Avoid setting changes (or at least more than very, very minor ones), give the books another year, (apparently) don't just nudge the HP of all monsters up a whole bunch(???), and emphasize presentation, presentation, presentation in the final publication. Avoid the GSL, avoid the murder-suicide that destroyed all future potential of the digital tools, avoid Silverlight which further strangled whatever minimal tools potential remained. Brace for the financial meltdown and focus on low-cost, easy-use books.
Yes, this. Although, some of those aspects are kind of hard to control. I mean, I don't think whomever hired the lead on the digital tools
intended for things to go the way they did.
Oh...and don't write such absolute $#!+ early adventures. Seriously, Keep on the Shadowfell and Pyramid of Shadows are horrible rotten garbage I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and they made a terrible first showing for a brand-new edition.
Most editions have had problems with bad early adventures. The problems are two-fold:
1. The adventures are written simultaneously with rules development, which means things in the rules change in ways that alter the way the adventure works and no-one catches these differences. For example, my understanding is that the opening encounter in Hoard of the Dragon Queen, where the party fights eight kobolds (which given the kobold Pack Attack ability is incredibly lethal), was a victim of some rule change or other.
2. Even with playtesting, it's hard to say how a rule set
actually works. There's usually a lot of stuff that emerges from how different parts of the rules interact that the designers never intended or foresaw. And that's the kind of thing you only understand with experience.
Without the GSL, Paizo almost certainly never makes PF, but instead makes more 4e content. Lacking a rallying flag and having fewer complaints (because of the lack of setting changes), the grumbles remain mostly just that--grumbles.
If the only thing different would be the GSL, I don't think so. There's a
retrospective post on Paizo's site about how once the Paizo folks got the chance to play in 4e demos, they decided that that was not a system for which they wanted to make stuff. It's possible that a more permissible license might have changed their minds, in much the same way that they're dipping their toes in 5e, but they wanted no part of 4e.
I don't think setting alone was a major factor. A huge amount of the objection to 4e was tonal. The rules didn't just look like a wargame, they read like one also. Some of the Essentials direction was better, but they needed to go even further. Classes should not have looked so similar to each other. They didn't focus enough on making each class unique, and hard coding roles was a mistake. Your Wizard CAN be a controller, but that label shouldn't be there and the players should choose the role for that particular PC without the intentional and explicit "pulling back the curtain" on that level of design. There was just too much of a gamification tone to the rules.
I disagree that the focus on roles was a mistake, though in retrospect they might have made a more subtle version.
The issue is that the classical D&D party is a fighter, a wizard, a cleric, and a rogue/thief. The fighter hits things and protects their allies, the wizard blows things up and solves many non-combat challenges with their magic, the cleric heals the party and fixes their problems, and the rogue scouts and deals with traps and stuff. The problem is that if you replace the rogue with a bard, you now no longer have a trapfinder. Replace the cleric with a druid (in 3e or earlier), and you lose out on a lot of healing. The fighter is probably the most interchangeable, because there's really little difference between the fighter, barbarian, paladin, and ranger hitting things.
So what roles did was to identify certain tasks that a party needed to do, and assigned them to various interchangeable classes. That meant that 4e was the first edition where making a cleric-less party was perfectly viable without using workarounds like stocking up on healing potions and such. Part of this was also to move the non-combat function of some classes into systems that were less tied to classes, such as rituals and skills.
That said, I recognize that hardcoding roles into classes caused some problems for the class fantasy. The typical example here is the archer fighter. The 4e fighter is bad at ranged combat. It is at best a backup option for them. The intent is that martial archers would be rangers, but this is poorly communicated, plus it automatically associates archers with nature stuff to some degree (even if the 4e ranger is much less wilderness-oriented than previous editions – they are very much "civilized person venturing into the wild" rather than a "native".
I think the solution here would have been to tie roles to subclasses rather than the whole classes. This is sort of what Essentials did. So you could have the Slayer fighter who focuses on dealing massive damage with big weapons, and the Knight fighter who defends their companions with skillful shield use. You could have an Ice Wizard focusing on debuffing and controlling the battlefield, and a Fire Wizard who just nukes the crap out of their foes. This would allow players to keep the
identity of being "a fighter" without necessarily being a defender, while still highlighting the need for someone else to pick up the defender slack.
When it comes to 4e and the Forgotten Realms specifically, they nuked the setting. NEVER nuke the setting.
Very much so.
Generally speaking, a setting has some people who like it and some who don't. If you nuke the setting, that will turn off a lot of the people who like it the way it is, and probably not attract the people who don't. The only times when a setting reboot is (or at least can be) a good thing is if the setting has been mothballed for a while.
Healing Surges are probably the most frequent cost to a group's failure of a Skill Challenge. For the player who contributed a Diplomacy check (or something else not physical), he or she will lose a Healing Surge just the same as someone who failed an Endurance or Athletics check.
But the costs are the same for the entire party, regardless of the skill that is rolled. You could lose healing surges, you could generate 2 extra guards at the next fight, etc. The skill that is rolled rarely matters in the consequences of the Challenge.
Those are consequences of losing the overall skill challenge, though – not of a single failed roll. It's not "I failed a Diplomacy check so I lose a healing surge". It's "My lack of manners annoyed the Fair Folk so they kept leading us astray in the woods, which exhausted us so we each lost a healing surge."
That said, I think skill challenges in general are better handled in The Troubleshooters. There, the Director determines three to five skills involved in a challenge (with player input) and has the party attempt those, with the overall level of success depending on how many of those skill checks were successful.
