D&D 4E Is there a "Cliffs Notes" summary of the entire 4E experience?

[Tony Vargas]

Fine. In no particular order, my less petty reasons for disliking 4e are as follows (my petty reasons include I don't think the hypotenuse should be considered the same length as a side of a square):

I like to put it "pi equals 4." Funny how easy geometry gets when pi is 4. I mean, literally funny - both in the hilarious and strange senses.

As a player, I prefer to stay in actor stance. The dissociative mechanics are something I dislike in 4e. As a player, if my character isn't making a choice I don't want to make a choice.

Well, nothing new or valid, there. Dissociative mechanics as defined by the Alexandrian is reducible to demanding realism in a fantasy game. A non-starter.

I dislike the reversal of cause->effect the power structure imposes without an equal in-game imposition ("Why didn't you try to trip him? Because I tripped someone else earlier today, he presented no opening." and "Gee it was a good thing you tripped him! Yes that's why I avoided tripping anything earlier today. The Conservation of Martial Action theorem dictates I only get one possible success a day").

A re-statement of Dissociative mechanics, and as such, equally invalid.

I dislike the way the dying condition is presented -- either the wounds were grievous enough to kill or they were only flesh wounds a la the last scene in The Last Action Hero).

Not really a change from 2e or 3e. In 1e, there was a meaningful long-term distinction between being wounded to 1 and -1 - an extra week of recovery regardless of hps restored. Maybe you disliked that in 2e & 3e, too, and house-ruled or ignored, but are unwilling to do so, now?

I dislike the math presented around skill challenges (the probabilities were not only quite borked, the fact they were borked is hard to see because the math is very opaque).

They were. They were also fixed.

Further, I think skills challenges as presented suffer from having all successes/failures come from PC action. I've devised/stolen similar structures from other games that can include opposition action and choice as well for chases, "submarine hunts", and other such situations.

Well, it /is/ the PCs' story, and having players makes the rolls helps keep them engaged.

Conceptually, though, there's no reason opposition action couldn't figure into it - primarily it /does/ figure into it as the opposition is part of the challenge and their actions (past & during the challenge) were presumably considered by the DM in defining the challenge.

At bottom this is no different than attacking a non-AC defense vs forcing a save. That the player is rolling against a difficulty based on the opposition he's facing, rather than the DM rolling makes no difference mathematically.

I think what you may be getting at is using the player as resolution system. You set up a challenge, like a sort of mini-game that the player wins or loses based on his skill at the kind of game (like a puzzle or something) with no reference to the ability of the character at whatever it is he's actually trying to do. Profoundly 'dissociative,' when you think about it. Also a bit unfair & unbalanced, as it fails to reflect what the character is good/bad at, and allows a players who's good at the sorts of challenges you use to 'dump' the corresponding character abilities you're ignoring.

I dislike having my will suborned by other players without an external effect that can be pointed at (warlord using his turn to move my character. I hear that was 'clarified' in later books so the original player can refuse, but that wasn't the original rule).

Actually, there was only one malformed Warlord power that caused the target to act rather than allowed him to act. It wasn't the one that granted a move.

And, yes, that one power was fixed, too.

I dislike fiddly positional combat both as a DM and as a player. I much prefer FATE's zones to a grid. I use at most a whiteboard/chalkboard for current character positioning and generally rely on TofM.

That's lovely, and I'm sure you'd love 13A for that reason, but 4e is no harder to adapt to that style of play than any other version of D&D - really, they're /all/ pretty hard to adapt that way. 3.5 not only used the grid but used more complex movement and area rules that were harder to visualize. 1e was designed for scale-inches miniature wargaming style play, and 2e was still all in inches with volume-filing fireballs and whatnot. 4e, thanks to it's non-Euclidean pi-is-4 geometry is dead easy to visualize - everything's in convenient cubes. Adopt something like SARN-FU, and you'd've had it made.

I dislike the removal of long-term strategic resource/play. I like the original quasi-vancian spell selection in 1e as a player, for example.

You mean beyond the 'day?' True, in 1e, at very high levels, it could take more than a day to re-memorize a full slate of spells - then again, that was an embarrassment of riches scenario, it was unlikely you'd ever expend a whole slate of spells. Aside from that - or taking a week off due to someone breaking the 0hp wound-severity barrier - I don't see what you might be referring to. D&D has always revolved around the day and the decision to 'sleep' and re-charge spells (and thus hps, since the only practical, renewable source of healing was spells) - thus the dreaded 5MWD.

I dislike long combat of any sort -

Of course, the default combat under 4e guidelines is a fairly complex, but merely 'challenging' rather than lethal, 'set piece battle.' In 3e, the default was a static slugfest against one monster, ending quickly at low levels due to high damage output from melee types, and even more quickly at high levels, to massive damage exploits or untouchable-save DCs. While prior eds had no guidelines whatsoever, making combats anything from rollover to grind to TPK with little rhyme or reason until you developed the 'art' of designing (and fudging) combats to make them more interesting and challenging-more-than-lethal (if you ever developed that art).

But, nothing forced you to use defaults. You could run a complex set-piece battle in 3e - it was a lot of work, and very hard to make challenging for the PCs (you'd have to go way overbudget, since 3e just didn't handle underleveled monsters very well - something 5e is addressing). You could run quickie roll-overs (like typically 'fast' 5e combats) in 4e - you just dialed the challenge way down and used a lot of minions and underleveled monsters.

- for me, D&D is much more about exploration and combat avoidance than combat. I have other games I lean on for stronger heavy combat style games like Hero.

Interesting, considering that D&D had very few system for combat avoidance, and those /very ineffective/. A party using a 4e-style Skill Challenge or Group Check to avoid a combat has a fair chance of success. A party trying to 2e dex-check or 3.5 party (or 1e thief) trying to Hide/Move-Silently to avoid an encounter was prettymuch statistically doomed to failure, since you had everyone rolling (or even rolling twice or rolling opposed checks) and even one failure blew it. For that matter, while Hero would also require everyone to succeed to avoid a combat, it'd at least likely be only a single skill, and Hero skills are cheap and easy to boost to ~90% success rates.

Similarly, exploration in pre-4e consists of one PC doing most of the actual playing (the formal 'caller' in 1e, or just whoever has 'taken point' or who's skills/spells apply or who is just most assertive/engaged when just listening to descriptions and asking questions) while everyone else is little more than a spectator or kibitzer. At least 4e had skill challenges to pull everyone into the exploration pillar, even if it was for 5e that the pillar was finally formalized.

 

[billd91]

If any of my questions trigger memories of frustrating times then that's not what I'm going for. I guess I'm more curious about reading a bit of a forensic breakdown of how the whole thing played out. Just for my own curiosity. Thanks in advance for anyone who indulges me.

Well, this thread is certainly serving up a microcosm of the whole 4e-timeframe on the messageboards, right down to the sneering dismissive responses to posts characteristic of the edition war. I'm sorry you had to witness it but I'm not surprised because this thread underlines just how much the sentiments for and against the edition continue to this day as well as how much or little we respect each other's statements.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Both sides can claim the other started it. After all, h4ters had to have something to h4te.

Considering they started their attacks when the game was /announced/, no they didn't need to have anything about the game itself to hate. The decision to hate (OK, impulse or reaction, I'm sure it wasn't often a thought-out decision) preceded the rationalizations for that hate.

Again 4E sold like gangbusters. It had a starting chance that pretty much any other game would kill for. And over time 4E was losing fans that started out liking it.

The pattern that D&D has followed since the fad ended was that new eds start out strong selling the core books, then taper off quickly when they have nothing to offer but supplements. (Really, most games follow that pattern, afterall, no one's likely to buy a supplement if they don't already have the core, and a lot of people might be happy playing with core for a long time.) 4e was no different from any other ed in that regard. It was not being abandoned en masse by fans that started out liking it -indeed, it was drawing in an retaining new fans better than most post-fad eds - it's just that supplements don't sell well, and WotC cynical attempt to label supplements 'core' didn't fool anyone.

Just tracing the same old trajectory wasn't enough, because the revenue goals were so far beyond the pale. 4e needed to not just sell like a new ed, it had to sell DDI subs like they were MMO memberships. When DDI tools were set back by a certain tragedy, that went from highly unlikely to virtually impossible, and D&D was dropped into non-core-brand hell, requiring a massive pulling back from it's ambitious design principles as staff was slashed. The result was Essentials, a much slower release schedule, and Pathfinder pulling ahead in sales.

All things being equal it is an unreasonable leap of faith to presume that some magic event would have made the game popular. And all things are not equal. The evidence points to the contrary.

The point is rather the opposite. It took a perfect storm of 3 unprecedented, probably never to be repeated, "magic events" to doom 4e.

 

[BryonD]

The point is rather the opposite. It took a perfect storm of 3 unprecedented, probably never to be repeated, "magic events" to doom 4e.

I realize this is the point you are claiming.
I'm saying that a lot of people truly disliked 4E and even in the absence of these events that dislike of 4E would have been no less.
Those events may mean quite a lot to how the fate of 4E impacted other games and what people not playing 4E choose as an alternative.
But people were never going to play a game they don't like. So the cause of 4e's "doom" was internal to 4E.

 

[Dausuul]

Something more general would certainly have been better. 'Heroic' Surge, for instance. IMX, most tables quickly shorten it to just 'surges.'

One benefit of a less specific name would have been leaving the door open to use them for more than just restoring hps or metering temp hps. There are a few examples, like magic items fueled by surges, of alternate uses. Surges could have been used for all sorts of things - fueling powers, granting bonuses like the Heroic Surge finally given to human, enabling 'plot point' type mechanics, etc. As a fixed daily resource, they could have been a strong core mechanic for limited-use abilities of all sorts, allowing more options-mixing, flexibility and customization to be introduced without unduly impacting overall balance (though flexibility /does/ affect balance, of course)

Agreed. You'd probably need to put in some per-encounter limits to prevent people from going nova, and it would be a challenge to balance survivability against damage output. But against that, you get the benefits of a streamlined, easier to learn, more versatile system that also happens to line up better with the fiction. Complaints about fighter daily powers would pretty much vanish, for instance.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I realize this is the point you are claiming.
I'm saying that a lot of people truly disliked 4E and even in the absence of these events that dislike of 4E would have been no less.

I don't doubt it. Afterall, it happened with every rev-roll. There were folks who hated 3e and refused to switch from 2e, for instance. They got quite vitriolic at times and I wasted a lot of bits defending 3e from them. But they didn't drag down 3e. 3e was riding high on the complementary products being churned out under the OGL. Pre-Hasbro WotC wouldn't have dropped or screwed over D&D if their lives depended on it, they /loved/ the game, they had no unrealistic expectations about the money they'd be making off it. There was no one prospect of anyone cloning 2e and keeping the hold-out community engaged and energized. There was no bet on a new vaporware complementary product that /had/ to be huge to count as a success.

But people were never going to play a game they don't like. So the cause of 4e's "doom" was internal to 4E.

There have always been holdouts, and a lot of them generally come around. They didn't come around and 4e a chance because they had the promise of ongoing OGL support. That's one of part of the 'perfect storm,' and it certainly whipped up the edition war, since it kept the 3.x holdout community engaged and energized enough to hulk-out into full-blown rage-fueled 'h4ters.' But it wasn't the content of the game that drove that, it was the availability of the alternative. That the rationalizations h4ters came up with - the /best/ they could come up with, after years of confabulating and refining - remain so weak, from the completely invalid to the wholly subjective, is clear evidence of that. What was between the covers of 4e made little difference. If 4e /had/ been a genuinely bad game, you would have had slightly more h4ters (and I'd've likely been one of 'em, as I felt that initial urge to punish the new ed for coming to early, myself), and slightly fewer 4vengers, and probably somewhat more acrimony - and the illogical and subjective arguments would have been more heavily on the 4venger side as they defended the indefensible from valid attacks.

Because the apologist come out for every new edition, just like the hold-outs.

And, y'know, even if 4e had been that bad, if there'd been no OGL, no crazy business plan, no exogenous disasters, it would've 'succeeded' in spite of the legitimate 'theorycrafting' leveled against it - because the D&D name just doesn't fail based on quality.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Agreed. You'd probably need to put in some per-encounter limits to prevent people from going nova, and it would be a challenge to balance survivability against damage output. But against that, you get the benefits of a streamlined, easier to learn, more versatile system that also happens to line up better with the fiction. Complaints about fighter daily powers would pretty much vanish, for instance.

I doubt complaints about the fighter would ever vanish. If it's not balanced, people break out the math & complain about that. If it is, other people claim to be offended by the way it was balanced, no matter what that way may have been.

 

[Obryn]

This thread is depressing.

 

[Derren]

There is not one big reason why people dislike 4E, rather there are several major points although not all of them apply to everyone who ended up disliking 4E.


- The big shift towards gamism
The 4E rules had a big shift towards gamism compared to 3E and the rules stopped to even try to be simulationist. Instead many powers and mechanics were impossible to explain with in game logic and often were copied without much modification from MMOs (which earned 4E its video game reputations)
Hit points were a major point here with nonmagical "shout" healing and Schroedinger Wounds where you could not know what a wound/hit that gets you into negative HP represented before knowing how it is healed, but also other things like nonmagical magic abilities and MMO taunt style abilities (Come and Get me, etc.) and PCs having completely different abilities than NPCs.

- Sacred cow killing
4E killed many sacred cows, often without discernible good reason and many people had the impression that the designers were "fiddling" with the core D&D values because of their own egos in an attempt to leave a mark.

- Anti 3E advertising
Much of WotCs own advertising had a Anti 3E atmosphere which of course created a hostile environment among those who liked 3E.

- Limited scope
At least at the beginning of 4E the scope of it was very limited compared to the beginning of 3E with traditional races not included in the core books. Also, the rules made it rather clear that "heroic adventurer" was the supposed playstyle and options for something else were either very limited or nonexistent. This goes so far that the MM1 had hardly any good monsters in it because "You usually don't fight them" and it making traditional good creatures unaligned

- FR timejump
While not all D&D players are FR fans (and it is quite possibly that the FR fans are a minority compared to all D&D players) it is still D&Ds biggest setting and its timejump and the massive changes introduced were not very well received at all.

- OGL crackdown
4E limited the ability of 3rd party companies to make supplements and experience from 3E has shown that especially high quality adventures are not WotCs strong point.

- Math problems
They only became apparent later but despite the claims of extensive playtesting many parts of the game like NADs, minions, solos and skill challenges suffered from quite some big math problems and broke down pretty fast and were only fixed after several revisions of core books, if at all

 

[BryonD]

There have always been holdouts, and a lot of them generally come around. They didn't come around and 4e a chance because they had the promise of ongoing OGL support.

Again, 4E was losing fan base over time. People were saying that they liked it at first but the problems emerged. That doesn't fit with your theory that people would come around.
1E and 2E were near on to the only game in town in their day. There was not any great "hold out" community to "come around". (Other than OD&Ders, and they did NOT come around)

I know there were a lot of people who didn't like 3E.


They still don't like 3E.

Good for them. But they didn't come around.

There is no evidence to support your theory whatsoever.

And, y'know, even if 4e had been that bad,

Important note: it *WAS* that bad to a lot of people. I absolutely agree that it was AWESOME to a lot of people. These two points are not in conflict. You can't make a reasonable conclusion without accepting the truth of both.

because the D&D name just doesn't fail based on quality.

I'll just let that statement speak for itself.