I don't play D&D.  Until the OSR I never looked twice at the rules. 

Now I'm a bit more educated about it, own quite a few PDFs.  I know the basics of D&D pretty well I would say.

But, everyone mentions that D&D 4E is the one everyone likes the least. 

What did it do that's so bad?

It was trying to emulate video games in a TTRPG format, with healing "power surges" and things like that.  I personally hated the Dragonborn and tieflings and crap, which has only gotten worse over time as the game moves further away from traditional Sword & Sorcery/mythology tropes, but I admit that's a pretty subjective view and others may like that stuff. Hated the art style, though I suppose it was OK from a technical viewpoint.  It also was a fairly poor tactical wargame/boardgame, I thought -- I knew people who praised it, but those people had never played any other kind, and I'd been playing games like that for years.  I had a couple of friends who liked it, but I really hated it.  It shouldn't have even been called Dungeons and Dragons, it was so radically different.  I didn't like 3E much either, but at least it was recognizably D & D. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on January 11, 2025, 11:46:40 PMWhat did it do that's so bad?

You can go to YouTube and put your thread title into the search bar. Lots of very strong opinions out there.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on January 11, 2025, 11:46:40 PMI don't play D&D.  Until the OSR I never looked twice at the rules. 

Now I'm a bit more educated about it, own quite a few PDFs.  I know the basics of D&D pretty well I would say.

But, everyone mentions that D&D 4E is the one everyone likes the least. 

What did it do that's so bad?

It departed far and wide from the long history, tradition, and lore of D&D.  That, and they called it D&D 4th Edition; instead of something else.  It replaced a relatively popular, and well selling previous edition of D&D.  It was a big stumble for WOTC, overall.

For me, the combat system was just really clunky with stuff like all of the marking mechanics.  it was like playing a janky MMO without the computer to track the marks, taunts and cooldowns for you.  Even at fairly low level, it was a slog.   

Quote from: weirdguy564 on January 11, 2025, 11:46:40 PMI don't play D&D.  Until the OSR I never looked twice at the rules. 

Now I'm a bit more educated about it, own quite a few PDFs.  I know the basics of D&D pretty well I would say.

But, everyone mentions that D&D 4E is the one everyone likes the least. 

What did it do that's so bad?

I liked 4e. I played it and then GMed a Dark Sun campaign in the system.

The issue was, it didn't feel like D&D. It was designed to be played on a gridmap. You could hack it to work with theater of the mind, but you'd be fighting the system. Everyone's powers and spells were codified into categories like At Will (use whenever) Encounter (use once per encounter) and Daily (use once per campaign day) Everyone's powers kinda sorta worked like spells. Already mentioned is that there was a lot of conditions to track during combat. The game focused on fights and put in a really wonky Skill Challenge system that reads great on paper and is pretty trash when put into actual use. I tossed out the Skill Challenge system pretty quickly, maybe pulling it out once in a while when it made sense to use.

It's a really interesting system. Playing it felt like playing a board game or video game with some RPing in-between fights.

It's weakness is that it didn't scratch the D&D itch. And IMO that, along with Paizo creating Pathfinder to capture all the disposessed 3rd ed players sunk 4th ed.

4E worked well as fantasy combat board game. I did not find it well suited to D&D campaign play.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on January 12, 2025, 04:20:23 AMThe game focused on fights and put in a really wonky Skill Challenge system that reads great on paper and is pretty trash when put into actual use.

I forgot about the skill challenge thing.  It sounded good when I read it but it didn't work worth a damn in actual play.

We played 4e for a couple months upon release and converted our 3.5 campaign to it.   One of the problems we had with the initial version of 4e was that the rules for roleplaying were threadbare basically amounting to skill challenges with pretty much every power being completely combat oriented except for a few that were utility powers that were used to recover/recoup after combat (so still in a way combat oriented).  In that initial release, even low level monsters had massive HP bloat that turned them into just a giant MMO hitpoint sponge.   The game session where we literally decided to quit the game involved us taking on some goblins in a low level (3rd level?) encounter where they had 30+ hp each other than the minions.  We reached a point in the battle where we knew that the goblins couldn't win but it still took an hour and a half to resolve the combat (without the DM just waving his hand to deus ex machina the victory).   Finally, everything felt the same and there was no granularity to the characters as, in an effort to "balance" the game, WOTC decided to make all character classes/races/builds just basically copy/paste/change one stat-word-or-effect versions of each other.  There was no simple class like fighter or complex class like mage to play depending on player preference... they all played the same because they had the same number of powers that were basically just tweaked versions of each other.  A fighter was just a reskinned mage who used a different stat targeting a different save to do the same actual damage/effect.  When you combined them all, it felt in actual play like a very unnecessarily complicated boardgame (like Descent but much worse as I actually enjoyed that game) instead of an RPG.   

Supposedly some of these things got fixed (like monster HP bloat) in the mid-life cycle refresh of the edition in an attempt to save it but others were intrinsic to the design.  It wasn't all bad though (skill challenges being the relative standout) and I liked the ideas/goals behind the changes but definitely not the actual implementation.  FWIW, Star Wars Saga Edition was basically a half way step between 3.5 and 4e which test drove some of the design changes and I did actually like that game overall (with the massively front loaded skill system being the notable exception).

So, I played some 4e campaigns.

It was not a bad game.

But it had some philosophical differences form D&D, and RPGs in general, to the point some people felt is was a different sort of game (e.g., a boardgame).

I wrote a bit about the subject int he links below, but basically:

- You can trip a gelatinous cube.
- Fireballs are square.
- Grids are mandatory.

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2017/02/tripping-oozes-in-d-3e-versus-4e-versus.html
https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2017/03/does-d-require-miniatures-3e-versus-4e.html

I never played or DMd 4E so my opinion is uninformed, but the stat blocks were intimidating and looked like a pain to set up an adventure.

Quote from: Ruprecht on January 12, 2025, 10:54:42 AMI never played or DMd 4E so my opinion is uninformed, but the stat blocks were intimidating and looked like a pain to set up an adventure.

I DMed 4E for about three years (which was two years longer than I really wanted to). As much as I can complain about 4E, which I don't like and don't even regard as D&D in retrospect, it was easy to DM - both the adventures WoTC sold and homebrewing your own. That was really its big initial appeal for me; I was very busy at the time professionally and 4E was a breeze to run, particularly after 3.5, which always felt like doing my taxes to me.

The game didn't feel or play like D&D. It felt like a table-top minis skirmish combat game that was designed to easily translate to a computer gaming environment. (In fact, it would probably work a lot better as a computer skirmish combat game.)

If it had simply had another name than "Dungeons and Dragons" it probably wouldn't have caught near as much grief as it did.  Those who didn't like it would have simply said "don't like" and quietly moved on.  It's like if a company said they were redesigning the classic "Dune" board game, keeping the name and everything and selling it as just an updated and improved edition, then you buy it and realize it's really "Settlers of Cataan" with Atreides and Harkonnens.  It was kind of like New Coke -- replacing a popular product with an inferior and very different one and selling it as the improved version.

My biggest beef was the mechanics that were disconnected from any in-game justification, like physical things you could only do once per day just because.  Second was that it just felt more like World of Warcraft than D&D - I was heavily into WoW at that point so the similarities were pretty obvious to me.  Aside from that there were some good things and some bad things.  As others have said, if it was named something besides "D&D" I don't think anyone would have had much of a problem with it.