yet another example of the phenomena: in 4e, no single-class fighter could cast a spell, not even metaphorically, in 5e a single-class fighter of the Eldritch Knight martial archetype begins actually, litterally, casting, actual spells at 3rd level, and it's a non-issue.

IMO that's fine because it's an actual part of the class's backplot and exists in the game world: "You're a fighter who's learned a bit of magic on the side."

Always seemed pretty minor to me, though I'd mix Power Attack and Combat Expertise with Spring Attack, reach, & Combat Reflexes to force a modest degree of tactical interest onto a fighter build. Problem was at low levels you were left cursing opportunities that passed you by before you had the right feat; while by the time you had the full set and could pull those cool tricks, they were obviates by the types of foes you faced and the magic your party brought to the table.

Yeah, that's often an issue. The benefit of savoring things you don't have but are building towards versus having too many options or having options that are empty ones due to foes being immune to them. IME, high level fighter types were still quite valuable in 3E, though, but that required a savvy player and the DM making things work, whereas 4E is much more relentlessly game balanced, so much so that I often felt the heavy hand of the game designer.

There were two "fighter math" problems. The harder one was figuring out when to Power Attack and if so by how much. (Best to just make it a default value and call it a day rather than "dial a yield.") The other was just the burden of rolling all those dice and doing a bunch of two digit arithmetic. Some people just stink at that and often won't be willing to learn the kinds of strategies that lead to speed up, such as learning to group dice in groups of fives and tens.

It really depended on the table and how you came at it.
You actually could play paragon or epic 'cold," say with pregens, but combat ran much slower than if you were playing a character that you'd leveled up, 'organically,' yourself. For established players, the first few times could be really slow, too, until you got used to actually having choices, as a non-caster, and as a caster, to your one optimal use of a daily, at best, swinging an encounter rather than 'pwning' it.

IME some people just never really managed to speed up. Of course the ones that had this the worst were the really hard core optimizer types---the ones who inevitably gravitated towards classes like barbarian and avenger---but a Paragon or Epic tier sheet just got ridic, especially when you factored in magic items. The fact that the power cards were often inaccurate or too abbreviated in various ways.

I got into it with a player here who insisted on using spell cards in 5E. The cards often left out key details. He finally got D&DBeyond and looks things up on his phone.

I've long had a pet peeve over long skill lists and open-ended skills, 3e had both, not nearly so bad as many other games, but as bad as D&D ever had it.

IMO it's one reason I dislike tools proficiencies. Some of them are OK but for the most part they're just useless in most games. By contrast Thievery should just be a skill.

Not because they were in squares, though. 3e used 5' squares, and let you convert from ft to aquares, constantly. 4e used 5' squares for everything and simplified it. Both were spuriously criticised as 'grid dependent' compared to AD&D, which used scale inches that could be either 10' or 10yds, depending, and didn't match the scale of the minis it was used with, which was closer to 1" = 6' anyway - That's not "grid independent," just needlessly complicated

To be clear, I don't actually mind squares but there's just no doubt that things like bow ranges were drastically shortened in 4E so they would fit on expected battlemap sizes.

Minor action attacks were beloved of Charop (so suspect), but virtually identical to 5e bonus action attacks, and less complicated than 3e iterative attacks - and also much less common than either. And, it's not like 5e bonus actions have the shield of tradition or familiarity.

The thing is that bonus action attacks are usually quite limited, but it was often possible to chain together bigger attacks in prior versions. You've got one bonus action and one reaction, end of story. I also liked the idea of sacrificing an action (e.g., the bonus action or, even better, the reaction) to maintain concentration rather than the way concentration works now.

I think they got a little rigid and would be OK with a regular action being reduced to a bonus action, for instance.

Off-turn actions are needed to render cyclical turn based initiative less absurd, and 3.0 through 5e all use them. 5e, arguably, not enough to avoid the cyclical round becoming absurd. In 4e, power choice could allow you to all but specialize in them, or eschew them almost entirely.

Some off-turn is OK, but some 4E characters had just way too much of that and a lot of it was so situational that for a lot of builds it was useless. The PHB2 Bard was an example. In a game we had, one of the characters was a drow bard named Kortuss. The bard could move allies around. This left the player asking "does anyone want to get moved?" at the end of nearly everyone's turn with the answer almost always being "no, I ended up exactly where I wanted to be." His nickname was, of course Kortuss Interruptus.

You'd rob yourself if some of the fantasy/action genre cadence of combat that way, but half hps/double damage was a commonly-mentioned variant (though I can't say I ever saw anyone use it - the closest was one convention game where the DM doubled all damage, PC & monster, after (on?) the third round.)

I don't get what I'm robbing myself of. 4E monsters frequently felt like a punching bag to me, way too little offense compared to their staying power and many of their powers and synergies were boring. I didn't find most of their status effects that interesting, although some of them are good: Forced movement was an excellent idea, as is prone. That really reinforces the theme of a monster like a giant that it does damage to you and frequently pushes foes smaller than it and/or knocks prone. In 5E I really like things like that and tend to reintroduce them.

During 4E after not running anything else for a fair bit, I ran some 2E (our old version with lots of house rules) and felt "wow, this is what I remember!" when I had the characters fight a mountain giant. The fights were much faster and nastier. The mountain giant's attacks felt very threatening. Now the mountain giant is an example of a very high threat monster (base damage 4D10!) but still, the more limited hit points and higher general damage makes fights feel much more nail biter-y.

I'm still running that 2E game though due to it being online we have adopted a number of 4Eisms, such as all movement or areas of effect are just squares. I get pretty good outcomes, but this is probably an example of something that really only works because of the group of us. We've played this game for many years and all the players are very experienced.

Part of this is probably me. I never really had a feel for 4E's numbers the way I felt some other DMs did, but quite honestly once I felt that 5E was a solid (if not perfect) game, I said "goodbye".

The 13A escalation die could have been nice for 4e, if Heinsoo had thought of it 6yrs earlier...

IMO that's a good idea but it's so totally, utterly out of the game world it just bugs the !#@$@#$ out of me. I don't mind that if there's something in a fight that makes something like that happen and have used things like that in the past, for instance by introducing some kind of creature that shifted the odds and made overall combat more violent, but on every fight? It just feels like a game mechanic that's grafted on to make combat faster and to force a different dynamic at the end of a fight and prevent people from nova-ing right at the beginning. I dislike it for exactly the same reason I dislike high-power, limited-use abilities applied outside of the context of a spellcaster.

I don't know if "really clever but unmoored game mechanics" was Heinsoo's specialty, but if so it would go a long way towards explaining why I felt that was a hallmark of 4E.

Hmm... in fine GRE Verbal fashion, 13A:4E:athfinder:3E?

That said, there are some damned good ideas in 13A, just as there are in 4E. I really like the Archetypes as part of the world and damage scaling by level is also a very good way of cutting down on rolls without undoing the theme of the characters.)