I remember when 4e came out about half my group switched to it, and half parroted the 3 complaints Sly Flourish highlights. Those of us who switched had an amazing time, some of the best games I've ever played or run were in 4e. And when I asked my other friends why they didn't switch, and they told me they didn't want to throw away their 3.5 books, or it was too much like an mmo I would ask them "well have you played it?" The answer was always "well... no."
Great shoutout to Sly Flourish! They have some incredible advise for DMs of all editions, and eventually came around on 4e to have some very excellent advise for that edition.
I`ve played D&D since 1974 and have played all editions (though nowadays I tend to stick to orginal D&D most the time). I realy liked 4th edition and chuckled to myself over the years every time I hear people bad mouthing it (and when you think about it... even celeb D&D shows like Acquisitons Inc were at their best when they played using 4th edition).
I was one of those people who bad-mouthed 4th edition back in the day. And it's only now 15 years later when I realize that I had no idea what the f**k I was talking about, just like everyone else at the time. Also, two things: It's funny that people always default to comparing D&D 4th with MMOs when it clearly has more in common with table top war games, only on a smaller scale (which I find funny when you consider what spawned D&D in the first place). And, is it just me, or do you think the heroic-paragon-epic tiers were a nod to the Basic Dungeons & Dragons expansion sets?
About the war game scale: There are a lot of skirmish war games where each player controls only 2-5 characters, quite few of which started to emerge mid to late 00s.
@@Eemi_SeppalaD&D originally started as an expansion to a wargame (it was called Chainmail if I recall correctly) where the most awesome heroes in your army could go down into dungeons to get extra loot for hiring soldiers and find magic items to use in the army battles. Turns out the people in the playtest enjoyed doing that so much they stopped having wargame battles. So any time I see people complaining that D&D feels too much like a tabletop wargame I always have to smile a bit since that's literally where the game came from. I believe "working as intended" is the correct response for that one.
I'll admit to being one of those folks who bounced off 4e pretty hard at first. (I have since come to my senses!) But not for any of the popular reasons. What I was missing was the lore and tonal cohesion with previous editions. If you wanted to use existing setting or lore, you'd have your work cut out for you explaining how magic used to work vs. how it works in 4e. A clear example is how much they had to warp the Forgotten Realms, by skipping ahead 100 years, and adding a parallel dimension, killing off some gods, and having the Spell Plague change how magic fundamentally worked in the setting, just to make the new mechanics fit. I was much more upset that they beat the breaks off of the lore of a setting I'd come to love, than by the rules themselves being so different. If they'd taken the effort to explain how to keep old settings intact, rather than making them unrecognizable, I probably would have been on board with 4e from the start. I did play and run a few games while 4e was a living edition. And I do remember that prepping and running were an absolute BLAST. Despite how much I didn't want to enjoy it, just on principle, I couldn't help but spend hours on the encounter building tools just for fun. I did eventually give up on 4e, and leaned into the indie and "story games" scene after that. Funny enough, it was PbtA games that brought me back around to 4e after support for it had officially ceased. Specifically, the mechanisms for retiring characters. That had quickly become one of my favorite aspects of PbtA, and remembering that 3e was actually the first time I'd seen a retirement mechanic in a 3PP, but 4e made them a core feature, and that got me crack open my old books again. Epic Destinies and Paragon Paths are RAD. They are equally impactful narratively as they are mechanically, and they're such a unique take on tiers or "Name Level," and really drive the story of your game forward in a way that no pile of gold or nemesis in need of justice can quite match. 4e took care of the DM. It's evident that a lot of consideration went into the logistics of the game, not just at the table, but between sessions, where most of the work actually happens. WotC recognized a need and addressed it. That makes the state of their current edition even more egregious. There are (or were?) people there who are capable of designing a damn good game. I truly wonder what happened? Where did the talent go?
Agree that 4e is a DM centric edition and makes things so much easier to setup. Would probably explain why there is an apparent dearth of DMs these days. Prepping and running a game is a lot of work and if that isn't done. Then there aren't any sessions for players to attend. They give plenty of player options, but also need to give the DM stuff to work with. Also love Paragon Paths. They're awesome for expanding your character. Themes when they added them were just as good too.
@@GrimPrismThe goal of 13A was to combine the best elements of 3E and 4E with indie story game elements too. In my opinion it was largely successful in that.
Played every edition as they released in my life and no edition felt as exciting as 4E with me and my groups. The first time we played we were all blown away by how smooth and fun it ran. We particularly thought combat was amazing. I'd never gone back to a previous edition until about two years ago we were all like, wanna go back to 4E? As regards stuff like skill challengrs, yeah lots of people bounced off the "gamey-ness" of 4E but that is precisely what i love about it. I enjoy immersion and all that but also enjoy playing a game.
So as someone who has only played 5e and Pathfinder 2E (Classic Fantasy TTRPGs at least, also played Mutants & Masterminds, Dark Heresy, Shadowrun 6E, Cyberpunk Red and looked at Savage Worlds), I've been looking at 4E for quite a while and honestly, to me it seems very similar to how Pathfinder 2E does things, except it fixes almost every problem I have with PF2E, while not introducing a lot of new ones. No lack of a dedicated move action, no million different ''Short Rest'' like activities like Refocus and Treat Wounds that may or may not be able to be done together dependant on your class or even what deity you follow as a cleric, from what I've looked at so far I also don't see any ''feat trees'' where a feat requires you to have another feat to get, no vancian casting, feats aren't limited to certain classes the same way (Although class exploits are a bit, but they're usually different from the way PF2E class feats work), there's actually random treasure tables (With magic items, kinda, not really but in a way) which god I love as a DM (Although the system is still a little less appealing to me than D&D5E, but better than PF2E) I like PF2E it's a cool system, but dang D&D 4E seems way more fun to me, might honestly beat D&D 5E for my favourite fantasy system, just gotta find some people to actually play it with. M&M and Cyberpunk Red are probably still gonna stay my overall favourite systems though.
@@SeiferVII I just personally don't like it, lots of people do clearly but I like being able to move 5 Feet without it taking 1/3 of my combat actions.
Several 4e designers found their way to Paizo after prior WotC purges. Their ideas cross-pollinated to yield PF2e. So that's where the similarities come from :)
I also like the layout of the 4e D&D books. Very clear, mostly high contrast black text on white background for easy reading. The pages are not cluttered.
I want to briefly mention something. There is always a dilemma in rulebook writing between clearly and unambiguously explaining mechanics in technical language vs being welcoming to a new player and using conversational language. I personally fall on the former side. I want my rulebooks to be written by the kind of people who write legal documents and technical manuals. Tell me exactly what things mean and do with no ambiguity. I am fine with a higher up-front cost to learn the game's language and structure in exchange for not having to get into rules arguments later down the road. One of the best things 4e did was explicitly having a sidebar that said "flavor and rules are different concepts. You can have your abilities look like whatever you want as long as it doesn't change the mechanical implementation". Flavor is flexible, rules aren't. You need a mechanically solid unambiguous set of rules to build flavor on top of. Even for very simple storytelling games I would expect a ironclad set of rules underneath the narrative.
the thing i noticed that turned off older edition players was the LOOK of the book design. the brighter colors on the headers and character art went away from the Tome look. Several people i knew dismissed it at first glance based on that alone.
I remember people being mad about the artwork too, but more about the choice to incorporate more diverse characters (and artists), and have women appear with more agency, scantily-clad or no. It's wild to hear echoes of those complaints now, 15+ years and almost two editions later, when it was claimed to just be anger at the system/mechanics changes. Even the design & corporate staff are all different, but the howls online sound the same.
The "fear of change" thing was very real. D&D 3.5 had a TON of books, so many people didn't want a new edition. Also, 4e was very aggressive with the changes, and the new system was also marketed around these changes, so I remember it made a lot of people instantly suspicious. Other than that, a great edition for a more gamey RPG experience.
Im glad I've decided to give 4e a try. Ive read through a good chunk of the three core rulebooks and I can see how everything works together. I keep saying "this might be my favorite edition of D&D." I wont know that until I actually run a game.
I like my rules to read like rules, my fluff to read like fluff and the two be clearly delineated. 4e did this brilliantly with Keywords in bold, IMO the best D&D *Game*. That said, the lore was... not good, spectacularly so.
I understand that there are some good ideas in 4e, and I steal those for my 5e games, but if 4e was really this underrated amazing gem of a game, why did the player base split so dramatically that Paizo was able to steal away such a large portion of the player base? IMO that massive split is the smoking gun evidence that 4e was not a good edition, or the player base would not have split so dramatically. 4e was not the game that the most people wanted.
That logic presupposes that the only reason people would stop playing a game is because of the game itself. But we can look at what is happening with D&D today to see that people shift allegiances for many reasons that have nothing to do with the game. In the two years leading up to the release of 4e, Wizards started to bring all of the D&D products back in house. When Paizo lost their contract for Dragon and Dungeon magazines, they had a choice of either folding as a company or making their own game. Many other companies had to make similar choices as Wizards moved toward taking back ownership of all D&D content. In 2008, Wizards introduced a super-restrictive Game System License for 4e instead of continuing the OGL. Many creators did not want to live by the terms in that license so they instead kept publishing for 3.5 or switched over to Pathfinder once it was released or made their own rules. And the critical component for 4e was to be the introduction of online digital tools including a virtual table top. What we got was clunky and the VTT never made it past an alpha release. But even then, those that used D&D Insider (including myself) actually thought it was a pretty good tool at the time. It wouldn't stack up today, but 12 years ago it was pretty good. Over the past year, Wizards has begun to cancel contracts with third-party partners. They tried to push out a new, more restrictive, game license. And they are developing their own digital tools with the hopes of pulling all that money away from third-parties. We can see how the community has responded. When I ask poll questions about D&D (any version), most of the responses have nothing to do with the game itself and everything to do with a disdain for what Wizards of the Coast is doing from the business side. This is the exact same stuff that happened in 2008. It is like Wizards is literally following that playbook to the letter. I am by no means saying that 4e was perfect. As with every edition, it has good stuff and bad stuff and it is not for everyone. But the reviews at the time, even a year later, were actually very high on the game. As we are seeing today, the reason people are leaving D&D is less about the game and more about their frustration over WotCs business practices. And that is not factoring in other things such as the fact that some people did not want to have to buy more core rulebooks for the third time in eight years. Or that many computers at the time couldn't run the VTT even if it made it to public release. Or, to your point, no matter how good the game was, maybe people just did not want to change. The bottom line is that the quality of the game itself is just one of many factors that play into how well a game performs. And when someone makes a decision to move in a different direction, there is a tendency to want to diminish the thing they left behind as a rationalization for their decision. 2008 People got frustrated with how WotC was doing business and jumped ship to other games. To justify that choice, they amplified every problem they had with 4e and it became the scapegoat for WotCs problems. 2023 People have gotten frustrated with how WotC is doing business and are jumping ship to other games. To justify that choice, every problem they have with 5e is being amplified as a symbol of their problems with WotC. Thanks for the feedback. if you made it this far into my response, I appreciate you even more. 🙂
I actually moved away from 5e before the OGL debacle - because I found it hard to balance encounters (a problem I never encountered in 4e). Sadly I drifted from 4e because I listened to the 'nay-sayers' without a critical eye.@@oldegreybeard
"If this game is so good, why did the publisher piss everyone off with incredibly scummy business practices, causing the player base to shift over to another game made by another developer that is behaving much better?"
There are way, *way* more factors involved in why some people decided not to play 4e Some people didn’t like what WotC did with the lore, the changes to classes, the updates to licensing and 3rd party creators Literally none of that has anything to do with how good the *game* was, those are personally preferences that some people hold so closely too their heart that anything less is “garbage” The **game** was good, some of the things that happened around it where not appreciated by everyone
What one also should not forget is that Paizo had a lot of fans in D&D with their adventures etc. so them going away would take some fans with them. Also with PAthfinder people would not need to learn a new system and could for a big part keep using their 3.5 material.
![FendiDa Rappa - Clock Dat ft. Shamar Marco [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/3NBU8KHdxYY/mqdefault.jpg)
I remember when 4e came out about half my group switched to it, and half parroted the 3 complaints Sly Flourish highlights. Those of us who switched had an amazing time, some of the best games I've ever played or run were in 4e. And when I asked my other friends why they didn't switch, and they told me they didn't want to throw away their 3.5 books, or it was too much like an mmo I would ask them "well have you played it?" The answer was always "well... no."
Great shoutout to Sly Flourish! They have some incredible advise for DMs of all editions, and eventually came around on 4e to have some very excellent advise for that edition.
I`ve played D&D since 1974 and have played all editions (though nowadays I tend to stick to orginal D&D most the time). I realy liked 4th edition and chuckled to myself over the years every time I hear people bad mouthing it (and when you think about it... even celeb D&D shows like Acquisitons Inc were at their best when they played using 4th edition).
The edition finally figured out how to make fighters fun to play in combat, and delt better with the liner fighter quadratic wizard problem.
I was one of those people who bad-mouthed 4th edition back in the day. And it's only now 15 years later when I realize that I had no idea what the f**k I was talking about, just like everyone else at the time.
Also, two things: It's funny that people always default to comparing D&D 4th with MMOs when it clearly has more in common with table top war games, only on a smaller scale (which I find funny when you consider what spawned D&D in the first place). And, is it just me, or do you think the heroic-paragon-epic tiers were a nod to the Basic Dungeons & Dragons expansion sets?
About the war game scale: There are a lot of skirmish war games where each player controls only 2-5 characters, quite few of which started to emerge mid to late 00s.
@@Eemi_SeppalaD&D originally started as an expansion to a wargame (it was called Chainmail if I recall correctly) where the most awesome heroes in your army could go down into dungeons to get extra loot for hiring soldiers and find magic items to use in the army battles. Turns out the people in the playtest enjoyed doing that so much they stopped having wargame battles. So any time I see people complaining that D&D feels too much like a tabletop wargame I always have to smile a bit since that's literally where the game came from. I believe "working as intended" is the correct response for that one.
I'll admit to being one of those folks who bounced off 4e pretty hard at first. (I have since come to my senses!) But not for any of the popular reasons. What I was missing was the lore and tonal cohesion with previous editions. If you wanted to use existing setting or lore, you'd have your work cut out for you explaining how magic used to work vs. how it works in 4e. A clear example is how much they had to warp the Forgotten Realms, by skipping ahead 100 years, and adding a parallel dimension, killing off some gods, and having the Spell Plague change how magic fundamentally worked in the setting, just to make the new mechanics fit. I was much more upset that they beat the breaks off of the lore of a setting I'd come to love, than by the rules themselves being so different. If they'd taken the effort to explain how to keep old settings intact, rather than making them unrecognizable, I probably would have been on board with 4e from the start.
I did play and run a few games while 4e was a living edition. And I do remember that prepping and running were an absolute BLAST. Despite how much I didn't want to enjoy it, just on principle, I couldn't help but spend hours on the encounter building tools just for fun. I did eventually give up on 4e, and leaned into the indie and "story games" scene after that. Funny enough, it was PbtA games that brought me back around to 4e after support for it had officially ceased. Specifically, the mechanisms for retiring characters. That had quickly become one of my favorite aspects of PbtA, and remembering that 3e was actually the first time I'd seen a retirement mechanic in a 3PP, but 4e made them a core feature, and that got me crack open my old books again. Epic Destinies and Paragon Paths are RAD. They are equally impactful narratively as they are mechanically, and they're such a unique take on tiers or "Name Level," and really drive the story of your game forward in a way that no pile of gold or nemesis in need of justice can quite match.
4e took care of the DM. It's evident that a lot of consideration went into the logistics of the game, not just at the table, but between sessions, where most of the work actually happens. WotC recognized a need and addressed it. That makes the state of their current edition even more egregious. There are (or were?) people there who are capable of designing a damn good game. I truly wonder what happened? Where did the talent go?
Agree that 4e is a DM centric edition and makes things so much easier to setup. Would probably explain why there is an apparent dearth of DMs these days. Prepping and running a game is a lot of work and if that isn't done. Then there aren't any sessions for players to attend. They give plenty of player options, but also need to give the DM stuff to work with.
Also love Paragon Paths. They're awesome for expanding your character. Themes when they added them were just as good too.
The lead designer teamed up with the lead designer of 3e or 3.5 dnd (I don’t remember which one) and made 13th age.
@@GrimPrismThe goal of 13A was to combine the best elements of 3E and 4E with indie story game elements too. In my opinion it was largely successful in that.
Yes, 13A is my favorite fantasy TTRPG
@@joanmoriarity8738 I feel like to did more than succeed. It blew it away! I can’t wait for 2e to finally come out
Played every edition as they released in my life and no edition felt as exciting as 4E with me and my groups.
The first time we played we were all blown away by how smooth and fun it ran. We particularly thought combat was amazing.
I'd never gone back to a previous edition until about two years ago we were all like, wanna go back to 4E?
As regards stuff like skill challengrs, yeah lots of people bounced off the "gamey-ness" of 4E but that is precisely what i love about it. I enjoy immersion and all that but also enjoy playing a game.
So as someone who has only played 5e and Pathfinder 2E (Classic Fantasy TTRPGs at least, also played Mutants & Masterminds, Dark Heresy, Shadowrun 6E, Cyberpunk Red and looked at Savage Worlds), I've been looking at 4E for quite a while and honestly, to me it seems very similar to how Pathfinder 2E does things, except it fixes almost every problem I have with PF2E, while not introducing a lot of new ones.
No lack of a dedicated move action, no million different ''Short Rest'' like activities like Refocus and Treat Wounds that may or may not be able to be done together dependant on your class or even what deity you follow as a cleric, from what I've looked at so far I also don't see any ''feat trees'' where a feat requires you to have another feat to get, no vancian casting, feats aren't limited to certain classes the same way (Although class exploits are a bit, but they're usually different from the way PF2E class feats work), there's actually random treasure tables (With magic items, kinda, not really but in a way) which god I love as a DM (Although the system is still a little less appealing to me than D&D5E, but better than PF2E)
I like PF2E it's a cool system, but dang D&D 4E seems way more fun to me, might honestly beat D&D 5E for my favourite fantasy system, just gotta find some people to actually play it with. M&M and Cyberpunk Red are probably still gonna stay my overall favourite systems though.
I haven't played PF2E yet but it's on my list. May I ask what the issue with not having a dedicated Move action?
@@SeiferVII I just personally don't like it, lots of people do clearly but I like being able to move 5 Feet without it taking 1/3 of my combat actions.
Several 4e designers found their way to Paizo after prior WotC purges. Their ideas cross-pollinated to yield PF2e. So that's where the similarities come from :)
I also like the layout of the 4e D&D books. Very clear, mostly high contrast black text on white background for easy reading. The pages are not cluttered.
I want to briefly mention something. There is always a dilemma in rulebook writing between clearly and unambiguously explaining mechanics in technical language vs being welcoming to a new player and using conversational language. I personally fall on the former side. I want my rulebooks to be written by the kind of people who write legal documents and technical manuals. Tell me exactly what things mean and do with no ambiguity. I am fine with a higher up-front cost to learn the game's language and structure in exchange for not having to get into rules arguments later down the road.
One of the best things 4e did was explicitly having a sidebar that said "flavor and rules are different concepts. You can have your abilities look like whatever you want as long as it doesn't change the mechanical implementation". Flavor is flexible, rules aren't. You need a mechanically solid unambiguous set of rules to build flavor on top of. Even for very simple storytelling games I would expect a ironclad set of rules underneath the narrative.
4e is still the best definition that they’ve ever made IMO
It’s frickin’ great
Thank you Greybeard!
the thing i noticed that turned off older edition players was the LOOK of the book design. the brighter colors on the headers and character art went away from the Tome look. Several people i knew dismissed it at first glance based on that alone.
There's a saying about that involving books and judging, but I can't quite remember what it might have been. Hmmm...
I remember people being mad about the artwork too, but more about the choice to incorporate more diverse characters (and artists), and have women appear with more agency, scantily-clad or no. It's wild to hear echoes of those complaints now, 15+ years and almost two editions later, when it was claimed to just be anger at the system/mechanics changes. Even the design & corporate staff are all different, but the howls online sound the same.
I agree, man!!! Keep up the good work!!!
The "fear of change" thing was very real. D&D 3.5 had a TON of books, so many people didn't want a new edition. Also, 4e was very aggressive with the changes, and the new system was also marketed around these changes, so I remember it made a lot of people instantly suspicious. Other than that, a great edition for a more gamey RPG experience.
Im glad I've decided to give 4e a try. Ive read through a good chunk of the three core rulebooks and I can see how everything works together. I keep saying "this might be my favorite edition of D&D." I wont know that until I actually run a game.
I like my rules to read like rules, my fluff to read like fluff and the two be clearly delineated.
4e did this brilliantly with Keywords in bold, IMO the best D&D *Game*.
That said, the lore was... not good, spectacularly so.
I understand that there are some good ideas in 4e, and I steal those for my 5e games, but if 4e was really this underrated amazing gem of a game, why did the player base split so dramatically that Paizo was able to steal away such a large portion of the player base? IMO that massive split is the smoking gun evidence that 4e was not a good edition, or the player base would not have split so dramatically. 4e was not the game that the most people wanted.
That logic presupposes that the only reason people would stop playing a game is because of the game itself. But we can look at what is happening with D&D today to see that people shift allegiances for many reasons that have nothing to do with the game.
In the two years leading up to the release of 4e, Wizards started to bring all of the D&D products back in house. When Paizo lost their contract for Dragon and Dungeon magazines, they had a choice of either folding as a company or making their own game. Many other companies had to make similar choices as Wizards moved toward taking back ownership of all D&D content.
In 2008, Wizards introduced a super-restrictive Game System License for 4e instead of continuing the OGL. Many creators did not want to live by the terms in that license so they instead kept publishing for 3.5 or switched over to Pathfinder once it was released or made their own rules.
And the critical component for 4e was to be the introduction of online digital tools including a virtual table top. What we got was clunky and the VTT never made it past an alpha release. But even then, those that used D&D Insider (including myself) actually thought it was a pretty good tool at the time. It wouldn't stack up today, but 12 years ago it was pretty good.
Over the past year, Wizards has begun to cancel contracts with third-party partners. They tried to push out a new, more restrictive, game license. And they are developing their own digital tools with the hopes of pulling all that money away from third-parties.
We can see how the community has responded. When I ask poll questions about D&D (any version), most of the responses have nothing to do with the game itself and everything to do with a disdain for what Wizards of the Coast is doing from the business side.
This is the exact same stuff that happened in 2008. It is like Wizards is literally following that playbook to the letter.
I am by no means saying that 4e was perfect. As with every edition, it has good stuff and bad stuff and it is not for everyone. But the reviews at the time, even a year later, were actually very high on the game. As we are seeing today, the reason people are leaving D&D is less about the game and more about their frustration over WotCs business practices.
And that is not factoring in other things such as the fact that some people did not want to have to buy more core rulebooks for the third time in eight years. Or that many computers at the time couldn't run the VTT even if it made it to public release. Or, to your point, no matter how good the game was, maybe people just did not want to change.
The bottom line is that the quality of the game itself is just one of many factors that play into how well a game performs.
And when someone makes a decision to move in a different direction, there is a tendency to want to diminish the thing they left behind as a rationalization for their decision.
2008
People got frustrated with how WotC was doing business and jumped ship to other games. To justify that choice, they amplified every problem they had with 4e and it became the scapegoat for WotCs problems.
2023
People have gotten frustrated with how WotC is doing business and are jumping ship to other games. To justify that choice, every problem they have with 5e is being amplified as a symbol of their problems with WotC.
Thanks for the feedback. if you made it this far into my response, I appreciate you even more. 🙂
I actually moved away from 5e before the OGL debacle - because I found it hard to balance encounters (a problem I never encountered in 4e). Sadly I drifted from 4e because I listened to the 'nay-sayers' without a critical eye.@@oldegreybeard
"If this game is so good, why did the publisher piss everyone off with incredibly scummy business practices, causing the player base to shift over to another game made by another developer that is behaving much better?"
There are way, *way* more factors involved in why some people decided not to play 4e
Some people didn’t like what WotC did with the lore, the changes to classes, the updates to licensing and 3rd party creators
Literally none of that has anything to do with how good the *game* was, those are personally preferences that some people hold so closely too their heart that anything less is “garbage”
The **game** was good, some of the things that happened around it where not appreciated by everyone
What one also should not forget is that Paizo had a lot of fans in D&D with their adventures etc. so them going away would take some fans with them. Also with PAthfinder people would not need to learn a new system and could for a big part keep using their 3.5 material.