Ooh, a 4e retrospective thread! I hope I can get into it before it gets all edition-warsy or becomes bogged down in the useless hoary old argument about 4e vs 3.x vs PF sales numbers like all such threads seem to!
Oh.
Oh dear.
Um.
Aaaanyway.
When 4e came along I was about 13 levels into a planned level 1-20 Savage Tide 3.5 campaign set in a homebrew world. I was definitely ready for it, this was the highest level I'd ever DMed in 3.x, and the cracks in the system were becoming glaring, and so many of them were to do with the fundamental maths of d20 that I had no real hope of remedying them with house rules. I was very ready for a new edition, and when it became common knowledge thet WotC was working on 4e, I was encouraged by the statements they put out - the problems they recognised and intended to solve were largely the same ones that bothered me.
The first indications of trouble came from Faerun, which was a bit of a backwards way to do things. The Grand History of Faerun came out, which was an extraordinarily detailed labor of love, except that the 'new' lore it provided over the last few years was ridiculous and widely despised, the killing of Helm by Tyr, all that sort of stuff. Then there started up rumours of the 100 year timeskip and the Spellplague. I largely ignored these (I'd gotten used to wild rumours in advance of a new edition during the buildup to 3e, in which a not-insignificant portion of these very boards bit on a story that now the MtG people were running D&D, you'd need to somehow buy booster packs to get magic weapons, or to play a PC of a class other than fighter/cleric/rogue/wizard), but then (if I remember right) a preview chapter of the first 4e-era Drizzt novel came out, and it basically confirmed EVERYTHING.
The Spellplague I could deal with I mean, it's not like Faerun wasn't being devastated by new calamities every second week prior to 4e, after all. It was quite a sore point and most opinion on here despised it, although obviously someone liked it because the books kept selling so WotC kept doing it. But the 100 year timeskip and the brutal rearrangement of the pantheon and the complete destruction of many lands, lores, plot hooks, etc etc etc that had been built up over years? That bothered me, a lot. There was a my-way-or-the-highway attitude to it, a contempt for the work of all those creatives who had contributed to the Realms over the decades, that that I found unappealing, and a bad omen for what was to come. Working in a legacy system like D&D, or a shared-world setting like FR, you're always standing on the shoulders of giants. It looked like the FR team stood on the shoulders of giants only for the purposes of widdling in their ear.
But anyway, then we started to see actual concrete 4e material getting released. Enough has been written about the tidal wave of marketing fluff that WotC spat out telling everyone that up to now their games hadn't been fun. Honestly, I found it a bit juvenile but it didn't really shift my opinion one way or another, so I'll gloss over that. But a couple of the big ones that stood out to me at the time were the Skill Challenges preview, and the annoucement that tripping would be an Encounter power. Skill challenges were immediately analysed here, and the fact that the maths simply didn't work as intended was blatant and undeniable. And this was a relatively short time before the books came out, with no possibility of any late fixes going in. And this broken mechanic was something that WotC specifically chose to preview in order to hype the new system? It was another big hit to my faith that they knew what they were doing. And the Trip thing. A lot of the marketing had been centred around how the encounter was being put front and centre once again, etc etc, making battles exciting and providing more options. But this annoyed me because it placed sheer gameyness for the sake of it above the world. Tripping an opponent or knocking them down or whatever seemed like a fairly basic maneuver - but all of a sudden you can only do it once per fight, regardless of circumstances, conditions, opponents etc etc? It centred in my mind as 4e being an edition that was over-focused on battlemap combat, rather than any other element of story or consistent worldbuilding. 3e went overboard in trying to simulate the world, and the maths suffered. 4e looked a lot like it was overcorrecting. Also bear in mind that at this time WotC was heavily promoting both their own randomised miniatures line, and the upcoming 4e online tools, both of which were encounter- and battlemap-centric by their nature.
But anyway, I bought the 4e core books when they came out. So did all the members of my group. So yeah, we all count as sales. We took the books home, and we read though (it took me a while, I found the slog of reading though power after power after power utterly mindnumbing) and next session we looked at each other around the table and said "So, 4e?" "No." "Nope." "No."
It was never discussed again. Did we ever give 4e a real fair go? No, we didn't. If we had, mind you, we probably would have done a quick run though one of the early adventures, and by the sounds of it, they probably wouldn't have given us a good experience. Did WotC give us any reason to give 4e a real fair go? Also no. Our group was a varied one, with differing degrees of online-ness. I was a heavy poster here at the time and so had seen all the controversy and arguments about FR and WoW-lite and so on. The well had probably been a bit poisoned for me, especially as I had a great love for FR and I utterly loathed what the 4e team did to that setting. But the not-online and less-online members of our group had the same reaction, so it's not quite fair to blame only the online haters.
I'd just about reached my limits of toleration for 3.x at this point, routinely dealing with massive multi-page stat blocks for high-level monsters and having to balance encounters for PCs with wildly differing survivability and save-or-die everywhere. The Savage Tide game struggled through to about 15th level then faded away unfinished largely due to real-life concerns. We'd very vaguely talked about what to play after we finished that game, possibly WFRP or Champions, but it ended up being a moot point. The group slowly broke up and didn't play again til many years later we started again on 5e over VTT during Covid lockdowns.
There's still a lot of 4e DNA in 5e, for better in some places and worse in others. Unlimited cantrips and ritual magic got their start in 4e, as did (I think) the early gestures towards limiting simultaneous magic item use that eventually became attunment slots. As a 3e DM, I DEFINITELY approve of that. I do wish the Bloodied condition had survived, I though that was an interesting new tool to use for encounter, monster, and ability design. But on the other hand, the PC-magic-can't-have-permanent-consequences-to-the-world design princple also started there (another thing which always gave me the impression of 4e being the Battlemat Edition), and that's carried over to 5e to its detriment, and I've always disliked the the Dawn War cosmology and planar changes that 4e blithely imposed on everyone. Healing surges were something that got a LOT of hate in the early days of 4e (which could have been almost completely avoided if WotC had called them 'Second Wind' rather than 'Healing Surge', but c'est la vie), and survived only in a slightly dissatisfying form as hit dice for healing. There was probably a few too many 4e babies thown out with the bathwater when 5e was designed, but also, there's still plenty of excess bathwater hanging around too.
But hell, no edition is perfect, except of course for the one that I'm gonna write some day, which will have no flaws and will be universally loved by everyone and which everyone will be happy with forever. Right?
