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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7364361" data-attributes="member: 18">I think a lot of it depended on how efficient your players were, and how min-max-y BUT and this is a really huge and frequently ignored issue, in my experience - even total non-min-maxers, totally casual players can eventually detect when their character is well, kinda rubbish.The best example of this is one of my players who always plays Rogue-types. He is in no way a min-maxer. He can recognise better or worse options and make decent tactical decisions (and is superb at coming up with cunning plans), but he just doesn't do min-maxing. Still, we always ensure his characters are about as mechanically capable as they could be so it's not like he's going in with weak characters in terms of stats/feats/weapon choices etc.Prior to playing 4E, it was clear that he had less fun in combat, a bit less fun generally, than the other players. We always attributed this to personality and so on. It's not like his character didn't have some big numbers, and he was always doing flashy stuff (much of which was mechanically ineffective, in retrospect).When we'd been playing 4E for a few session, we'd noticed he was having vastly more fun, and he himself finally worked it out - it was because his character was actually mechanically effective in combat.I know that might sound kind of stupid, but it was huge. I'd always understood some characters are less effective, mechanically, than others (even if played well), throughout different systems, settings, editions and so on, but him pointing this out recontextualized a huge number of issues I'd seen over the years, and then I could see that there was actually a very strong correlation between being genuinely mechanically effective, particularly in combat, and how much fun a lot of players were actually having. Even they were saying they didn't mind ineffective characters, or if they thought they were effective or whatever, but weren't - I could see that did matter.So my feeling is that, as much as the strict tier business might be nonsense, and people do have fun with weak or crummy characters, that in the long-term, over a large player-base, the tier list had significant degree of truth to it, that more effective characters, particularly a situation where everyone is effective in combat (which, let's be real, has always taken up a significant proportion of session time but never more than 3.XE and 4E), and everyone at least has some sort of vague chance to succeed at cool stuff outside combat, really leaves people overall a lot happier, having a lot more fun.So that's my take on the tier list - a strict thing it's worthless, but as an underlying reality across a long period of time and large number of players, it really was pretty accurate.I'm not sure if the issue is so much that 4E lacked the core engagements as it lacked a real reason to change from 3.XE, which many people were very heavily invested in, in terms of both learning, and even very literally in the sense that they had a metric ton of material for it. My own brother, for example, was pretty impressed with 4E and enjoyed playing it and liked a lot of the idea, but was sure as hell not going to willingly dump the hundreds of quid of 3.XE books and adventure paths and so on he had! I suspect even I, had I been more invested in 3.XE, financially, might have balked more at 4E.Then on another level maybe you're correct. What 4E offered was remarkable. But it was esoteric. And particularly understanding how and why certain changes and ideas were valuable was particularly um... not difficult really... but requiring a certain mindset and a degree of sitting and thinking. So combine that with investment (which matters to players too - I remember the groaning and moaning about a new edition, even though my players became utter starry-eyed 4E-worshipping cultists within five sessions), and sprinkle with bad marketing (which helped lead to negative memes and word-of-mouth spreading), demographics and so on, and suddenly it's easy to see why it didn't gain traction more broadly. And long-term it was hurt by some bad decisions early on (floods of terrible feats, MAD) and some intractable design issue (the insane reaction/interrupt-fests the you got at about level 13+, which slowed combat to crawl - I didn't believe they were an issue until I saw it first-hand, I thought people were hyping it, but no...).Whereas what 5E offers over 3.XE/PF and 4E is extremely obvious. A straightforward, highly-accessible system that is clearly "the D&D you remember" or "the D&D you heard about".</blockquote>

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