Undrave
Legend
I feel like 4e, at the very least, made discussion about game designs a lot more interesting than they were before 4e.
D&D 4E Presentation vs design... vs philosophy
- Thread starter CapnZapp
- Start date
I feel like 4e, at the very least, made discussion about game designs a lot more interesting than they were before 4e.
Sometimes it's hard to put into words exactly why a game doesn't "work" for you. I gave 4E more than the old college try - DMing and playing in campaigns that went all the way to 30th.
At first, I was a big defender of 4E, but in the long run it didn't "feel" like D&D to me either, had 5E not come out I was ready to jump back to 3.5 (despite it's warts) or try PathFinder.
But ask me to point out specific things? Well ... that's a little tougher. I guess it really came back to experiencing less and less free form play as things went along. Cause? Again, that's difficult. Some of it was presentation with being constantly reminded it was a game.
On top of that it just was not possible to emulate the style of fantasy fiction that I wanted to emulate. Throw in hours-long combats and for me it became more of a tactical war game than an RPG. It just didn't happen overnight and, no, I can't exactly put my finger on why. It just didn't feel like D&D.
Which does not mean it was a bad game, just one that I would not want to play again for any length of time.
I actually think 4E was a necessity to the game and has helped make D&D even better. Because it highlighted a lot of things to the game that 3E/3.5 didn't focus on (game balance and ease-of-DMing for example) and thus was a palate cleanser to the kaiju-sized game conglomerate that was the d20 System. There was just so much stuff that came out of 3E/d20 that this amorphous blob of a game system empire really did need a refocusing. 4E did that.
Unfortunately, it did that by taking a hard right turn away from a lot of the baseline concepts of what people considered D&D, but which had been buried beneath the miles and miles of books and ideas written by every would-be game designer. But it was probably hard for anyone to really tell what was "D&D" to them at that point. So its not really the 4E designers' fault... they had to sift through this pirate ship graveyard of the d20 system to try and find anything to hang their D&D hats on that wouldn't be just a retread of what people already had cobbled together in the d20 morass. And they certainly did that. They made a tight base 4E game that kept much of what we would recognize as D&D, but which also forged its own path. Little did they realize though what not continuing with the OGL was going to do.
And that I think was what ended up being the real issue at the end of the day. While the game itself had its naysayers from the beginning... had 4E continued with the OGL and made it just as easy for other companies to follow in their wake... we would not have gotten Paizo breaking off and creating Pathfinder. And without Pathfinder, we would not have had nearly the same number of people not eventually climbing aboard the 4E train. Granted, they might not have preferred it, but if it was the only real game in town, they probably would have held their nose and played it, thus extending the game's lifetime by several years at least. Instead, Paizo made Pathfinder, not enough people stayed on the 4E train, and WotC blew through their potential 4E book resources so fast they ran out of stuff to design which would make even the slightest dent in sales numbers by the end.
So while it ended much earlier than some people at WotC probably originally expected... that hard right turn really did end up being the palate cleanser when it came time to make 5E. Because we had now experienced enough new things design-wise out of 4E that were useful and worked well that the designers were able to use it as a prism to look back at 3E and even earlier. And they were able to clean a lot of the barnacles off of the game using 4E scrapers to eventually give us a very clean D&D 5E ship. And the game has only benefited by that in the long run, as we are all now experiencing.
Unfortunately, it did that by taking a hard right turn away from a lot of the baseline concepts of what people considered D&D, but which had been buried beneath the miles and miles of books and ideas written by every would-be game designer. But it was probably hard for anyone to really tell what was "D&D" to them at that point. So its not really the 4E designers' fault... they had to sift through this pirate ship graveyard of the d20 system to try and find anything to hang their D&D hats on that wouldn't be just a retread of what people already had cobbled together in the d20 morass. And they certainly did that. They made a tight base 4E game that kept much of what we would recognize as D&D, but which also forged its own path. Little did they realize though what not continuing with the OGL was going to do.
And that I think was what ended up being the real issue at the end of the day. While the game itself had its naysayers from the beginning... had 4E continued with the OGL and made it just as easy for other companies to follow in their wake... we would not have gotten Paizo breaking off and creating Pathfinder. And without Pathfinder, we would not have had nearly the same number of people not eventually climbing aboard the 4E train. Granted, they might not have preferred it, but if it was the only real game in town, they probably would have held their nose and played it, thus extending the game's lifetime by several years at least. Instead, Paizo made Pathfinder, not enough people stayed on the 4E train, and WotC blew through their potential 4E book resources so fast they ran out of stuff to design which would make even the slightest dent in sales numbers by the end.
So while it ended much earlier than some people at WotC probably originally expected... that hard right turn really did end up being the palate cleanser when it came time to make 5E. Because we had now experienced enough new things design-wise out of 4E that were useful and worked well that the designers were able to use it as a prism to look back at 3E and even earlier. And they were able to clean a lot of the barnacles off of the game using 4E scrapers to eventually give us a very clean D&D 5E ship. And the game has only benefited by that in the long run, as we are all now experiencing.
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Undrave
Legend
I agree. I think the game needed that shock to the system. Considering people kept playing 3.X for about ten years afterwards, thanks to Pathfinder, I think it's safe to say the public was getting complacent and would probably have kept following WoTC if 4e had just been 3.75 or something. They would have complained about buying new books, but they probably wouldn't have minded that much. But by not trying new things the fanbase would have probably just kept getting smaller and smaller as a result of pleasing the same crowd over and over, like how comic books are nowadays.
atanakar
Hero
I totally agree with this. The 4e clean up really did do that. 5e didn't happen is a vacuum. It benefits from both side of the equation. I see 5e as a bridge between the TSR era and the WoTC era.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Which is all well and good. We all have different preferences, and there’s no denying that 4e had a distinctly different feel than past editions of D&D. It’s just that when you phrase it as “it didn’t feel like D&D to me” that is implicitly invalidating to the opinions of the many folks to whom it did “feel like D&D.” I think the conversation would go smoother if you would say “didn’t feel like what I want out of D&D” or “didn’t feel like I expect D&D to” or something along those lines. To your credit, “didn’t feel like D&D to me is a marked improvement over “wasn’t D&D,” but it still does set up some views of what D&D feels like as more valid than others.
I’m not asking you to do that. Your experience and preferences are valid, whatever your reasons for them may be. In fact, I think asking people to cite specific reasons 4e didn’t “feel like D&D to them” just tends to invite argument. For one thing, people are generally not very good at identifying why they do or don’t like something. You could cite reasons you think might have contributed to the feel not being right for you and I could nitpick and point out why I don’t think those reasons make sense all day long, but at the end of the day it doesn’t get us anywhere. Feel is intensely subjective, trying to rationalize it and form objective arguments about it will only lead to trouble.
I get it. I don’t share your assessments, but like I said, feel is subjective. If it didn’t feel like what you think of as D&D, it didn’t feel that way, and that’s fine and understandable. Heck, I liked it precisely because it didn’t feel like what I had experienced playing 3.5. I only object to defining that feeling as “like D&D” and the feeling 4e had as something not D&D. They’re both D&D, they’re just different styles of D&D.
Well, "Didn't feel like D&D" is a lot less wordy than "I felt like the longer I played the less there was free form role play, any RP just felt like tacked on narration. In addition the different class mechanics didn't feel distinct enough nor did it feel like I could emulate a mundane warrior..." and on and on.
It's just difficult to put into a simple phrase, it certainly isn't meant to invalidate anyone else's opinion. A whole lot of people around here drive pickup trucks and having grown up on a farm where they were utility vehicles it just seems odd to me. That doesn't make them wrong, it just means I'm not heading down to my local Ford dealer to buy the latest trunkless gas guzzler.
In any case, I think this horse is long dead.
Have a good one.
atanakar
Hero
As a counter-point to my other post, in which I explained why 4e did not work for me as a DM, my wife really loved 4e.
At the time she had been playing D&D with us since the mid-90s (AD&D2e). She never felt truly part of the crowd around the table. Too many books and too many convoluted rules. Then with 4e, since they wiped the slate clean, she felt on the same page as everyone. She really like the power cards a lot because she could sit at the table and had everything she needed to play in front of her. No digging in rule books. Plug&Play she said.
At the time she had been playing D&D with us since the mid-90s (AD&D2e). She never felt truly part of the crowd around the table. Too many books and too many convoluted rules. Then with 4e, since they wiped the slate clean, she felt on the same page as everyone. She really like the power cards a lot because she could sit at the table and had everything she needed to play in front of her. No digging in rule books. Plug&Play she said.
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Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Again, that’s far more detailed and precise than what I’m asking for, and in fact I think that level of specificity is likely to invite more argument. When I say “Didn’t feel like what I want out of D&D,” I mean that literally. I’m not asking folks to explain what they want out of D&D or why they think 4e didn’t deliver on that, and at this point I would frankly rather they didn’t. I’m asking that they say “wasn’t what I want out of D&D” instead of “wasn’t D&D” or “didn’t feel the way I like D&D to feel” instead of “didn’t feel like D&D.”
The simple phrase is “it didn’t feel like what I wanted out of D&D.” What’s so difficult about that?
I don’t doubt that it isn’t meant to, but it does, implicitly. It would not if you reframed it around your own personal preferences instead of some abstract platonic ideal of “the feel of D&D.”
Son of the Serpent
Pupil
That is in every sense of it the opposite of what is happening in comic books nowadays. The ones attempting to appeal to a distinctly different persuasion of person from what has been the typical crowd of fans in the past are the ones tanking hardest. I dont know how else to put this but its a thing.
