I've always thought that OD&D through 4e was something like a spectrum, distinct differences at certain points, but blurry transitions at others. So if you were playing OD&D, that was a relatively smooth transition to AD&D (or alternatively XD&D). But as people were moving out of "exploration/problem solving" and into "story and setting", 2nd Edition focused on that. If you were an OD&D player who used AD&D books, it was too different. But if you were an AD&D player running Dragonlance-style games, it was a smooth transition. And if you were an AD&D player who used 2nd Ed materials, 3e was a huge change, maybe changed too much. But if you had played a lot with the supplemental material (Complete Handbooks, Skills & Powers, etc), the move to 3e wasn't such a big change. And if you were a 2nd Ed player who used 3e books, 4e was this whole other thing. But if you were a 3e player who really got into the nitty-gritty of character generation and interactions with rules, the move to 4e was not much different than going from descending to ascending AC -- same idea, better presentation.
In my case, I hadn't played very much 3E (and no 3.5) but had played a lot of Rolemaster and a fair bit of RuneQuest and related games, as well as 2nd ed AD&D Skills and Powers points buy, and so was familiar with a variety ways of using mechanics to achieve a variety of RPGing goals both in PC building and action resolution.
Coming from that background, 4e seemed (and seems) to me to take the legacy systems of D&D - especially hit points and armour class (which most other classic fantasy RPGs, like RM and RQ, begin by dumping) - and make them consistent, and powerful, and generalised across the game. I also liked its handling of class - another D&D legacy. It makes class the centre of PC build but also connects it even more tightly to stats than the old "prime requisites", and links it to the skill system in a way that brought class archetypes into non-combat resolution.
If you want to use the rules as a physics generator, 4e design sucked. If you saw the rules as abstractions on which to hang your roleplay, 4e was awesomely designed. 4e really had to be wrangled to work for classic dungeoncrawls (and produce the same kind of tension and dread), but it did set-piece battles like no one else.
I agree with all this. But for me, when I started playing 4e (Jan 2009) D&D hadn't been primarily about dungeon crawls for nearly 25 years.
Since Oriental Adventures (1986) my campaigns - be they mechanically D&D or Rolemaster - have focused on personalities, and politics/religion together with history/cosmology, rather than dungeoncrawls. There has been the odd bit of extended underground exploration over the year - including in my 4e game - but the inability of 4e to (easily) replicate White Plume Mountain or Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan hasn't been an issue for me.
When I did run a dungeon crawl, at around 6th level, I was quite happy with how it worked out, but tracking rations and iron spikes wasn't part of it. I merged elements of Night's Dark Terror - burial mounds haunted by undead - with elements of the Sceptre Tower of Spellgard - underground canals, a flooding trap room with a vampire in it, etc - with bits of the online extensions for Thunderspire Labyrinth. And I did get out my graph paper and draw up a map. But the focus was on the action, not the exploration.
Chris Perkins replied to that tweet, saying, "Out of context, this sounds bad.
" Gamehole Con replied, "Sorry, was clear in the room what you were saying, 140 characters is a bit of context killer." Asked for elaboration of context, Perkins said, "One of my goals is to make sure 5e contains lots of humor. Remember the little b&w comics in the 1e books?"
So rather than be a comment on 3e and 4e themselves, he was talking about a pan-edition phenomenon, something that goes back to 2e, if not late 1e.
The ENworld Front Page had the second Perkins quote too, but didn't make it clear that the two went together so tightly.
Also, I should add that I wasn't meaning to bag Perkins. I don't know much about him other than his advice column on the old WotC website, which made him look like a pretty good GM, and some videos of him GMing (the famous "Darkfire can't target non-creatures" one), in which I don't think he came across quite as well.
I'd be surprised if he dislikes 4e, given he seems to have spent a lot of time and effort GMing it, but you never know - he wouldn't be the first person to hate his job! But even if he did, as apparently Robert J Schwalb does despite having written tons of content for it, that would be his prerogative.
as someone whose favorite edition has generally been ignored, from the outside it's never looked to me like WotC was trashing other editions. I've always thought people imparted far too much malice into such comments, comments that were often intended to be self-deprecating, or in-group criticism.
I agree that too much malice gets imparted. I tend to seem them as a mixture of marketing - which, as a commercial enterprise, WotC is obliged to undertake - that draws upon the sort of in-group criticism you describe. For instance, when Mearls talks about "shouting hands back on", I think of that as a throw-away line. But I also think that it's a throw-away line that is intended to resonate with a certain part of his audience - namely, that part which don't like inspirational healing. That's the marketing aspect.
What can frustrate me a little bit about that sort of remark is because there will always be posters out there who treat it as a
reason rather than as a throw-away line. And if someone is going to say that inspirational healing shouldn't be part of the game because "you can't shout a hand back on" - that is, if someone puts it forward as an actual reason in favour of some rules element rather than another - then I find it hard to resist pointing out the obvious, namely that the passage of time can't grow a hand back on either (if you're a human being), and hence that recovery from severed limbs doesn't provide any sort of basis for preferring "passage of time" healing to inspirational healing.
