I decided to post here cause it is pretty easy to find places online that tell me why 4e sucks. I wanted to hear more bias opinions in favor of 4e instead of people complaining about it.
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D&D 4E Switching to 4e?
- Thread starter Squnk
- Start date
I decided to post here cause it is pretty easy to find places online that tell me why 4e sucks. I wanted to hear more bias opinions in favor of 4e instead of people complaining about it.
The Human Target
Adventurer
In my experience 4E hate is really over estimated due to the passion of people who do hate it.
mattcolville
Adventurer
I think in order to understand the reaction to 4E, it helps to understand the context into which it was released. Bear with me.
D&D3 was released in 2000, after a decade of gamers being told that dungeon crawling and killing orcs was kids stuff. Adults played highly narrative story-based games. I know that may sound hard to believe, but trust me that was the real climate back then. I started as a game designer in 1997, hired full-time by a company called Last Unicorn Games to work on the DUNE CCG. At the time, White Wolf was the company everyone looked to, the company that sorta set the agenda, the company everyone else was reacting to. One of my coworkers *literally* called gamers, our customers, "mouth-breathing morons." I'm 90% sure he was quoting someone at White Wolf.
But that climate was pure narrative. The entire industry was only a few dozen writers and designers and they all knew each other. The actual gamers weren't plugged into this narrative, they just knew the game they liked, AD&D, had become a mess with AD&D2. Everything was Settings and Guidebooks and the notion of design and rules seemed to have been forgotten. TSR, reacting to that White Wolf narrative, had sorta disappeared up its own bum. And the gamers left. By and large, they didn't switch systems, or go back to AD&D, they just stopped playing completely.
Comes Wizards of the Coast and Peter Adkison and Ryan Dancey. These guys buy TSR and basically make the game they want. They are customer #1 and they want a new game, with robust design (something AD&D, designed Ad Hoc, never had) that is basically, "what if we made AD&D now?" Peter and Ryan were very strongly driving the design back then, they wanted a game that captured that feeling of gaming in 1979, but without all the ad hoc systems that never made any sense.
The marketing phrase you saw everywhere was "Back to the Dungeon." "Wasn't the 90s crap?" they were saying. "Let's get back to killing orcs and taking their stuff!"
As someone who was a designer at the time, I remember a *lot* of my fellows thought this was madness before D&D3 came out, thought that gamers didn't want to kill things and take their stuff. Gamers wanted to tell stories! But nothing succeeds like success, and when it quickly became obvious that in spite of what all the designers in the industry thought, the *players* loved the idea, the designers changed their tune.
All they wanted was someone to give them permission to enjoy playing the game they way they did when they were teens, and support that with a modern game. D&D3 did that and was a colossal success. Because there'd been this 10 year drought, you had this huge ocean of underserved players and D&D3 gave them the game they wanted.
Now fast forward 8 years. A couple of things have happened.
The turning point was probably when Ryan Dancey had his fiancée watch a focus group of people playing D&D, and he asked her--she who knew nothing about the game--what she thought.
"It's 30 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours," she said. That had a big impact on the folks up there. D&D3 was so incredibly robust, with logical and consistent rules for so many situations, that it had gotten in its own way. Gamers were spending absurd amounts of time just looking things up. And if you were part of that process, you didn't realize how much of your time at the table you spent looking stuff up.
Let me give you an example. The average word count for the average RPG, per page, is about 750 words. That's one page of text in your average RPG book. The rules in the D&D3.5 PHB for Grappling, the otherwise simple act of grabbing someone, took around 1,600 words. What would be two pages in any normal RPG (the D&D PHB used a really small font to pack more rules onto a page) just to grab someone.
Those rules made sense. When you read them, you thought "this all makes sense," it was very detailed and covered a lot of situations.
But after using the system for 8 years, a lot of players were thinking "1,600 words just to grab someone?" Well, they weren't literally thinking that, they didn't do a word count like I did, but that was the general attitude.
So D&D4 was a response to that. "We kinda went crazy with the rules there," WotC was saying, and a lot of people agreed. After being madly in love with D&D3 for about 6 years, my group gave it up. It was just too much work.
D&D4 was, to us, so much more fun, so much easier, more dynamic, everyone had a *selection* of cool things to do every turn and the rules were so easy! Want to grab someone? Make an attack roll. Success? Now they can't leave their square. That's it. Done. It was so...refreshing. It wasn't 30 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours any more. We were able to play ALL NIGHT without ever looking up a rule. Maybe one or two. Five minutes. Not 1,600 words.
Now we arrive at the critical problem.
D&D3, released into a gaming community *starving* for a robustly designed dungeon crawl, after ten years of "story-based games." HUGE pool of lapsed players to re-engage.
D&D4...not released into that climate. LOTS of people were still happy with D&D3.5. Thought there was no problem. Didn't understand what all the fuss was about.
So, if you *weren't* having the experience the guys inside WotC were having, the experience many, but not all, players were having, if you loved D&D3, D&D4 was something like a slap in the face. "This game we made is crap!" was the message and it was not one that happy customers were super enthusiastic about. Why would they be?
So of course there was a huge backlash against D&D4. Lots of people were happy with D&D3. It successfully brought a generation of lapsed gamers to the table and engaged a whole new generation for whom this WAS D&D. The only edition they ever played.
This, then, is the reason you see the reaction you're seeing. It has very little to do with the actual games in question, and everything to do with the climates into which they were released.
jbear
First Post
My transition was pretty smooth. I like D&D because it's a game, a complex, beautiful game that allows you to literally step off the board. I enjoyed 3.5, it seemed pretty cool to have a rule for literally every single thing you could ever imagine needing to know how to make a ruling on. Classes seemed fun and powerful but more intuitive, at least compared to my memory of 2nd ed that i played as a kid (no THAC0 for example). But it was just an engine for me to make the adventures I wanted to make for my players, and have fun together. I had awesome adventures with 2ed, and 3.5 and nothing changed when I began playing 4e.
I got into 4e from the get go, so the anti-vibe was something I stumbled into once I'd already bought the core books and my wanderings on internet brought me here. I was saddened and a little crushed to stumble into a full blown edition war, but it didn't affect my opinion about the game. I thought it was awesome from day 1, and the reasons are very concrete and simple, at least for me.
1) Words of advice read in DMG made me a better DM. I stopped telling my players that they couldn't do things because rule a) said this or rule b) said that, or their low level prevented them from pulling off amazing stunts without rolling a 20 on the dice etc. etc. I started finding ways to take their ideas and come up with ways that could work. I began to DM with the new philosophy of 'Say Yes ...'
2) I stopped have to stop the game in order to refer to the rules in order to make a judgement. The rules are so clear and streamlined that I haven't referred to a book during play in so long that I can't even remember the last time. The rest is based simply on my judgement of whether the task is easy, moderate or difficult ... and voilá based on the DC chart for the appropriate level I know what the PC needs to achieve to pull off said task.
3) Characters are heroes from the outset. At level 1 the PCs are very durable (although so to are their enemies). But the wizard doesn't have to hide behind the party for 5 levels before he can stand up to a beating in a fight. Everyone gets to do cool stuff, so the fighter doesn't just have to slog away with his axe. Things definitely get more interesting for a character from about level 3, but even at level 1 they still begin with some very cool options. Not only that but every single level, everyone gets something cool. Level 2 new feat, atk, defense, initiative and skill boost (hp of course); Level 3 new encounter power; level 4 boost 2 stats by 1 and atk, defense, initiative and skill boost plus a new feat; level 5 new daily power etc etc Which makes levelling up pretty darn cool! All the time!
4) It's a game and proud of it. It's fun, and that is the reason I am playing, to have fun. One of the main things that has improved the fun for me is the dynamic combat: Terrain really matters, it's the essential spice to making combat fun, varied and exciting. Players powers take on whole new dimensions when terrain is a factor. My group enjoys combat. We have a fairly balanced 50/50 split between roleplay and combat. I have added elements to combat so that mechanically the players can take advantage of the situation, think outside the box and be rewarded. Combat can be slow, if your players don't know the rules properly, or their powers ... err, but that is normal. Once you've learnt the game, and people know their characters properly, and start working together as a team it will speed up considerably. Besides WotC has addressed the problems with combat in significant ways recently. The damage output of monsters has increased significantly. The outcome of combat is not a long drawn out conclusion any more. Where before my players heckled me for how little they were challenged by my baddies, now they literally fear getting into combat and are starting to get creative in order to avoid it. At level 6 they are now being hit for easily 20 points a blow. A PC can be dropped to dying in 3 hits, no trouble. They also creamed their way through a 200 hp level 12 elite Aboleth with domination and enslavement capabilities with clever use of the terrain in 3 rounds. I imagine the monsters in the Monster's Vault are being redesigned with an anti-grind philosophy, to continue promoting this savage, slick and tense feeling in combat. The Dark Sun sessions I played, combat was never dull because you were always on the brink of death.
I could go into more things that I like about 4e, but those are the main reasons I prefer it over 3.5. The others are less relevant to me.
I do think it's important to remain as unaffected by other peoples opinions as possible, and really judge it on its own merits. if you go into thinking it's going to be crap awful, that will affect your experience whether you like it or not. It's the basis of any self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyway, good luck and keep us informed. We likes to see how things like this turns out, we do!
I got into 4e from the get go, so the anti-vibe was something I stumbled into once I'd already bought the core books and my wanderings on internet brought me here. I was saddened and a little crushed to stumble into a full blown edition war, but it didn't affect my opinion about the game. I thought it was awesome from day 1, and the reasons are very concrete and simple, at least for me.
1) Words of advice read in DMG made me a better DM. I stopped telling my players that they couldn't do things because rule a) said this or rule b) said that, or their low level prevented them from pulling off amazing stunts without rolling a 20 on the dice etc. etc. I started finding ways to take their ideas and come up with ways that could work. I began to DM with the new philosophy of 'Say Yes ...'
2) I stopped have to stop the game in order to refer to the rules in order to make a judgement. The rules are so clear and streamlined that I haven't referred to a book during play in so long that I can't even remember the last time. The rest is based simply on my judgement of whether the task is easy, moderate or difficult ... and voilá based on the DC chart for the appropriate level I know what the PC needs to achieve to pull off said task.
3) Characters are heroes from the outset. At level 1 the PCs are very durable (although so to are their enemies). But the wizard doesn't have to hide behind the party for 5 levels before he can stand up to a beating in a fight. Everyone gets to do cool stuff, so the fighter doesn't just have to slog away with his axe. Things definitely get more interesting for a character from about level 3, but even at level 1 they still begin with some very cool options. Not only that but every single level, everyone gets something cool. Level 2 new feat, atk, defense, initiative and skill boost (hp of course); Level 3 new encounter power; level 4 boost 2 stats by 1 and atk, defense, initiative and skill boost plus a new feat; level 5 new daily power etc etc Which makes levelling up pretty darn cool! All the time!
4) It's a game and proud of it. It's fun, and that is the reason I am playing, to have fun. One of the main things that has improved the fun for me is the dynamic combat: Terrain really matters, it's the essential spice to making combat fun, varied and exciting. Players powers take on whole new dimensions when terrain is a factor. My group enjoys combat. We have a fairly balanced 50/50 split between roleplay and combat. I have added elements to combat so that mechanically the players can take advantage of the situation, think outside the box and be rewarded. Combat can be slow, if your players don't know the rules properly, or their powers ... err, but that is normal. Once you've learnt the game, and people know their characters properly, and start working together as a team it will speed up considerably. Besides WotC has addressed the problems with combat in significant ways recently. The damage output of monsters has increased significantly. The outcome of combat is not a long drawn out conclusion any more. Where before my players heckled me for how little they were challenged by my baddies, now they literally fear getting into combat and are starting to get creative in order to avoid it. At level 6 they are now being hit for easily 20 points a blow. A PC can be dropped to dying in 3 hits, no trouble. They also creamed their way through a 200 hp level 12 elite Aboleth with domination and enslavement capabilities with clever use of the terrain in 3 rounds. I imagine the monsters in the Monster's Vault are being redesigned with an anti-grind philosophy, to continue promoting this savage, slick and tense feeling in combat. The Dark Sun sessions I played, combat was never dull because you were always on the brink of death.
I could go into more things that I like about 4e, but those are the main reasons I prefer it over 3.5. The others are less relevant to me.
I do think it's important to remain as unaffected by other peoples opinions as possible, and really judge it on its own merits. if you go into thinking it's going to be crap awful, that will affect your experience whether you like it or not. It's the basis of any self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyway, good luck and keep us informed. We likes to see how things like this turns out, we do!
Colmarr
First Post
I think the h4ters' main complaints about 4e are that:
- it is less "realistic" than 3.5 (eg. fighters have daily powers, PCs can be dying and then on full hp 5 minutes later without magical intervention, mechanics are disassociated - "why exactly can a fighter mark but a rogue can't?", mundane characters have as much power as magical ones); and
- that it focuses too much on being a combat system to the detriment of roleplay;
- that 4e is too restrictive about what it will let you play (I believe I once heard someone seriously complain that 4e limited his roleplaying because he couldn't be a half-demon half-drow with at-will levitation)
- being MUCH (yes, that much) easier for the DM to run, particularly at higher levels - 3e could cause an aneurism;
- creating a system where every PC can participate in every scene (the fighter no longer needs to twiddle his thumbs when you visit the king);
- making sure every player gets cool stuff to do, not just the ones who play arcane or divine casters;
- simplifying the rules to the extent that (as many others have said) you really won't dig out your rulebook at all other than to check some of the less common conditions such as restrained or helpless;
- making every class viable. You're no longer a newb for choosing to play a fighter.
- encouraging team work. The big thing in 3.5 was to create a character (usually a wizard or cleric) who didn't need the party because they could do everything. In 4e, a party is together more than the sum of its parts.
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Xyrlove Woodsoul
First Post
I'll keep it short and sweet. I've been playing dnd for over 25 years; and I was VERY skeptical about 4ed at first, because it is a lot different, but now I love it more than any other version, by far. It's definitely a version that will "grow on you." I think it still has bugs, but way less than other versions imo. I would never go back to a previous version.
AbdulAlhazred
Legend
I think in order to understand the reaction to 4E, it helps to understand the context into which it was released. Bear with me.
D&D3 was released in 2000, after a decade of gamers being told that dungeon crawling and killing orcs was kids stuff. Adults played highly narrative story-based games. I know that may sound hard to believe, but trust me that was the real climate back then. I started as a game designer in 1997, hired full-time by a company called Last Unicorn Games to work on the DUNE CCG. At the time, White Wolf was the company everyone looked to, the company that sorta set the agenda, the company everyone else was reacting to. One of my coworkers *literally* called gamers, our customers, "mouth-breathing morons." I'm 90% sure he was quoting someone at White Wolf.
But that climate was pure narrative. The entire industry was only a few dozen writers and designers and they all knew each other. The actual gamers weren't plugged into this narrative, they just knew the game they liked, AD&D, had become a mess with AD&D2. Everything was Settings and Guidebooks and the notion of design and rules seemed to have been forgotten. TSR, reacting to that White Wolf narrative, had sorta disappeared up its own bum. And the gamers left. By and large, they didn't switch systems, or go back to AD&D, they just stopped playing completely.
Comes Wizards of the Coast and Peter Adkison and Ryan Dancey. These guys buy TSR and basically make the game they want. They are customer #1 and they want a new game, with robust design (something AD&D, designed Ad Hoc, never had) that is basically, "what if we made AD&D now?" Peter and Ryan were very strongly driving the design back then, they wanted a game that captured that feeling of gaming in 1979, but without all the ad hoc systems that never made any sense.
It is an interesting perspective. I agree, there was a period of time in which the fashion in game design was definitely not D&D style action. I'm not so sure about what happened with 3.x though. It certainly CODIFIED everything. I wouldn't call it a very comprehensive design though. At least not one with good GAME PLAY in mind. It seemed like it codified all the bits and pieces of AD&D in a fashion, but it didn't CLEAN IT UP. Nobody seems to have sat down and taken all those elements and asked "why is this here, does it add to the fun, how can it be made more fun?" Things were there simply because they were there in 2e which put things in because they were in 1e which put things in because they were in OD&D which was itself just an early attempt to create a new kind of game and was quite a mish-mash.
There were a LOT of us who just pretty much went to other game systems sometime in the later 2e days or when 3.0 was released with a sort of "well, it was a great game in 1976 but the world has moved on" sort of thought.
4e seems to be about answering the question "which things really make a good game of D&D?" It hasn't totally succeeded in delivering the ideal game to the table, but from the outside at least 4e seems to be the FIRST version of D&D that was actually DESIGNED vs mostly being a codification of existing practice. Far more than anything else that drew me to the game, having played very little D&D in the 3.x days.
4e is firstly a well designed game. I can create adventures and story lines that in any previous edition would have required either lots of hand waving or significant rules surgery. There are still things the game needs or areas where 4e slightly missed the mark, but it seems to be the best thing going at this point. For some players the flaws in 4e will really bother them, but for others it addresses exactly the issues they had from the start.
In a sense though it is a bit too bad we can't just have 5e at this point, lol. Nobody wants to go jump into a new version at this stage, but it sure seems like a lot of people around here hanker to really tinker with the 4e engine. It could certainly use faster combat with less fiddly conditions and such, and a way for people that don't really enjoy hard core tactical combat to make it a bit more abstract in a clean way. Still, I'd never go back, the lack of any sensible concept of design in past editions is just too irking.
filthgrinder
First Post
I think this is a really helpful way to look at 4E. It's set out to be a fun GAME where you kill orcs and take their stuff, as opposed to an attempt to make an orc killing simulation.
One big complaint that people have coming from other editions, Fighters have daily powers. People who played other editions really don't like to accept the fact that a martial character has an artificial limitation on something they can do. People who have never played D&D before don't see this as a stumbling block at all. I think people who complain about it, haven't been at the game table where the monsters are closing in and battering the heroes back and when the fighter's turn come up, he (or she) takes the breath and goes, "ok, I'm gonna use my daily" and everyone else at the table leans in because they know he's bringing the thunder. (and if you are in my group, it tends to set off the chain reaction of player's bringing out the big guns).
That's just a fun moment. When you see a lot of changes in the rules, keep that in mind. They made changes because they wanted to try and "increase the fun" around the table for everyone. They didn't make changes because they hate you. They wanted to build a good solid game that's fun for everyone.
I think the end result was good. YMMV.
#1 is 100% true to me. My 3.5 campaign finished early this year. The players went from level 1 to level 18 at the end and it lasted for 2.5 years. At the end, it was myself the DM and 8 players, plus one major NPC. For me to come up with interesting, unique & challenging encounters for such a large group past level 9/10 or so became a HUGE amount of work for me. I was putting in 20, 30 and even 40 hours of work between sessions just to create cool bad guys, equip them, level them up, pick spells, feats & skills, learn any new rules related to that Prestige class, etc. However, because I had to put so much time into creating the encounters, there was not as much character & story development as I would have liked... sometimes a round would take a good hour to resolve between several bad guys, plus 9 good guys all taking turns. I didn't develop the world around the players nearly as much as I wanted - encounter prep became 90% of my focus when I had free time outside my family & my job.
We switched over to 4E in the Spring after a bit of group turnover, plus some downtime for me to recharge my mental batteries and it has been a very easy transition for me as DM.
Also - I liked most of 3.5 overall, it was just murder on me as a DM. I have been playing since the late 70s overall, though, so have experience with 1E and 2E as well. Have likes for both 1E and 2E as wel.
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TerraDave
5ever, or until 2024
Yes. Much easier to DM (with a small caveat below). If you are the DM, you want 4E.
If you are a player, it depends a little bit. I certainly prefer it as a player, as I find it easier to do the things the charecter should do (if that makes sense). And while it has plenty of charop, unless you make some big mistakes in creating the charecter, you can be pretty sure your charecter will do fine and have his moments.
The caveat: In its 30 months of existance, the game has a lot of, lets call it refinement, with rules updates, and an explosion of options. And then there are monsters. Big changes to monsters. The solution for you is probably to just use Essentials. These are updated and by design should allow for an easier transition. And they say the adventures in the DM kit are good.
If you are a player, it depends a little bit. I certainly prefer it as a player, as I find it easier to do the things the charecter should do (if that makes sense). And while it has plenty of charop, unless you make some big mistakes in creating the charecter, you can be pretty sure your charecter will do fine and have his moments.
The caveat: In its 30 months of existance, the game has a lot of, lets call it refinement, with rules updates, and an explosion of options. And then there are monsters. Big changes to monsters. The solution for you is probably to just use Essentials. These are updated and by design should allow for an easier transition. And they say the adventures in the DM kit are good.
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