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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 7929862" data-attributes="member: 7006">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.</blockquote>

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