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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Don Durito" data-source="post: 8308722" data-attributes="member: 6687260">It's hard to be sure that 5e didn't actually appeal to a lot of 4e players.  There was obviously a particular culture of 4e players online who were alienated by 4e, but it's really hard to know how big that culture was, and what percentage of 4e players really belonged to it.  Certainly at the height of 4e, there seemed a very different attitude to 4e on Rpgnet from what I remember from the WOTC Gleemax boards.I suspect that the 4e players who made connections between 4e and what indy games were doing, and saw 4e as a game to be creatively reskinned and the like, was probably the most online visible component.  A lot of the intended audience for 4e seemed to have been people who were playing late 3.5 and complained about balance issues and the like.  While it's obvious that a lot of those players were alienated by 4e and went with Pathfinder, it seems likely that many of these players made the transition to 4e and probably still made up the majority of 4e players (at least initially).Certainly there were a lot of such players on the WOTC board, and from what I remember the optimisation board was pretty much exclusively these players.Which is not to say, people are wrong to feel that 5e threw their preferred style of play under the bus, but rather that the efforts WOTC did make to incorporate 4e elements into 5e might not have seemed quite so unsatisfactory to all 4e players.There also often seems to be the assumption that people either loved 4e or they hated it and abandoned it completely - due to how toxic the online edition war was..  Every edition has had players who stuck with it because it was the current edition and it at least fixed some of the blatant issues with what came before, while probably not being entirely satisifed with it.  This almost certainly included a lot of Adventurer's League players who played it primarily because it was what there was available at their local store, and new players who began with 4e and didn't know any different.  It could be that for many of these players 5e seemed less like a betrayal of what they knew and more like an improvement.  (Or perhaps better in some ways, worse in others).When we get right down to it, 5e appeals to a lot of 1e players, even if it's alienating to some members of the hardcore 1e OSR crowd who think it's style of play is completely antithetical to what they enjoy.  I'm not sure it's necessarily so different with 4e.</blockquote>

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