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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9564116" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The problem is, that's not what Bob is saying here.Instead, it is:Bob: "4th edition had many good points, but also some bad points."Fran: "Would you care to mention some?"Bob: "Oh, well on the good side, it was tactically rich and it addressed many fans' complaints that some classes are just better than others."Fran: "Yeah, I'd say it's fair to point to those as some of its best traits. How about bad points?"Bob: "Oh, it required you to always use perfectly-balanced, level-locked combats, enforced rigid and inflexible roles on every character, and turned Fighters into Wizards."Fran: <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f621.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":mad:" title="Mad    :mad:"  data-smilie="4"data-shortname=":mad:" />Bob: "What?! Jeez, don't take things so PERSONALLY."By which I mean, if you're going to criticize it, criticize it for problems it actually had, not merely parroting objectively false Edition War memes. That's why people "take everything so personally".Several things 4e did exceedingly poorly:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Its visual presentation in general. The "sleek, modern" manual-like format, rather than the Ye Olden Dayse Upon Ye Parchment look, was pretty clearly a bad move.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Skill challenges' presentation--and, worse, their usage in MANY, MANY official adventures--was objectively awful, driving players away from the thing that was supposed to conclusively demonstrate that 4e was about more than just combat. Skill Challenges, especially with a couple very small tweaks, are actually an extremely cool and useful subsystem, but the absolute hate they got for how awful most example SCs were (which, objectively, they WERE awful!) means we'll probably never see them come back.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Having borked math for several things (stealth, SC stuff, a few other things), and (as I theorize) designing the game so players "get worse" relative to equal-level combats to passively encourage teamwork, but which instead angered players, thus leading to crappy "feat tax" fixes.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Having more than half of the introductory adventures be straight-up feculent. Awful, completely antagonistic to many of the things 4e was designed for, etc. This was one of the worst errors 4e made, and nobody claiming to "criticize" 4e ever talks about it.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Albeit for highly understandable reasons (the tragic murder-suicide, with both people holding critical positions), the objective failure of the digital tools, then further compounded by the switch to Silverlight which was then almost immediately canned by Microsoft. Imagine a world where 4e beat Roll20 to offering the world's first online, accessible VTT!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Expanding the game to provide a wider spectrum of fundamentally mechanically distinct options. As much as I think the "every class is so samey" complaint is disingenuous in a lot of cases, it is true that hard, sharp differences in fundamental building blocks were thin on the ground and stayed that way for too long. Some of this was intentional--most of the hard, sharp differences in fundamental gameplay in 3e are the very things that so thoroughly cemented the ultra-supremacy of spellcasters--but IMO the PHB2 should have gone much further with more varied mechanical expression than it did.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Failing to court the old-school fanbase, right as the OSR movement was kicking off. Which is really sad, because the "4thcore" community showed how well 4e can actually be used for old-school-like "are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President" experiences if you try. In fact, not only did 4e do this exceedingly poorly, there's a number of places where it almost seems like they were actively trying to piss off "grognard" players, which is exceedingly stupid!</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Failing to publish "inherent bonuses" rules WAY earlier. That should've been a free supplement at launch, not something buried halfway through the DSCS book a year and a half after the PHB1.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Frankly, the whole "paragon multiclassing" concept. It's just...really, really bad, but coming off of 3rd edition, folks were absolutely going to be demanding cool multiclass stuff. (Frankly, MC in general is weak beyond your intro feat, but that's "complicated issue mixing good and bad" territory, not "exceedingly poor" performance.)</li> </ol>I'm sure I could come up with more. There are PLENTY of things to criticize about 4e. "Your roles are totally rigid", "you can't have combats that aren't level-locked", and "all classes are absolutely 100% the same" are not in that set.</blockquote>

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