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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Daztur" data-source="post: 9445482" data-attributes="member: 55680">I honestly think 4e or something like 4e could've been very popular if it was published in different circumstances. The main things holding it back that wouldn't have been an issue in a different set of circumstances including:1. Having it be what people expected. I remember my first reaction to seeing 4e rules was "bwuh? They changed everything? Why did they change everything?" I think if there was a 3.75e that looked (in very broad outline) like PF 1e or Star Wars: Saga Edition and that was around for a while people would've been ready for a more back to the drawing board game (like they very much were in 2014) but most people didn't want a back to the drawing board game in 2008 (or 2024). We can see this with PF 1e vs 2e. People really weren't ready for something like PF 2e when 1e dropped but they were a while later after the d20 system had finished wearing out its welcome more completely.2. A more mature version of 4e. With more time cooking and more lessons learned from a somewhat 4e-ish theoretical 3.75e the lessons learned by the end of the 4e cycle could've been in core. I think the biggest ones were simply keeping monster HPs down and damage up. Things like keeping the PHB and MM design more in tandem would've gone more smoothly if there weren't the rushes and changes of plans that marked a lot of 4e's development cycle.3. A better match with the default play style. 4e is good if you have a plot heavy game and maybe 1-2 big fights per session, but it isn't the best fit extended dungeon crawling. Meanwhile 5e really needs more encounters for things to work well and can sometimes be a bad fit with more plot heavy games with fewer bigger fights and more long rests. One of the biggest issues I've seen newbie DMs have with 5e is that they just have too many long rests and struggle with putting in more fights per long rest. That's just not a problem in 4e. I think that a lot of 5e DMs wold honestly be happier with a theoretical streamlined 4.5e than with 5e or 5.5e. WotC would then have to write adventures what 4e is good at instead of Keep on the Shadowfell which a lot of people found to be a real slog that didn't do a good job of showcasing 4e's strengths.4. A bit of tweaking of 4e fight pacing doing things like having a bit less abilities to interrupt things at higher levels as that could gum up the flow of a fight. I would have also liked to see more encounter and daily power that have some kind of requirement to use them (such as use only when bloodied, or use only when your ally is KOed, or use only immediately after downing an enemy, or you can use it any time but using it costs ALL your healing surges) so that you have more cool powers being used later in a fight instead of usually unloaded right at the start with the fight ending a bit anti-climactically with at-will spam. Not a big change to 4e, could've been done with some minor tweaking.5. No murder-suicide. That was a really horrible tragedy that set back 4e's online tools a lot and there's nothing WotC could've done to prepare for something like that, no can anyone really...</blockquote>

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