D&D General Making and surviving the break…

[dave2008]

What makes folks (you) stay with an edition?

What are the costs of being left behind? How does it change your gaming life?

We played our homebrew version of 1e/BECMI until we fizzled out because of life. We came back to the game with 4e which we loved. I would probably still be playing our homebrewed version of 4e if it was still supported.

We tried 5e shortly after it came out and liked some of the changes (others not as much). What we found was that it was the easiest version of the game for us to homebrew into what we liked and more flexible to our styles of play. We will like stick with 5e (our version) until we stop playing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I've probably asked before, but have you tried PF2? It has a lot of the design mojo of 4e but actually even tighter design. If fixes some of the flaws in 4e design but it is not a 4e clone. So if you want the precise 4e feel it might not do it for you, but it might be worth a look and you can probably find a group!

You may have, certainly some have. I'll need to sit down with it at some point. I...do not care for some of the design choices they've made with it that, to me, seriously undermine the tightness of the design. The specific way they did actions, for example, is....awkward, and as an outsider, it appears to rather ruin a number of things I like. E.g. shields are 100% useless (worse, they're*detrimental*) unless you blow an action every round forever to use Raise a Shield. Or how crits can be forced because it's not rolling a 20, it's hitting a numeric threshold (succeed by 10 or more).

These design choices plus the removal of some of the gonzo stuff from PF1e has made me reluctant to do more than hear about it. Of course, my skepticism may be unwarranted. But it's hard not to look at these and think, "Nope. Sounds terrible. Like a game designed with good intentions and bad, bad preconceived notions."

 

[Micah Sweet]

I've probably asked before, but have you tried PF2? It has a lot of the design mojo of 4e but actually even tighter design. If fixes some of the flaws in 4e design but it is not a 4e clone. So if you want the precise 4e feel it might not do it for you, but it might be worth a look and you can probably find a group!

I just started a campaign of PF2 (as a player) and yeah, it feels more like 4e than any game I've ever played that wasn't actually 4e.

 

[Micah Sweet]

We played our homebrew version of 1e/BECMI until we fizzled out because of life. We came back to the game with 4e which we loved. I would probably still be playing our homebrewed version of 4e if it was still supported.

We tried 5e shortly after it came out and liked some of the changes (others not as much). What we found was that it was the easiest version of the game for us to homebrew into what we liked and more flexible to our styles of play. We will like stick with 5e (our version) until we stop playing.

Why did a lack of continuing support for 4e lead you to abandon the game? Did you need more material? Or was it a player issue?

 

[dave2008]

You may have, certainly some have. I'll need to sit down with it at some point. I...do not care for some of the design choices they've made with it that, to me, seriously undermine the tightness of the design. The specific way they did actions, for example, is....awkward, and as an outsider, it appears to rather ruin a number of things I like. E.g. shields are 100% useless (worse, they're*detrimental*) unless you blow an action every round forever to use Raise a Shield. Or how crits can be forced because it's not rolling a 20, it's hitting a numeric threshold (succeed by 10 or more).

These design choices plus the removal of some of the gonzo stuff from PF1e has made me reluctant to do more than hear about it. Of course, my skepticism may be unwarranted. But it's hard not to look at these and think, "Nope. Sounds terrible. Like a game designed with good intentions and bad, bad preconceived notions."

Ultimately it wasn't for me and we stuck with 5e, but it reminded me, in a lot of ways, of a better designed 4e. It is more balanced and less min/max abusable than 4e, but there are other areas it misses out to 4e and 5e IMO. It was worth running an adventure in to see if it plays well. For example, for what I have heard most people love the 3 action economy to concerns you.

My ideal is some combination of 4e, 5e, & PF2 but it is not worth to time and energy when we are enjoying our current game so much!

 

[dave2008]

Why did a lack of continuing support for 4e lead you to abandon the game? Did you need more material? Or was it a player issue?

Good question. Nothing specific, it was just the zeitgeist I guess. With 4e I got active on the WotC and EnWorld forums for the first time and everything just shifted to 5e. Also, as the DM I got a little burned out on designing 4e monsters and encounters to challenge high level groups. 5e monster and encounter design was a like breath of fresh air for me.

So, in reality, it was only partially the support. The big thing on the support front was probably when the online monster builder and archive was shut down (the name of it escapes me now). I really enjoyed the digital support for 4e.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I started with B/X and quickly moved to 1e. Played 2e when it came out, but really played a hybrid of 1e and 2e. When 3e and 4e came out, we still played AD&D. Up until 2012 when the playtests started. Mostly 5e since.

With a new edition, I'll probably still play 5e with one group, and the other group has already shifted to GEAS (my own system I'm playtesting now.) The way it's looking, we'll be playing GEAS for a while. The group is really enjoying it and how the rules reinforce the style of play they like.

 

[Shardstone]

So...this one was a bit weird for me. I'm sure for anyone that's seen me post for any length of time, I'm a big 4e fan and unapologetic about it.

That wasn't always the case. Indeed, originally, I was a dyed-in-the-wool 4e hater.

My original exposure to it was through (now-former) friends...who hated it. Openly loathed it. I'm pretty sure they'd never even cracked the books open. They condemned it as a cash grab (as though the 3.5e "revision" wasn't), as being antagonistic to story and RP, an MMO on paper, a boardgame not an RPG, a rollplaying game not a roleplaying game...basically, if there was a screed you could shout at it that didn't actually require you to know anything about it, they said it. And I believed them. What reason would I have to doubt their word?

So I stuck with 3.5e--because I thought it was merely an imperfect implementation of a wonderful idea. Because I thought if I could just find the right little bit of homebrew or house-rule or combination of ACFs or (etc., etc.), that I could get from it the experience I wanted. I wasn't satisfied with it, but I simply assumed that that was on me. That I was just looking for the right angle, and if I could find it, I'd truly be completely content with 3.5e.

Of course, there were discussions, and I parroted the things I had heard from others I trusted (at the time, anyway.) I gave my two bits. Eventually, at some point, I made an argument, and someone pushed against it--with citations. That of course required that I actually sit down and read the text, right? Can't meaningfully respond to citations unless you actually know what's being cited. So I did.

And the more I read, the more I realized I loved what I was seeing.

4e wasn't a cash-grab. In fact, it wasn't any of the things I'd been told it was. It was a game that married both serious design--with actual testing, and sometimes really quite clever solutions--and loving design--with heart, and sincerity, and a genuine desire to make something bursting at the seams with flavor and mythic resonance and pure potential. Moreover, as I read it, I realized precisely why I'd been so frustrated with 3.X for so long with no end in sight. I wanted something the game categorically couldn't provide.

I could go into deeper detail, but the point here isn't to crap on 3e, it's to celebrate 4e. 4e truly offers a game where teamwork actually matters, you can't afford to not use teamwork. A game where cold, bloodless calculation is actually not that useful, and flavor-first choices can be perfectly acceptable, even good. A game where you can stop worrying about whether you're hyper-optimized (because it is well-balanced), and instead focus on what makes sense for your character. A game where you can try weird combinations and funky builds without fear that you'll hold your party back. A game that rewards lateral thinking, non-combat tasks, setting and completing personal goals.

And, of course, I'd be remiss if I didn't say, it's the game that gave us not just in-the-PHB-dragonborn, but specifically Arkhosia and the story thereof. It gave us the Raven Queen, and Erathis, and the Dawn War and War of Winter, the Feywild and Shadowfell, and a zillion other brilliant lore and cosmology elements. All of which are designed for how useful they are as part of play, not just as navel-gazing academic cosmology construction that couldn't even in principle have an impact on 99% of campaigns.

All those things combined are why I stick with 4e. Or, at least, I would if I could find people playing it. Because that's the price I pay here. I haven't had a game of 4e at all in something like four years, and I haven't had a really good game of 4e in something like six years. Even then, games were few and far between.

It's frankly pretty miserable, loving something so much and being just genuinely unable to ever get it, and having most people happily and eagerly $#!+ all over it and tell me to my (digital) face what badwrongfun it was. I would love to love 5e. I would love to be able to look at it and say, "Awesome, this is something that can at least get me part of what I want." But it doesn't. It constantly reminds me just how much it repudiates the things I love. Again, I'd rather not digress into talking about something I don't love, so I'll just leave it at what I've said before: "5e was supposed to be the 'big tent,' but I've always felt like that so-called 'big tent' pointedly excluded my interests."

I would never describe the original 4E books as bursting at the seams with flavor and mythic resonance.

 

[Cadence]

I think I kind of cheated on several breaks.

For a while we would play B/X and 1e interchangeably until we all started using 1e. (One game had OD&D, B/X, and 1e at the same table, but I never owned OD&D).

2e came out just as I was starting college, and so I didn't have a lot of time to play for a few years, so the transition wasn't that noticable when I started again in grad school.

Moved and it was pre-3e so we all used 2e still. They graduated/moved and 3.5 was out when it really started up again.

Bounced off of 4e and did a little PF, but it's hard when you have a little one at home.

5e entered kind of a blank slate when I finally picked it up

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My big thing after 3 is that I really need something like the OGL or CC-By for me to bother with it as my go to system. I might never make my own heartbreaker, but I want the option. WotC really pissed me off by raising quesitons about OGL and I wish they had just done something to solidify it as being a permanent thing somehow.

 

[Cadence]

I would never describe the original 4E books as bursting at the seams with flavor and mythic resonance.

I'd go the other way.

I think one of the things that annoyed me most about 4E was that it felt like it was bursting at the seems with a particular cosmology that didn't mesh with what came before for me. The previous D&D versions had one of course, but I had always taken it as the default, and it never felt so integrated that I couldn't massively change it. One of my favorite 2e things was making specialty priests and the like to fit certain campaigns - where I might completely change some powers out or the spell lists, and I loved all the options in PF even if they weren't balanced. All the interlocking parts in 4e made it feel not as approachable to me and made it feel like it fit that particular setting.