Consonant Dude
First Post
A lot of us felt like 4e improved on everything that made D&D successful and threw out a lot of things that got in the way.
A lot? Not nearly enough. In 32 years, I've never seen so many people refuse categorically to play an edition of DnD. I've never seen such a hard line between two editions and I've never seen WotC do such a 180 degree turn.
Which brings me back to my original point: People got upset with WotC not because WotC told them what was fun, but because they disagreed with what WotC told them was fun.
But like I said, you have an added responsibility. You have an amazing franchise that has been played millions of hours and you have to honor that. You have to correctly distill what was fun about that before adding your own touch. The line between putting your thumbprint on the brand and completely missing what it is about can be fine. And I agree, differences of opinions on what is essential or not will differ. But it seems WotC crossed that line by about a mile.
Every edition of DnD has tried new things. None were perfect. Over time, you backtrack about a few things while you retain the new elements that work. In the case of 4th edition, it seems WotC now acknowledge how far off the mark they were. Fortunately, there are still interesting features I hope to see ported to 5th (Rituals being the main one) but it did more damage to the brand than good.
When a small fry competitor copy-pastes almost verbatim your previous version, adds some clutter on top and challenges you to the top position with a 12-year old design , you have to ask yourself some serious questions.