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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 8307865" data-attributes="member: 87792">As someone who's just started their second new 4e campaign this year (although the first broke due to timezone issues) there are three fairly major reasons in my experience:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">H4ters gonna h4te. It's just getting to the point where it's possible to have a conversation about 4e in an open forum without some jerk coming along and spouting fatuous nonsense about shouting hands back on or how it's a boardgame and everything feels the same. This wasn't the case before 2020</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">4e really requires the character builder - and to get that takes low level piracy. The WotC ninjas didn't steal the 3.5 rulebooks when 4e came out - but the WotC sysadmins have turned off the character builder and even Silverlight has gone. So you need a pirated and hacked copy of the old one, which is slightly shady in its own right. And a few months ago a Windows update broke the hacked version so we all needed new patches.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">For licensing reasons the online virtual tabletops don't support 4e in the way they do a lot of other games - and 4e is fairly battlemap centric.</li> </ol>There's a lot more 4e than is immediately obvious in 5e - and that 5e is on a lightly modified 4e engine is itself pretty obvious. Indeed a big part of the reason I'd say that 5e is vastly thematically more interesting than anything pre-4e is that it kept a lot of the 4e fluff in everything from cantrips being at will so wizards don't need crossbows to specialist wizards being better at casting the same spells in the areas they specialise in rather than merely getting an extra spell to rituals being a thing. Sorcerer fluff is pure 4e (but then 3e sorcerers were "they might be descended from dragons I guess?"). Paladin fluff is pure 4e. Warlock fluff is pure 4e. Rogues and monks alike owe a lot to 4e (with 4e being the first edition either of them weren't just bad); Cunning Action is an elegant consolidation of a couple of 4e utility powers for minor action trickery (Fast Hands and Lock Tap) with about half the rogue attack powers that let you either hide, jump out of hiding, or shift. Barbarians are again mostly 4e rather than the variant fighter who gets upset for a few minor bonuses of 3.X.We were going to always lose the battlemap focus for balancing back towards Theatre of the Mind and the inherent balance with martials being as cool as casters and NADs back to saving throws. But the only unnecessary losses 4e took by my estimation were the warlord class, skill challenges, and strong monster design and CR tools. And separated spell mechanics may have come back but aren't really as dominant and Vancian Casting remains dead.</blockquote>

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