Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
Let's not forget the whole economic collapse at the tail end of 2007 from which the United States didn't fully recover from until 4E was already in the ground.

Pathfinder was operating in the same economic environment and yet it was outperforming D&D and growing. If it was just a bad economic outlook, you wouldn't have seen the essentials line, you'd have seen a more conservative strategy. The way the book schedule thinned out towards the end of 4e's lifetime was not the cause of its death, but a symptom of its demise.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
It also had awful marketing (such as mocking and throwing prior editions under the bus, just like 5e did to 4E... same tactic, just a less popular target), generated unnecessary bad blood...

Marketing was certainly a weak point for 4e, designed for people who were terminally online before such a term existed. I'm unaware of 5e openly mocking D&D fans though the way 4e did - I admit I wasn't paying much attention to D&D at that point though.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
It was, frankly, a perfect storm of factors that had nothing to do with the quality of the material in the books...

The launch-contemporary 4e starter adventure "Keep on the Shadowfell" is considered by many to be quite poor quality. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1582/roleplaying-games/keep-on-the-shadowfell-first-impressions.

4e wasn't the kind of game you could easily convert older content to it or just whip something up from scratch with no prep. Call it what you want, but that's a product issue. If your point is that the 4e core game is actually great, then that's up to preference. A design that fails to meet its objectives is a bad design and I'd argue 4e failed to meet most of its objectives. I will note that in terms of production value, Paizo was already outclassing 4e in art and content both in terms of quality and volume. Layout in 4e had improved over the weird aesthetic of 3.5 but Paizo also had excellent and arguably better layout/design.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
In addressing 4E's failure its important to note that, if D&D were owned by any RPG company other than Hasbro, it would have been a monster success... its biggest Achilles Heel was that if failed to make the money the developers promised it would back when they did the edition switch

This isn't saying much. If you're the British empire and you barely squeaked out a victory against a far inferior force, that's not a win. That's a defeat. Because you're the British empire - it's not supposed to be a close fight. D&D is the equivalent of the British empire - anything less than absolute dominance is a very bad sign. That Pathfinder managed to bootstrap a business and then outperform D&D within the span of a few short years was an absolute failure for WotC. See the trendline here: https://www.awesomedice.com/blogs/news/google-statistics-on-the-edition-wars-d-d-pathfinder

Those trends more or less mirrored what I personally witnessed, especially the spike in interest in 2008 that was short-lived - 4e just had no staying power. People moved back to 3.5 until Pathfinder came around and then gradually adopted that as the standard until 5e came out. If 4e was a standalone tactical miniatures/battle game without the D&D baggage, it wouldn't have stuck around either. Because none of the games in that genre tend to stick around in general. It's a niche genre at best and driven by things like collectible miniatures and pickup board game sessions (not consistent campaign play). See Kingdom Death or even an RPG like ICON and you'll see these tactical game are just a totally different beast.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
The idea that 4E was hated and unloved by a majority during its lifetime is just a myth the OSR likes to tell itself to pretend what it likes is actually popular in gaming circles (most who played 4E didn't hate it when they stopped playing, they just moved onto the latest currently supported thing, which has enough 4E in it that only 4E diehards wouldn't want to move on).

4e certainly has its fans, but 4e was indeed hated or unloved by a huge swathe of the market. If 4e were secretly popular, none of the following would have happened:

• Essentials line launching within the first ~2 years of initial launch, with a focus on drawing in new players and trying to "soften" the opinionated 4e design.
• The entire line being effectively abandoned within ~4-5 years of launch with a focus on the new edition, making it the shortest-lived mainstream full edition of the game in history both in terms of practical support and official support.
• Pathfinder beating 4e in sales for 4 consecutive years (approx. 2011-2014).
• Third party publishers abandoning 4e to instead support Pathfinder (If the sales and revenue were there, people would still make and sell products with the GSL even if it wasn't perfect).
• The subsequent edition essentially abandoning everything about the 4e design that couldn't be ripped out, re-contextualized, and disguised as something else. 5e resembles 3.5 far more than 4e in just about every respect.

In my opinion, the narrative that 4e was a misunderstood-but-genius design is growing because of nostalgia, not because 4e was actually genius. It had many bad decisions which contributed to its demise, including business blunders, but the game itself is also culpable.

The legacy of 4e is that it was a game designed from the ground up to solve illusory "problems" surfaced by the nascent online discourse which emerged around the 3.5 scene. Online communities of people who spent more time chatting, theory-crafting, and character-building started driving the narrative around what was "wrong" with 3.5 rather than the people who were actually playing and enjoying the game (and buying products). You see it in the design of 4e: the obsession with symmetry for fear of imbalance creating bland and boring classes. Strict definitions and limited effects and interactions between powers/spells to avoid imbalance. Limits to critical hits to maintain strictly balanced math. Strict guidelines for how the GM is supposed to run the game to avoid the dickhead-DM problem. Use-it-or-lose-it AP and at-will/encounter powers to fight the 5-minute adventuring day. Baking magic item progression into the game to deal with the "christmas tree" phenomenon. Every major decision in 4e could be directly associated with a corresponding narrative that was prevalent on the forums at the time.

In actuality of course, nobody was playing pun-pun, or trying to pass of the peasant railgun as viable to their table's GM. Nobody was centering their campaigns on intra-party PvP where balance issues would be a net-negative rather than a net-positive for a cooperative party. Most players were not character optimizers who could build totally broken characters, and the people who brought a game-destroying build from online were simply told that it wasn't allowed and the world kept turning. People who were actually playing 3.5 campaigns wanted more quality content, more settings, more adventures, and a little cleanup around the edges. Pathfinder gave them that, so it succeeded. 5e also essentially gave them that, so it also succeeded and won back many PF players. 3.5 players were actually upset by the relatively low quality of official content splats and how long combat was lasting (a problem 4e made worse with tactical grid emphasis and bloated HP pools). In most cases, 4e was steering in exactly the wrong direction. Ironically, I think Paizo fell for the same trap WotC ran into and started listening to their forums too much. This resulted in PF 2e, a game that resembles 4e so much because it's trying to solve the same non-issues that are generated in theory but don't really matter at most tables.

The same basic issues in 3.5 exist in 5e and it has been doing just fine. The OSR is also doing just fine despite people insisting that the flaws that 4e needed to fix were intrinsic to the original design. What we actually saw with the resurgence of the OSR was that much of the game worked perfectly well if you retained the elements that made it work (like dungeon exploration turn, random encounters, etc). We saw the effects of Chesterton's Fence with 3.5 and onward, where many systems which were retained in the first place were totally vestigial.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on June 14, 2023, 03:57:32 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
Let's not forget the whole economic collapse at the tail end of 2007 from which the United States didn't fully recover from until 4E was already in the ground.

Pathfinder was operating in the same economic environment and yet it was outperforming D&D and growing. If it was just a bad economic outlook, you wouldn't have seen the essentials line, you'd have seen a more conservative strategy. The way the book schedule thinned out towards the end of 4e's lifetime was not the cause of its death, but a symptom of its demise.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
It also had awful marketing (such as mocking and throwing prior editions under the bus, just like 5e did to 4E... same tactic, just a less popular target), generated unnecessary bad blood...

Marketing was certainly a weak point for 4e, designed for people who were terminally online before such a term existed. I'm unaware of 5e openly mocking D&D fans though the way 4e did - I admit I wasn't paying much attention to D&D at that point though.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
It was, frankly, a perfect storm of factors that had nothing to do with the quality of the material in the books...

The launch-contemporary 4e starter adventure "Keep on the Shadowfell" is considered by many to be quite poor quality. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1582/roleplaying-games/keep-on-the-shadowfell-first-impressions.

4e wasn't the kind of game you could easily convert older content to it or just whip something up from scratch with no prep. Call it what you want, but that's a product issue. If your point is that the 4e core game is actually great, then that's up to preference. A design that fails to meet its objectives is a bad design and I'd argue 4e failed to meet most of its objectives. I will note that in terms of production value, Paizo was already outclassing 4e in art and content both in terms of quality and volume. Layout in 4e had improved over the weird aesthetic of 3.5 but Paizo also had excellent and arguably better layout/design.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
In addressing 4E's failure its important to note that, if D&D were owned by any RPG company other than Hasbro, it would have been a monster success... its biggest Achilles Heel was that if failed to make the money the developers promised it would back when they did the edition switch

This isn't saying much. If you're the British empire and you barely squeaked out a victory against a far inferior force, that's not a win. That's a defeat. Because you're the British empire - it's not supposed to be a close fight. D&D is the equivalent of the British empire - anything less than absolute dominance is a very bad sign. That Pathfinder managed to bootstrap a business and then outperform D&D within the span of a few short years was an absolute failure for WotC. See the trendline here: https://www.awesomedice.com/blogs/news/google-statistics-on-the-edition-wars-d-d-pathfinder

Those trends more or less mirrored what I personally witnessed, especially the spike in interest in 2008 that was short-lived - 4e just had no staying power. People moved back to 3.5 until Pathfinder came around and then gradually adopted that as the standard until 5e came out. If 4e was a standalone tactical miniatures/battle game without the D&D baggage, it wouldn't have stuck around either. Because none of the games in that genre tend to stick around in general. It's a niche genre at best and driven by things like collectible miniatures and pickup board game sessions (not consistent campaign play). See Kingdom Death or even an RPG like ICON and you'll see these tactical game are just a totally different beast.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
The idea that 4E was hated and unloved by a majority during its lifetime is just a myth the OSR likes to tell itself to pretend what it likes is actually popular in gaming circles (most who played 4E didn't hate it when they stopped playing, they just moved onto the latest currently supported thing, which has enough 4E in it that only 4E diehards wouldn't want to move on).

4e certainly has its fans, but 4e was indeed hated or unloved by a huge swathe of the market. If 4e were secretly popular, none of the following would have happened:

• Essentials line launching within the first ~2 years of initial launch, with a focus on drawing in new players and trying to "soften" the opinionated 4e design.
• The entire line being effectively abandoned within ~4-5 years of launch with a focus on the new edition, making it the shortest-lived mainstream full edition of the game in history both in terms of practical support and official support.
• Pathfinder beating 4e in sales for 4 consecutive years (approx. 2011-2014).
• Third party publishers abandoning 4e to instead support Pathfinder (If the sales and revenue were there, people would still make and sell products with the GSL even if it wasn't perfect).
• The subsequent edition essentially abandoning everything about the 4e design that couldn't be ripped out, re-contextualized, and disguised as something else. 5e resembles 3.5 far more than 4e in just about every respect.

In my opinion, the narrative that 4e was a misunderstood-but-genius design is growing because of nostalgia, not because 4e was actually genius. It had many bad decisions which contributed to its demise, including business blunders, but the game itself is also culpable.

The legacy of 4e is that it was a game designed from the ground up to solve illusory "problems" surfaced by the nascent online discourse which emerged around the 3.5 scene. Online communities of people who spent more time chatting, theory-crafting, and character-building started driving the narrative around what was "wrong" with 3.5 rather than the people who were actually playing and enjoying the game (and buying products). You see it in the design of 4e: the obsession with symmetry for fear of imbalance creating bland and boring classes. Strict definitions and limited effects and interactions between powers/spells to avoid imbalance. Limits to critical hits to maintain strictly balanced math. Strict guidelines for how the GM is supposed to run the game to avoid the dickhead-DM problem. Use-it-or-lose-it AP and at-will/encounter powers to fight the 5-minute adventuring day. Baking magic item progression into the game to deal with the "christmas tree" phenomenon. Every major decision in 4e could be directly associated with a corresponding narrative that was prevalent on the forums at the time.

In actuality of course, nobody was playing pun-pun, or trying to pass of the peasant railgun as viable to their table's GM. Nobody was centering their campaigns on intra-party PvP where balance issues would be a net-negative rather than a net-positive for a cooperative party. Most players were not character optimizers who could build totally broken characters, and the people who brought a game-destroying build from online were simply told that it wasn't allowed and the world kept turning. People who were actually playing 3.5 campaigns wanted more quality content, more settings, more adventures, and a little cleanup around the edges. Pathfinder gave them that, so it succeeded. 5e also essentially gave them that, so it also succeeded and won back many PF players. 3.5 players were actually upset by the relatively low quality of official content splats and how long combat was lasting (a problem 4e made worse with tactical grid emphasis and bloated HP pools). In most cases, 4e was steering in exactly the wrong direction. Ironically, I think Paizo fell for the same trap WotC ran into and started listening to their forums too much. This resulted in PF 2e, a game that resembles 4e so much because it's trying to solve the same non-issues that are generated in theory but don't really matter at most tables.

The same basic issues in 3.5 exist in 5e and it has been doing just fine. The OSR is also doing just fine despite people insisting that the flaws that 4e needed to fix were intrinsic to the original design. What we actually saw with the resurgence of the OSR was that much of the game worked perfectly well if you retained the elements that made it work (like dungeon exploration turn, random encounters, etc). We saw the effects of Chesterton's Fence with 3.5 and onward, where many systems which were retained in the first place were totally vestigial.

Greetings!

Excellent analysis! I was going to put forth essentially the same analysis, though you wrote it so eloquently!

I remember 4E. I HATED 4E, for everything you mentioned. 4E was NOT D&D. As some kind of weird, fucked up tactical wannabe board game, it may have had its merits. As a RPG keeping faithful to D&D, it was an utter failure, and total garbage. That's just dealing with the mechanical aspects nd game-pay systems. The focus on grids and miniatures was a huge failure to "Read the Room" and understand the D&D core audience. Marketing wise, that is an entirely separate an distinct issue--and an aspect that WOTC failed miserably. The designers mocking an belittling older, traditional fan and gamers of D&D was absolutely horrendous. It doesn't take a genius to understand why 4E was a terrible game, and why it failed spectacularly.

I refused to buy so much as one 4E book, and refused to play that broken, stupid game edition entirely. 4E can be burned in the fires, and I am glad that it choked and died on the ash-heap of gaming history. The game designers and writers of 4E were all failed morons, or had abandoned their previous wisdom and embraced the "New Idea" like sheep running off the fucking cliff.

That is what I analyzed from initial materials and books that I looked at from the very few friends that were foolish enough to buy the trash books. There is a reason that most of my friends, by a huge majority, also refused to embrace 4E. Like 90% or more. They all went to Pathfinder, or stayed with 3E like I did.

Oh, and in addition to the very structured, tactical miniatures game-play feel, 4E also had so many terrible inspirations from WoW. So many people said it was like bringing class "Balance" and mechanical systems from the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Having myself played WoW for many years, I also instantly recognized the WoW video game inspirations and elements throughout 4E's entire class design and game play. All of the 4E fanbois used to loudly protest and argue against this--but they were wrong. If anyone denies the huge fact that 4E was heavily influence in many ways by the video game WoW, they are either blind or in absolute denial. 4E tried to incorporate video game elements, systems, and mechanics into D&D, and it was painfully obvious. Some ore nd thematic inspirations from video games of course can be fine--but 4E's embrace of such larger video game systems like found in WoW was obvious, and terrible. It tried to bring the mechanical systems of WoW into D&D--two entirely different mediums, and the broken game play of 4E was an easy thing to foresee. There were these HUGE systemic aspects that made 4E  terrible game. The fact that the game designers  thought that this was a good way to go shows how much they are morons, and how terrible 4E was as a system.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

At the time of 4E release I was part of a gaming club with 50+ members; one of the club's traditions was the "testing run", where for about one month after the release of an interesting game every group switched to it and ran as many games as possible to "battle test" it and later share their opinions.
We had ten groups playing about 2 or 3 games a week each for nearly 5 weeks......and at the end of the run the general consensus was pretty much "What the fuck is this shit ?".
It was one of the few times that the recap talk at the end of the testing run ended quickly and without too much squabbling: every single group reported that 4E felt more like World of Warcraft than an actual RPG. The only people that liked it were the (thankfully few) hardcore forgies that saw it as an example of "well done" simulationist design.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on June 14, 2023, 03:57:32 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
Let's not forget the whole economic collapse at the tail end of 2007 from which the United States didn't fully recover from until 4E was already in the ground.

Pathfinder was operating in the same economic environment and yet it was outperforming D&D and growing. If it was just a bad economic outlook, you wouldn't have seen the essentials line, you'd have seen a more conservative strategy. The way the book schedule thinned out towards the end of 4e's lifetime was not the cause of its death, but a symptom of its demise.

  Not quite. I think launch environment makes a difference--slightly after 4E's launch in 2008, we hit absolute panic in the US, with bank closures, bailouts, etc. Pathfinder launched in 2009, when things had calmed down a bit. Also, you had a 3-book and pricey supplements vs. 1-book launch, completely new vs. backwards compatible, etc.

Quote
Marketing was certainly a weak point for 4e, designed for people who were terminally online before such a term existed. I'm unaware of 5e openly mocking D&D fans though the way 4e did - I admit I wasn't paying much attention to D&D at that point though.

  They kept the mocking a bit toned down in favor of the 'we messed up; how can we do it right this time?', although you got things like 'warlords shouting hands back on' in some more unguarded moments. But WotC's marketing has consistently stuck with the two motifs of "the most recent edition was deeply flawed" and "1st Edition AD&D is the peak to which we all aspire," although they seem to have finally abandoned that for AshD&D. (As in "Ash nazg durbataluk ... " )

Quote
The launch-contemporary 4e starter adventure "Keep on the Shadowfell" is considered by many to be quite poor quality. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1582/roleplaying-games/keep-on-the-shadowfell-first-impressions.

   I never owned it, but that is the general consensus, and often used to argue that Mearls didn't quite 'get' 4E.

Quote
4e wasn't the kind of game you could easily convert older content to it or just whip something up from scratch with no prep. Call it what you want, but that's a product issue. If your point is that the 4e core game is actually great, then that's up to preference. A design that fails to meet its objectives is a bad design and I'd argue 4e failed to meet most of its objectives.

   IMO, 4E is a pretty good (if somewhat underbaked) game if taken on its own terms, but marketed to the wrong audience, ill-suited to fitting into the D&D tradition, and had the additional problem of being launched not only a year or two early but just as the audience was returning to that tradition, with the rising OSR movement.

Quote

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
The idea that 4E was hated and unloved by a majority during its lifetime is just a myth the OSR likes to tell itself to pretend what it likes is actually popular in gaming circles (most who played 4E didn't hate it when they stopped playing, they just moved onto the latest currently supported thing, which has enough 4E in it that only 4E diehards wouldn't want to move on).

4e certainly has its fans, but 4e was indeed hated or unloved by a huge swathe of the market. If 4e were secretly popular, none of the following would have happened:

• Essentials line launching within the first ~2 years of initial launch, with a focus on drawing in new players and trying to "soften" the opinionated 4e design.
• The entire line being effectively abandoned within ~4-5 years of launch with a focus on the new edition, making it the shortest-lived mainstream full edition of the game in history both in terms of practical support and official support.
• Pathfinder beating 4e in sales for 4 consecutive years (approx. 2011-2014).

   I have to agree with many of your points, but I'm calling shenanigans on this one--you don't get to count years when no 4E product is being produced for the 'outselling' narrative.

Quote
In my opinion, the narrative that 4e was a misunderstood-but-genius design is growing because of nostalgia, not because 4e was actually genius. It had many bad decisions which contributed to its demise, including business blunders, but the game itself is also culpable.

   I tend to take a more middle of the road position, myself. 4E is a solid design with some truly inspired moments when you take it on its own merits, but it's a decidedly odd duck when considered in the 'D&D' tradition overall--you can definitely see the elements of earlier games, but they're more dramatically remixed and reimagined than a typical comic book reboot or Hollywood adaptation. IMO, you'll typically find appreciation for it among those who were disillusioned with 3.X or 'traditional D&D', or those who stuck with it long enough to understand its own strengths and weaknesses. It is not very good at fitting into many of the traditional D&D-as-played narratives, although it arguably fits D&D-as-marketed from 1983 to 1996 better than most of the other versions. It's also not well set up for casual investment or play, which further hurts it in comparison to 5E.

Quote from: Vestragor on June 14, 2023, 06:49:56 AM
At the time of 4E release I was part of a gaming club with 50+ members; one of the club's traditions was the "testing run", where for about one month after the release of an interesting game every group switched to it and ran as many games as possible to "battle test" it and later share their opinions.
We had ten groups playing about 2 or 3 games a week each for nearly 5 weeks......and at the end of the run the general consensus was pretty much "What the fuck is this shit ?".
It was one of the few times that the recap talk at the end of the testing run ended quickly and without too much squabbling: every single group reported that 4E felt more like World of Warcraft than an actual RPG. The only people that liked it were the (thankfully few) hardcore forgies that saw it as an example of "well done" simulationist design.

   I'll accept most of your narrative, but I don't believe that anyone ever praised 4E as 'simulationist', let alone Forgies who generally don't even believe in simulationism.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on June 14, 2023, 08:30:20 AM

Quote from: Vestragor on June 14, 2023, 06:49:56 AM
At the time of 4E release I was part of a gaming club with 50+ members; one of the club's traditions was the "testing run", where for about one month after the release of an interesting game every group switched to it and ran as many games as possible to "battle test" it and later share their opinions.
We had ten groups playing about 2 or 3 games a week each for nearly 5 weeks......and at the end of the run the general consensus was pretty much "What the fuck is this shit ?".
It was one of the few times that the recap talk at the end of the testing run ended quickly and without too much squabbling: every single group reported that 4E felt more like World of Warcraft than an actual RPG. The only people that liked it were the (thankfully few) hardcore forgies that saw it as an example of "well done" simulationist design.

I'll accept most of your narrative, but I don't believe that anyone ever praised 4E as 'simulationist', let alone Forgies who generally don't even believe in simulationism.

Agreed.

Similationist designs don't have durations like "until the end of the encounter", abilities usable "once per encounter" and "epic destinies" discussing the way your PC will achieve either figurative or literal immortality upon completing your adventures. It also wouldn't have meta-currencies like Action Points earned for overcoming encounters. Nor would the DMG devote so much effort to coming up with "campaign themes" and other elements that put the campaign into a narrative framework.

It's structure is much closer to World of Darkness' scene-based durations than anything simulating the real world.

I mean, I guess you could say it was simulating a narrative... but that's really pushing the definitions for an agenda.

Either that or the Princess Bride quote about words not meaning what you think they mean is on the table.

Sidebar: also worth remembering... back around 2000, Third Edition was commonly accused of being "Diablo the RPG" so I guess comparisons between the current edition of D&D and the current hot fantasy title was just a thing until 5e became recursively self-referential and now they're just trying to make D&D a video game with the upcoming edition.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on June 14, 2023, 08:30:20 AM
   I'll accept most of your narrative...

Oh thank you good sir, tonight I'll sleep well knowing that "my narrative" pleases you.



I don't give a fuck if you believe it or not, this is what happened.

Quote from: Vestragor on June 14, 2023, 09:57:32 AM

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on June 14, 2023, 08:30:20 AM
   I'll accept most of your narrative...

Oh thank you good sir, tonight I'll sleep well knowing that "my narrative" pleases you.



I don't give a fuck if you believe it or not, this is what happened.

Um, he agreed with you on all points except the premise of 4E being simulationist. If you believe that it is, what makes you believe that? I am curious about why someone would have that perspective.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on June 14, 2023, 03:57:32 AM

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
Let's not forget the whole economic collapse at the tail end of 2007 from which the United States didn't fully recover from until 4E was already in the ground.

Pathfinder was operating in the same economic environment and yet it was outperforming D&D and growing. If it was just a bad economic outlook, you wouldn't have seen the essentials line, you'd have seen a more conservative strategy. The way the book schedule thinned out towards the end of 4e's lifetime was not the cause of its death, but a symptom of its demise.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
It also had awful marketing (such as mocking and throwing prior editions under the bus, just like 5e did to 4E... same tactic, just a less popular target), generated unnecessary bad blood...

Marketing was certainly a weak point for 4e, designed for people who were terminally online before such a term existed. I'm unaware of 5e openly mocking D&D fans though the way 4e did - I admit I wasn't paying much attention to D&D at that point though.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
It was, frankly, a perfect storm of factors that had nothing to do with the quality of the material in the books...

The launch-contemporary 4e starter adventure "Keep on the Shadowfell" is considered by many to be quite poor quality. https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/1582/roleplaying-games/keep-on-the-shadowfell-first-impressions.

4e wasn't the kind of game you could easily convert older content to it or just whip something up from scratch with no prep. Call it what you want, but that's a product issue. If your point is that the 4e core game is actually great, then that's up to preference. A design that fails to meet its objectives is a bad design and I'd argue 4e failed to meet most of its objectives. I will note that in terms of production value, Paizo was already outclassing 4e in art and content both in terms of quality and volume. Layout in 4e had improved over the weird aesthetic of 3.5 but Paizo also had excellent and arguably better layout/design.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
In addressing 4E's failure its important to note that, if D&D were owned by any RPG company other than Hasbro, it would have been a monster success... its biggest Achilles Heel was that if failed to make the money the developers promised it would back when they did the edition switch

This isn't saying much. If you're the British empire and you barely squeaked out a victory against a far inferior force, that's not a win. That's a defeat. Because you're the British empire - it's not supposed to be a close fight. D&D is the equivalent of the British empire - anything less than absolute dominance is a very bad sign. That Pathfinder managed to bootstrap a business and then outperform D&D within the span of a few short years was an absolute failure for WotC. See the trendline here: https://www.awesomedice.com/blogs/news/google-statistics-on-the-edition-wars-d-d-pathfinder

Those trends more or less mirrored what I personally witnessed, especially the spike in interest in 2008 that was short-lived - 4e just had no staying power. People moved back to 3.5 until Pathfinder came around and then gradually adopted that as the standard until 5e came out. If 4e was a standalone tactical miniatures/battle game without the D&D baggage, it wouldn't have stuck around either. Because none of the games in that genre tend to stick around in general. It's a niche genre at best and driven by things like collectible miniatures and pickup board game sessions (not consistent campaign play). See Kingdom Death or even an RPG like ICON and you'll see these tactical game are just a totally different beast.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 13, 2023, 03:47:52 PM
The idea that 4E was hated and unloved by a majority during its lifetime is just a myth the OSR likes to tell itself to pretend what it likes is actually popular in gaming circles (most who played 4E didn't hate it when they stopped playing, they just moved onto the latest currently supported thing, which has enough 4E in it that only 4E diehards wouldn't want to move on).

4e certainly has its fans, but 4e was indeed hated or unloved by a huge swathe of the market. If 4e were secretly popular, none of the following would have happened:

• Essentials line launching within the first ~2 years of initial launch, with a focus on drawing in new players and trying to "soften" the opinionated 4e design.
• The entire line being effectively abandoned within ~4-5 years of launch with a focus on the new edition, making it the shortest-lived mainstream full edition of the game in history both in terms of practical support and official support.
• Pathfinder beating 4e in sales for 4 consecutive years (approx. 2011-2014).
• Third party publishers abandoning 4e to instead support Pathfinder (If the sales and revenue were there, people would still make and sell products with the GSL even if it wasn't perfect).
• The subsequent edition essentially abandoning everything about the 4e design that couldn't be ripped out, re-contextualized, and disguised as something else. 5e resembles 3.5 far more than 4e in just about every respect.

In my opinion, the narrative that 4e was a misunderstood-but-genius design is growing because of nostalgia, not because 4e was actually genius. It had many bad decisions which contributed to its demise, including business blunders, but the game itself is also culpable.

The legacy of 4e is that it was a game designed from the ground up to solve illusory "problems" surfaced by the nascent online discourse which emerged around the 3.5 scene. Online communities of people who spent more time chatting, theory-crafting, and character-building started driving the narrative around what was "wrong" with 3.5 rather than the people who were actually playing and enjoying the game (and buying products). You see it in the design of 4e: the obsession with symmetry for fear of imbalance creating bland and boring classes. Strict definitions and limited effects and interactions between powers/spells to avoid imbalance. Limits to critical hits to maintain strictly balanced math. Strict guidelines for how the GM is supposed to run the game to avoid the dickhead-DM problem. Use-it-or-lose-it AP and at-will/encounter powers to fight the 5-minute adventuring day. Baking magic item progression into the game to deal with the "christmas tree" phenomenon. Every major decision in 4e could be directly associated with a corresponding narrative that was prevalent on the forums at the time.

In actuality of course, nobody was playing pun-pun, or trying to pass of the peasant railgun as viable to their table's GM. Nobody was centering their campaigns on intra-party PvP where balance issues would be a net-negative rather than a net-positive for a cooperative party. Most players were not character optimizers who could build totally broken characters, and the people who brought a game-destroying build from online were simply told that it wasn't allowed and the world kept turning. People who were actually playing 3.5 campaigns wanted more quality content, more settings, more adventures, and a little cleanup around the edges. Pathfinder gave them that, so it succeeded. 5e also essentially gave them that, so it also succeeded and won back many PF players. 3.5 players were actually upset by the relatively low quality of official content splats and how long combat was lasting (a problem 4e made worse with tactical grid emphasis and bloated HP pools). In most cases, 4e was steering in exactly the wrong direction. Ironically, I think Paizo fell for the same trap WotC ran into and started listening to their forums too much. This resulted in PF 2e, a game that resembles 4e so much because it's trying to solve the same non-issues that are generated in theory but don't really matter at most tables.

The same basic issues in 3.5 exist in 5e and it has been doing just fine. The OSR is also doing just fine despite people insisting that the flaws that 4e needed to fix were intrinsic to the original design. What we actually saw with the resurgence of the OSR was that much of the game worked perfectly well if you retained the elements that made it work (like dungeon exploration turn, random encounters, etc). We saw the effects of Chesterton's Fence with 3.5 and onward, where many systems which were retained in the first place were totally vestigial.

Spot on.  Thus endeth the argument.

Those awful forgies puffing themselves for game design and claiming other people were suffering from brain damage (defective if you will) if they didn't fall into their paradigm.
The Old Schoolers have more class and dignity than that.

Quote from: SHARK on June 14, 2023, 04:54:22 AM
Oh, and in addition to the very structured, tactical miniatures game-play feel, 4E also had so many terrible inspirations from WoW. So many people said it was like bringing class "Balance" and mechanical systems from the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Having myself played WoW for many years, I also instantly recognized the WoW video game inspirations and elements throughout 4E's entire class design and game play. All of the 4E fanbois used to loudly protest and argue against this--but they were wrong. If anyone denies the huge fact that 4E was heavily influence in many ways by the video game WoW, they are either blind or in absolute denial. 4E tried to incorporate video game elements, systems, and mechanics into D&D, and it was painfully obvious.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

I played WoW for a few years too and I'm boggled anytime someone claims there's no connection between 4E and WoW.  For anyone who's actually played the game for a few hundred hours it's extremely obvious.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on June 14, 2023, 08:30:20 AM
   I'll accept most of your narrative, but I don't believe that anyone ever praised 4E as 'simulationist', let alone Forgies who generally don't even believe in simulationism.

Spot on.  It's very gamist.  I struggled for a long time figuring out what exactly about 4E bothered me, then I' read The Alexandrian's essay on disassociated mechanics and it all clicked into focus.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on June 14, 2023, 12:44:37 PM
Those awful forgies puffing themselves for game design and claiming other people were suffering from brain damage (defective if you will) if they didn't fall into their paradigm.
The Old Schoolers have more class and dignity than that.

LOL and Amen.  I know some 4E fans who are far from dumb and have a lot of useful things to say about RPGs.  I just have to take their preferences and assumptions into account when considering their ideas.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on June 14, 2023, 12:44:37 PM
Those awful forgies puffing themselves for game design and claiming other people were suffering from brain damage (defective if you will) if they didn't fall into their paradigm.
The Old Schoolers have more class and dignity than that.

To take a page out of Pundit's book and cast generalized aspersions against an entire group of people based on my own negative experiences with a limited sample of them: People who're in love with OD&D have always been like that since before the OSR became the OSR. Back in the day in my old gaming circles it was always the people who couldn't let go of Basic who behaved like that. They just couldn't fathom the idea that anyone could like any other system or want things that Basic D&D couldn't provide. And they always had disparaging remarks about other systems (including AD&D) and people who liked them that basically amounted to "They're not like Basic D&D, therefore they're wrong".

With few rare exceptions (like maybe people like Estar and some at another forum) my interactions with the OSR has done nothing but reaffirm my views of people obsessed with Old/Basic D&D. They just can't think outside of the old D&D paradigm and automatically assume that anything and anyone outside of it must simply be "wrong", at a fundamentally subhuman level and worthy of disparagement. And can never argue points or with the aim achieving understanding. But with the purpose of attacking and getting into "arguments" in the sense of having a verbal(or written) "fight" and "winning" it.

Quote from: Mishihari on June 14, 2023, 01:03:33 PMLOL and Amen.  I know some 4E fans who are far from dumb and have a lot of useful things to say about RPGs.  I just have to take their preferences and assumptions into account when considering their ideas.

And if you said that playing 4e for you was like getting cancer and being decked in the face for 8 hours, I'd still be fine with that because you're presenting a preference and elaborating on it.
You don't believe that your form of play pretend makes you a genius and somebody else a failed person if they dislike it.