D&D 4E Inquiry: How do 4E fans feel about 4E Essentials?

[Mannahnin]

I liked it too. Fixed math, and simpler classes for those who wanted them.

I also found that the classes generally worked fine alongside regular 4E classes. The last 4E game I played in (in 2019) I played a Skald, the martial bard from Heroes of the Feywild, and enjoyed it quite a bit, played alongside a Sorcerer, Rogue, and Druid.

 

[Charlaquin]

I liked it too. Fixed math, and simpler classes for those who wanted them.

I also found that the classes generally worked fine alongside regular 4E classes. The last 4E game I played in (in 2019) I played a Skald, the martial bard from Heroes of the Feywild, and enjoyed it quite a bit, played alongside a Sorcerer, Rogue, and Druid.

Heroes of the Feywild was great. It had my favorite ever iteration of both the bard and the barbarian, as well as playable satyrs and dryads. And I think pixies? I don’t remember if that was from HotF or not…

 

[ctorus]

I'm a 4e fan and I really like Essentials. I'm running a campaign with Essentials classes right now and they are great - particularly for players new to 4e. The main thing I think it is missing is rituals - these in my view were one of the shining strengths of 4e. But they are no difficulty whatsoever to add to the Essentials setup.

 

[cbwjm]

Essentials came to late for me to use but I think if they had started with the essentials class structure that 4e would have been better recieved.

 

[Nefermandias]

In general prior to Essentials as a 4e GM I did not have to pay attention to things like the length of the adventuring day if I wanted the game to be balanced. I just basically run it however I wanted. The Essentials classes changed all that.

Even more importantly for me I really appreciated the 4e lore and Essentials walked back pretty much all of the conflict rich 4e specific lore for a more conflict neutral approach to the lore that was more reminiscent of previous editions.

That's it.
Essentials was a huge backtrack that introduced back quite a few problems that 4e had already solved with it's release.

 

[Greg K]

Which precluded Warlords too.

Why did it preclude the Warlord? I seem to recall WOTC giving away an Essential Warlord and some other Essentialized classes.

 

[Dausuul]

Count me as another person who quite liked Essentials. But then, I don't know if I qualify as a true 4E fan, since I made the jump to 5E and am happy with that decision. (I did like 4E; I just like 5E more.) The main thing I appreciated was the shift to more distinctive, streamlined class mechanics. The AEDU system always felt overly restrictive and bland to me.

I recently read something to the effect that the 4E designers wanted to do Essentials-style classes from the beginning, but ran out of time before launch, so they put everything into the AEDU framework and ran with that instead. I have to wonder if 4E might have fared better if they'd been able to design it the way they wanted.

The end result would likely have been the same; it might have blunted the fan backlash a little, but there were a lot of things driving that backlash and AEDU was only part of it. It also wouldn't have stopped Wizards from botching the GSL and driving Paizo to create Pathfinder, nor the disasters that befell the VTT rollout. There were so very many things working against 4E's success. Still, 4E might have lived a couple more years and flourished a little better during its time.

 

[dave2008]

Jein. It could be played alongside the rest of 4e, but it couldn't really be played "great alongside the rest of 4e" without quite a large amount of errata that plagued a lot of the early releases, especially until the math got fixed.

I think the really depends on the group (like most things in D&D). We had standard and essentials characters at the same table and it worked great for us. We were never sticklers for RAW though.

 

[Charlaquin]

Why did it preclude the Warlord? I seem to recall WOTC giving away an Essential Warlord and some other Essentialized classes.

I don’t remember there being an Essentials-style warlord. There was an assassin, called the executioner, which was a little bit weak, but incredibly fun.

 

[Dausuul]

I don’t remember there being an Essentials-style warlord. There was an assassin, called the executioner, which was a little bit weak, but incredibly fun.

It wasn't in the books, but they released a "Marshal" class in Dragon that was an Essentialized warlord. Or at least a warlord in Essentials format; mechanically it apparently wasn't much different from the PHB version. (I don't remember the details, and the original article has departed WotC's website, so I'm going off commentary on the article from third-party sources.)