I've mentioned earlier that 4e was when I became a serious TTRPG gamer.

> 4e
> serious
> lolwut

Haha, seriously. Before then, I'd only occasionally joined a session or two of D&D when invited. With 4e, some friends and I started gaming weekly, buying stacks of book, devising our own campaign worlds, etc. Of course, it also caused a huge fooferaw that I only became aware of a couple years into it, but mostly stayed out of. Now that it doesn't generate as much NEEERRRRRD RRRRAAAAAGE and I haven't played it in a while, I thought it might be a good idea look back at it dispassionately.

With 4e, WotC learned a big, super-serious lesson about brand identity and customer expectations. For what was essentially a new game from the ground up, 4e was pretty solid out of the gate. Not perfect, but solid. You could play from 1st to 30th level, and the wheels would never really fly off the system, although high-level combat would bog down. But the fact is, it doesn't matter how many boxes you check off on anyone's list of "good design," customers have certain expectations from an established brand, and you had better damn well meet them. It is pretty obvious 4e didn't meet most customers' expectations, while 3.x, for all its design flaws, mostly did. I feel like 5e goes back and attacks many of the same problems 4e did, but within the parameters that it has got to deliver what people expect out of D&D.

I also think that WotC finally learned its lesson about milking people's wallets via supplements. Early on, they alluded Monster Manual 5(!!!), and it seems pretty clear that each MM was to be themed around a different evil deity for endless money absorption. By the time I'd accumulated 3 PHBs, 3 powers books, 2 monster manuals, Open Grave, a really shitty Heroes of the Elemental Chaos book, and two monster manuals, it was pretty clear that Dollars Spent Per Pages Used was going unacceptably high. On top of that, I was paying 75 bucks a year to use a really crappy Silverlight app to generate character sheets, which were irritatingly complicated.

They seem to have learned to stop killing editions with expansions...finally. Anyway, I could write a lot more retrospective on 4e, but thought I'd shut up and give someone else the floor. Next post will probably be what I thought was positive.

There were parts about 4e that I liked (I really like the vibe of minions - front-loaded HP, and a few other tidbits), but the biggest thing for me was the symmetry of the game, such as how classes' Powers structure made most fights feel very similar.

Balance is a good thing in a TTRPG, and symmetry between characters is the easiest way to do it.  (Not that it was perfectly symmetrical.)  But... symmetry is also the most boring way to balance - especially in a co-op game.  Moreso in a game such as a TTRPG which you expect to play for long periods of time.

In my opinion, much worse than the symmetry of class design was the symmetry of foes.  All of their defenses would be within a few points, and rarely did they have off-the-wall tricks which were what made them scary.  In my opinion, the variety of the monsters is a lot of the secret to D&D's success over the years.  It inherently adds variety to play, as even a mediocre DM will pull out different monsters and tactics, especially as you level.

In addition - the two-dozen sourcebook thing works best if, like 3e, there is a lot of customization for characters so that players feel there will be something cool to use in each book.  (Though that's as much a business critique as an edition one.)

Everyone I knew who was really into 4e was either a hardcore math nerd/baseball stat-cruncher or an actual diagnosed high-functioning autistic.

No joke or insult intended. Dead serious. Make of this what you will for good or ill.

I love 4e, but my fav iteration is the Gamma World game. Even players who burnt on 4e are happy to join up for my GW stuff. They keep asking for me to do a fantasy conversion.

I need to check out the 4e retroclones that are floating around the web.

My friends who loved 4e have mostly migrated to 13th Age. I've played enough to like the system, but I haven't run it yet.

Quote from: Spinachcat;963214I love 4e, but my fav iteration is the Gamma World game. Even players who burnt on 4e are happy to join up for my GW stuff. They keep asking for me to do a fantasy conversion.

Yes. Everyone I've met who disliked 4e has stated that they liked how 4e D&D GW streamlined the system. They also universally detested the so-called Gamma World setting that was in name only.

Quote from: Spinachcat;963214My friends who loved 4e have mostly migrated to 13th Age. I've played enough to like the system, but I haven't run it yet.

I've heard similar stories from a lot of people. I was not a huge fan of 4e, but even I think 13th Age is a solid game and does what 4e did, only better. The way it handles monsters alone is enough to make it a lot easier for the GM to handle. The way it spreads out stat calculations is something I think D&D should have learned from, too.

I wasn't on the roleplaying scene at the time so I missed all of 3rd and 4th and was only even aware there had been a 3rd and 4th edition maybe three or four years ago as I was never a big D&D player way back when and when I came back to RPGs I wasn't interested in D&D any more than I was before. I remember being somewhat surprised to learn D&D was no longer owned by TSR. So, I've never actually seen a copy of 3rd or 4th edition D&D (or 5th for that matter). I hear lots of nasty remarks about the 4th edition. To the point that it appears everyone was forced to play it in gulags and had their older editions stripped out of their libraries.

Quote from: Dumarest;963222To the point that it appears everyone was forced to play it in gulags and had their older editions stripped out of their libraries.

We were.  

It was terrible.

"Mark those enemies" they said!  But I wanted to play a charger paladin who focused on dueling.  Not in THEIR game I wouldn't!  Only when there were solo enemies - and those took so many rounds to play...

Sometimes I still have flashbacks of magic missiles missing their targets.  *shudder*

There is one core idea in 4E that really clicked with me when I first heard it, and I remain convinced that it could work really well if cooked into a better edition: The notion that all classes have capacities that function more or less like spells: they are a limited resource of special actions or abilities, and as you advance in level you get access to more and better ones, and can use them more frequently. If this idea had been merged with 1E, and implemented in a way that respected the power balance of the game, and not wandered down the shitty road of garbage-bin feats we walked down for most of the last 20 years, it could be awesome. I feel like I could write an OSR game with this included and you'd end up with something fun and in keeping with the traditions of the game.

On the down side, 4E was just fucking slow to play, so it turned into a death march of combat after combat. It is ironic that youngsters often criticize old D&D dungeon craws as being one boring fight after another when the reality was you'd spend maybe 10-25 % of the night resolving fights (because they were super quick) and the rest of it role playing, exploring, goofing off, etc. In my experience, a standard 4E fight would last 2 hours, and at no point in that time were any player characters seriously in danger of dying. I found it to be a huge turn off.

Quote from: Omega;963218Yes. Everyone I've met who disliked 4e has stated that they liked how 4e D&D GW streamlined the system. They also universally detested the so-called Gamma World setting that was in name only.

The "setting" for the new GW is threadbare. It begins with an okay premise (the Hadron supercollider causes all possible Earths to slam together and mix up) and then its basically just a combat boardgame unless the GM takes the initiative to create a coherent world. It went too gonzo in chargen, but the monsters were mostly well done and the streamlined and deadlier system made combat faster.

I reigned in chargen with some world design (literally just an afternoon) and I've found it very enjoyable. For me, it scratches my itch for a RPG / skirmish boardgame hybrid. I have plenty of other post-apoc RPGs for my other needs.

There have been a few attempts over the decades to create a "Very casual" RPG, something halfway between a board/minis game and an RPG, a party game that would give you an RPG-like experience without a lot of GM prep, rulebooks, etc.

I got to play the 4e Gamma World twice and felt it was the closest anyone ever came. It was a blast even with a mediocre GM. Really underrated product line. Shame WotC didn't pursue it (Or similar projects in different genres, like maybe a rebooted Gangbusters or Boot Hill with the same approach) farther.

4E was the first edition where I ended up having too many players to handle: before that it was difficult to find players looking for a 3E game, and when I did it was rare that they would stick around.

I did like that it was easy to houserule (I did the half-hp thing, then did the "somewhere between half and one-third hp" thing because it could still be grindy, also modded monsters to not assume magic items and leveled up the party whenever) and seemed to work at any given level. Even monsters like dragons and demons were easy to run without referencing other books.

I've actually almost completed something that started as a 4E retroclone (really just wrapping up a bit of GM advice), then veered off and I guess ended up more like (in someone else's words) B/X or Rules Cyclopedia.

4e just never really became a thing in my area. Across all the FLGSes and gaming haunts in my area I recall hearing of two 4e groups. Everyone either switched to Pathfinder or kept on playing 3rd.

4e is still my favorite edition to DM and play. 5e does some interesting things and the adventures are solid but its missing that certain....something.

In 4e you could play without someone being the dedicated healer. You didnt need magic in your campaign if you didn't want it. Playing monsters, such as werewolves or vampires, was easily done without the necessary complications of level adjustment. Combat, for us, was about thr same as it was in our 3e games so I never got what all that fuss was about?

Quote from: Larsdangly;963229There is one core idea in 4E that really clicked with me when I first heard it, and I remain convinced that it could work really well if cooked into a better edition: The notion that all classes have capacities that function more or less like spells...

I have to confess that this was one of the things that really turned me off to 4E. I felt like magic was no longer special, since everyone could do it. Oh, I know that some of the "spells" and "magic" were just fighter moves, but they all felt like spells.

I enjoyed a lot of the concept of 4E -- the fact that they were reorganizing things and streamlining somewhat from 3E was a real plus -- but somehow 4E never really caught on with my group. I had this huge mountain of 4E rulebooks and no players.