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<blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 8079009" data-attributes="member: 6803643"><p>My friends and I were all super excited for the end of Vancian spellcasting and the linear-warriors/quadratic-wizards trope that 4e brought along. 3.5e was broken to its core, and no patchwork of Pathfinder was going to fix that, either.</p><p></p><p>Just like the Wii U was a necessary stumble to form the Nintendo Switch, I think 4e was a necessary experiment to get to the balancing act that 5e has performed. 4e shows what you can do if you balance every class perfectly, and then later on with 4e PHB3 and Essentials, they tried pulling apart those structures to see if you could still preserve the balance while allowing classes to level up and work mechanically differently. They found it was working, and so that laid the stepping stones for 5e to have balance between the Fighter and the Wizard (and everything in-between) while still playing entirely differently in terms of power structure, versatility, ease of entry, etc. </p><p></p><p>Now, I'm sure there were a lot of people warded off by the abjuration spell "Slaughter Sacred Cows" cast by WotC in 2008. WotC didn't do a giant public playtest from 2006-2008 to see what most people wanted. These are people who tend to prefer Earth-616 to Ultimate Marvel reboots - people who have found what they like and want to stick with it. That's fine. There's always a splinter group that sticks with what they've invested in when a new edition comes around. The difference here was that 4e was SO radically different, and the OGL & 3.5 SRD opened the door for 3rd party competitors. And who arose to fill in that gap with a 3.5 d20 successor? The company that WotC had licensed out <em>Dragon</em> & <em>Dungeon</em> Magazines to, the people who knew almost as much as WotC how to make D&D. </p><p></p><p>Even then, 4e probably would have been more successful if it had delivered on its promised virtual tabletop tools. In 2020, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, D&D Beyond, Twitch, and the DMs Guild have made D&D an extremely easy game to play over the internet (and that's not counting the other virtual tools available that make the game even easier for DMs like Obsidian Portal and World Anvil). But in 2008, the promise was that WotC would deliver all of this in a neat in-house suite of virtual tools for D&D players who subscribed to <em>D&D Insider</em>. Plus, you'd get official core expansion rules and adventures and content through the Magazines, which were back in WotC's hands and were going all digital. It was arguably a bigger promise than the suite of apps and functionality that Nintendo promised the Wii U would come with (Wii U TV never actually took off, for example, despite being built into the console with a dedicated button on the Game Pad!). We all know what happened - the 2nd-party team hired to develop the tools crashed and burned, the Character builder was made 3 different times, each time angering a different part of the base, the 4e encyclopedia was worth the cost when it came with EVERYTHING in 4e (no extra purchases necessary beyond a sub) but was slow and difficult to use (easy to copy-paste into word docs though), and the Encounter Builder never really came at all. 4e was successful in 2008, but by 2009 was flopping its way to the finish line with too many splatbooks coming out - many more than anyone could really afford to buy, and riddled with errors that required hundreds of pages of errata documents.</p><p></p><p>The 4e/Pathfinder chasm was a colossal marketing mistake. But 4e was not a bad vision, and I doubt 4e would have been as controversial had it been laid out differently, or had the tools been successful, or had <em>Pathfinder</em> not been there to compete with it, or had there been sufficient online support tools to make the game more manageable. And ultimately, WotC learned from the error and were able to turn around a 5e with a public playtest from 2012-2014 that for the first time in any edition, reclaimed the market rather than splintered it further.</p><p></p><p>I have friends who stayed with 4e because that's what they like. But 5e by and large did the Smart Hulk thing - took the brains and the brawn and put them together to become the best of both worlds. It's not perfect, and it's still being refined. But 5e is able to play like a 1e game or like a 2e game or like a 3e game or like a 4e game, and it's more accessible to new audiences than ever, so it's good in my book.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Marandahir, post: 8079009, member: 6803643"] My friends and I were all super excited for the end of Vancian spellcasting and the linear-warriors/quadratic-wizards trope that 4e brought along. 3.5e was broken to its core, and no patchwork of Pathfinder was going to fix that, either. Just like the Wii U was a necessary stumble to form the Nintendo Switch, I think 4e was a necessary experiment to get to the balancing act that 5e has performed. 4e shows what you can do if you balance every class perfectly, and then later on with 4e PHB3 and Essentials, they tried pulling apart those structures to see if you could still preserve the balance while allowing classes to level up and work mechanically differently. They found it was working, and so that laid the stepping stones for 5e to have balance between the Fighter and the Wizard (and everything in-between) while still playing entirely differently in terms of power structure, versatility, ease of entry, etc. Now, I'm sure there were a lot of people warded off by the abjuration spell "Slaughter Sacred Cows" cast by WotC in 2008. WotC didn't do a giant public playtest from 2006-2008 to see what most people wanted. These are people who tend to prefer Earth-616 to Ultimate Marvel reboots - people who have found what they like and want to stick with it. That's fine. There's always a splinter group that sticks with what they've invested in when a new edition comes around. The difference here was that 4e was SO radically different, and the OGL & 3.5 SRD opened the door for 3rd party competitors. And who arose to fill in that gap with a 3.5 d20 successor? The company that WotC had licensed out [I]Dragon[/I] & [I]Dungeon[/I] Magazines to, the people who knew almost as much as WotC how to make D&D. Even then, 4e probably would have been more successful if it had delivered on its promised virtual tabletop tools. In 2020, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, D&D Beyond, Twitch, and the DMs Guild have made D&D an extremely easy game to play over the internet (and that's not counting the other virtual tools available that make the game even easier for DMs like Obsidian Portal and World Anvil). But in 2008, the promise was that WotC would deliver all of this in a neat in-house suite of virtual tools for D&D players who subscribed to [I]D&D Insider[/I]. Plus, you'd get official core expansion rules and adventures and content through the Magazines, which were back in WotC's hands and were going all digital. It was arguably a bigger promise than the suite of apps and functionality that Nintendo promised the Wii U would come with (Wii U TV never actually took off, for example, despite being built into the console with a dedicated button on the Game Pad!). We all know what happened - the 2nd-party team hired to develop the tools crashed and burned, the Character builder was made 3 different times, each time angering a different part of the base, the 4e encyclopedia was worth the cost when it came with EVERYTHING in 4e (no extra purchases necessary beyond a sub) but was slow and difficult to use (easy to copy-paste into word docs though), and the Encounter Builder never really came at all. 4e was successful in 2008, but by 2009 was flopping its way to the finish line with too many splatbooks coming out - many more than anyone could really afford to buy, and riddled with errors that required hundreds of pages of errata documents. The 4e/Pathfinder chasm was a colossal marketing mistake. But 4e was not a bad vision, and I doubt 4e would have been as controversial had it been laid out differently, or had the tools been successful, or had [I]Pathfinder[/I] not been there to compete with it, or had there been sufficient online support tools to make the game more manageable. And ultimately, WotC learned from the error and were able to turn around a 5e with a public playtest from 2012-2014 that for the first time in any edition, reclaimed the market rather than splintered it further. I have friends who stayed with 4e because that's what they like. But 5e by and large did the Smart Hulk thing - took the brains and the brawn and put them together to become the best of both worlds. It's not perfect, and it's still being refined. But 5e is able to play like a 1e game or like a 2e game or like a 3e game or like a 4e game, and it's more accessible to new audiences than ever, so it's good in my book. [/QUOTE]
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