Quote from: Gabriel2;1050383One of the reasons why I gave up on 4e was because of Essentials.

My perception of Essentials was that it was a concession to the persistent naysayers who didn't play and didn't want to.  It was attempting to cater to an audience that was never going to be a customer anyway.  Whether that perception was firmly based in reality or not, it was the perception I had.

There were more reasons, but as soon as Essentials hit shelves and effectively created an edition split, I was done.

Did you read or play any of the essentials materials? It was by far my favorite part of 4E and I owned the hard backs as well. It never created an edition split because as pointed out above the core rules were the same. It was streamlined, not rules lite, and presented to new players in a much easier to understand format. They tried to straighten out  the horrible encounter building guide lines and skill challenges mush.

I rather liked the digest size book for ease of handling.  And honestly I think it was at least a better than nothing attempt to save 4E from hour long combat encounters that made upper level play a laborious drag.

Plus Nentir Vale is one of the better "vanilla" campaign worlds out there with some interesting factions. Some of the monster builds for even common goblins were creative. And i still really like the mook and mob rules codified under "Next"

It just wan't enough. Most of the players at our tables would not buy Next after getting burned on 4E in general. And after ridiculously long combats trying to slog through a 4E conversion of Tomb of Horrors, must of us said "enough" and went running for the rules lite(r) OSR.

Quote from: MonsterSlayer;1050395Did you read or play any of the essentials materials?

Nope.  Like I said, it was a perception thing.

The buzz going around at the time was that Essentials had really changed the game.  The groups I knew that were playing were telling me that the new Essentials products completely invalidated the PHB/DMG/MM and swaths of later books.

And, to make myself sound even more superficial, I had no desire to buy the smaller softcover books.

Was it the only reason I quit?  No, not at all.  It was just a straw on the camel's back, not THE straw.  Was it an accurate perception?  Possibly not, but it was the perception WotC created, intentional or not.

I'm glad you liked 4e in the Essentials era.  I quite liked chunks of the game in the pre-Essentials time.  I do think 4e could have stood to be in the oven a bit longer before serving.

I agree with everything MonsterSlayer says here. I only got into 4E because of the Essentials format. It was the easiest edition of D&D to run at the table, with the possible exception of B/X. The rules were straightforward, the books were the best layed-out and designed of any RPG books I've seen, and the default setting was not Forgotten Realms, but a small-scale boots-on-the-ground setting with some very cool adversaries (Threats of the Nentir Vale is one of the best setting books released by TSR or WotC, and it's actually a monster manual). And the DM and MM sets contained all the pogs you would ever need, so you didn't have to go out and buy minis.

The Essentials-era adventures were much better too - Madness at Gardmore Abbey is an overlooked classic. I think if WotC had released 4E with the Essentials format and content, the game would have been a bigger success.

I was actually thinking of getting into 4e a bit after reading its DMG 2 and loving how it laid things out.

But it's so confusing figuring out where you are supposed to enter into the game. Even Essentials is kind of confusing since its ambiguous how compatible it is with other 4e stuff or what you're supposed to use.

I know Essentials is supposed to be "streamlined 4e," but does that sacrifice what made 4e fun? Is it better to just play the original 4e?

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1050434I know Essentials is supposed to be "streamlined 4e," but does that sacrifice what made 4e fun? Is it better to just play the original 4e?

Same game presented different with more straight forward options. Think of it like a Magic the Gathering build that competitive with many traditional deck build but is considerably easier to learn and play because of the selection of specific cards.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1050434I know Essentials is supposed to be "streamlined 4e," but does that sacrifice what made 4e fun? Is it better to just play the original 4e?

I pretty much exclusively ran my 4e game using the Essentials rulebooks.  My players, except the one who struggled with basic arithmetic, played regular 4e characters and we had no problems.  The magic item system was better in Essentials than in 4e but it suffered from never being properly vetted -- they just said "everything in 4e is uncommon unless we note otherwise" IIRC.  But then magic items are a problem in 5e as well so nothing is perfect.

It's all interchangeable but I did notice that the 4e classes could do more than the Essentials ones when played well.

The only differences between 4E and Essentials are:

1) Monster HP have been reduced and damage increased, in order to make combats less grindy. This change was made to 4E monster stats even before Essentials, and only matters if you're using older 4E published adventures.

2) The new PC classes in Essentials have more narrowly prescribed abilities, rather than the completely open-ended character generation in 4E. However, the Essentials classes are completely compatible with the 4E classes.

3) Essentials doesn't have spell rituals.

The difficulty with getting into Essentials now is the availability of the material. The DM's Toolkit and Monster Vault are getting tough to find, especially with the pogs and adventures intact.

I still prefer running 5e over 4e, and players are a lot more prevalent. But I still have a soft spot for 4e and would run it or play it again if given the opportunity. It's really not hard to convert powers, magic items, monster abilities from 4e into 5e.

Quote from: Haffrung;1050446The only differences between 4E and Essentials are:

1) Monster HP have been reduced and damage increased, in order to make combats less grindy. This change was made to 4E monster stats even before Essentials, and only matters if you're using older 4E published adventures.

2) The new PC classes in Essentials have more narrowly prescribed abilities, rather than the completely open-ended character generation in 4E. However, the Essentials classes are completely compatible with the 4E classes.

3) Essentials doesn't have spell rituals.

The difficulty with getting into Essentials now is the availability of the material. The DM's Toolkit and Monster Vault are getting tough to find, especially with the pogs and adventures intact.

Good news if I ever decide to sell my "Essentials"* stuff since I have it all complete. But between the two, I would rather sell the original 4E stuff. Threats of the Nentir Vale is still
one of my favorite monster manuals.

*Edit: why do I keep saying "Next" when I mean "Essentials"?

Quote from: Gabriel2;1050430Nope.  Like I said, it was a perception thing.

The buzz going around at the time was that Essentials had really changed the game.  The groups I knew that were playing were telling me that the new Essentials products completely invalidated the PHB/DMG/MM and swaths of later books.

And, to make myself sound even more superficial, I had no desire to buy the smaller softcover books.

Was it the only reason I quit?  No, not at all.  It was just a straw on the camel's back, not THE straw.  Was it an accurate perception?  Possibly not, but it was the perception WotC created, intentional or not.

I'm glad you liked 4e in the Essentials era.  I quite liked chunks of the game in the pre-Essentials time.  I do think 4e could have stood to be in the oven a bit longer before serving.

Fair enough.

I didn't mean to come off too harsh, I'm not here to protect the virtues of "Essentials". I think in ways, at the time, it was the AD&D versus B/X argument all over again. As if "Essentials" was kiddy table which it was not.

Anyhow, its flogging a dead horse except there were some good ideas buried in the edition. Bu i have moved on to 5E as my mechanics of choice like many others.

4e lost about 2/3rds of D&D's customer base.

I've discussed here before my experiences with 4e some time back.

I was running and playing Pathfinder at the time (2010 maybe.. can't exactly remember)
One of my players had been pushing 4e for some time, but the rest of the players weren't that keen.
Over time though, I was trying to get one of the players to run something and a player volunteered to run 4e, so we decided to give  it a go.

So, I like Clerics. The 4e DM said, yeah no Clerics in 4e, so that was a big negative right there.

He ran a published scenario, which IMO didn't help.  It was a VERY linear scenario and any straying from the storypath just got us dragged right back into the story.  Also did not like..
Still early DnD stuff used to do this thing a lot, but it seemed a thing again in 4e perhaps?
 
I was asking about making magic items or loot that might be magic items and he said that you don't really find magic items anymore, but they're part of the story based character development.
Something about how magic items evolve in 4e, so that was a big strike against 4e too..  I don't mind the IDEA of that, but to blanket restrict items like that seemed off to me.

Then the Daily abilities, and abilities that recharge after a scene and unlimited use abilities.
It was a pain keeping track of it all at higher levels (we played about 10 sessions I think and I got to about level 3 or 4). He dished out various cards with our spells that got flipped over as we used them.
At that stage there were lots of abilities that recharged or didn't depending if it was a new scene, or full day or whatever.   But the abilities seemed all very samey really.
That and I REALLY noticed the fightery type abilities seemed very abstract and hard to visualise what they were ACTUALLY doing. These were observations from players running Fighters and stuff.

I had a Fey type elf who was a sort of Mage.

I noticed that you pretty much HAD to use a battle grid to play 4e, as range, position, facing etc  etc were very important and I felt like I was playing a small skirmish version of Warhammer, not an RPG.
Combat took AGES!,  Gah, I stopped caring after a while and just combat just seemed like one huge, boring grind fest.   But the way the published scenarios were written, you HAD to have all these boring fights, whittling down your enemies over time.  Each round taking ages and flipping over abilities and using abstract abilities that made no sense.

So anyway, after 10 sessions, we gave up and I never played 4e again.

FWIW,  I ran Pathfinder after that until the party hit about level 12 and the whole management of feats and abilities became a pain, so we dropped PF and I ran Runequest and Stormbringer for a while until I moved, which was fun.
 
As a final note for 4e, I think it's correct it was made to try and grab the MMORPG crowd.
Was it a bad RPG?  Well, I didn't like it, but I respect that others might like it and clearly did.

Does 5e take some stuff from 4e?  yeah a bit, but extremely cut down, simplified and combat is cut down and simplified too.
Feats have been heavily reduced and you don't even need them really.
5e combat caters to grid based combat if you want, but spells are made so it's not a requirement to use a grid.
So if you like abstract combat as opposed to a grid, NPS, it supports that.
Is 5e perfect?  No it has issues which I'm happy to discuss. But it's good enough and WAY better than 4e in my opinion and experience..

So no, I didn't like 4e and I gave it a good try. I think 10 sessions is a fair go.

Quote from: RPGPundit;10507434e lost about 2/3rds of D&D's customer base.

Did they lose them, or did Paizo steal them by keeping the 3.x model in circulation?

Quote from: danskmacabre;1050790I noticed that you pretty much HAD to use a battle grid to play 4e, as range, position, facing etc  etc were very important and I felt like I was playing a small skirmish version of Warhammer, not an RPG.
Combat took AGES!,  Gah, I stopped caring after a while and just combat just seemed like one huge, boring grind fest.   But the way the published scenarios were written, you HAD to have all these boring fights, whittling down your enemies over time.  

The people who wrote 4E's early adventures didn't understand how to write for the system. 4E combat should be rare and eventful - 2, maybe 3 combats per session. There should be no grinding in 4E, no trash fights. Only important, cinematic, climactic battles. Instead, WotC published a bunch of adventures for 4E that were 1E D&D style dungeon-crawls.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1050798Did they lose them, or did Paizo steal them by keeping the 3.x model in circulation?

I attribute any outflow to mismanagement of the edition (Essentials wasn't really essential) and the murder-suicide that shelved the virtual table.