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  • I've been playing DND since first edition. When my group got to 4e we jumped on eagerly, then dropped it like a hot potato.

    Why?

    It wasn't a bad system, but up till then DND felt like an evolution and 4e felt.. different. There were a bunch of undocumented patterns that had been in the rule set for a very long time, strategies, concepts, that just.. broke under the new ruleset.

    It felt alien. If we had wanted a different system we would have gone looking and found one already. It's like ordering chocolate ice cream and being given lemon all the while insisting it is still chocolate.

    So we jumped to Pathfinder, played around with 5e (which reclaimed a lot of that lineage), and finally really got into Pathfinder 2, which had largely felt true to that lineage all along.

    I'd love to say 4e could have flourished if they had billed it as a sister system instead of a replacement, but in all honesty it probably would have had a lot slower growth than hasbro wanted. There were already other competitors and what hasbro really wanted was to refresh the market with the need to replace your set to have (buy) the current version.

  • 4E is good to steal concepts and ideas from such as minions. You should always steal. No one will know except for that voice in your head.

  • 4e didn't deserve the reputation it got. Many people who frankly don't know what they're talking about jumped on the "it's an MMO" train for upvotes and feelings of in-group belonging. It's a recurring problem with humans- they can just say anything.

    I personally didn't play it much because around when it came out I wasn't interested in fantasy combat games, but was spending time with the whitewolf games instead.

    • I'm going to push back on this. I was not super online at that age, but I did play WoW, and I specifically remember feeling like it was playing into the WoW mania of the day. The aggro mechanic, while not literally taunt, was clearly made to function like a taunt. The codification of roles felt similar to the tank/DPS/healer with CC being moved to a role. The way abilities between martials and caster were unified bled the line between magic and ability in ways that felt similar to MMOs.

      More than anything for me was that it felt like the system was only for combat in a way that 3.5 didn't. Obviously DnD in any edition has been a combat focused system, but the way it was systematized in 4e was a drastic step away from the rulings not rules mindset that makes TTRPGs feel more alive than video games. With that flexibility stripped on the systems level, it felt like playing a video game with your friends, and the analog for that at the time was MMOs.

      • I don't remember any aggro mechanic from 4e. Do you mean the "marked" stuff? I remember that being pretty interesting and much better than 5e's "lol they just walk around the fighter" lack of rules.

        The way abilities between martials and caster were unified bled the line between magic and ability in ways that felt similar to MMOs.

        You're entitled to your opinion, of course, but I always found D&D's "linear fighters quadratic casters" to be kind of garbage. I do not find "wizards can rewrite reality, but fighters can swing their sword three times" to be interesting or satisfying. Giving all classes fun stuff to do is significantly cooler, and comparing it to MMOs feels like a non sequitur. Many games give cool powers to various archetypes. Limiting the cool shit to half the classes is legacy weirdness.

        More than anything for me was that it felt like the system was only for combat in a way that 3.5 didn’t. Obviously DnD in any edition has been a combat focused system, but the way it was systematized in 4e was a drastic step away from the rulings not rules mindset that makes TTRPGs feel more alive than video games. With that flexibility stripped on the systems level, it felt like playing a video game with your friends, and the analog for that at the time was MMOs.

        Skill challenges were pretty cool, if I recall. That was a non-combat system that I don't believe was in 3e. I often see people accidentally reinventing them in 5e, because they want some sort of system for non-combat challenges.

        I kind of despise OSR games, so "rulings not rules" reflexively makes my skin crawl. You know what I absolutely do not want in my games? Today my character can climb a wall because the GM is in a good mood, and tomorrow that same wall is impossible because his boss chewed him out at work.

        That's not to say I want specific rules for every situation, but the "GM is the absolute authority" is my ick. Also my ick: not even trying to be consistent across scenes. The whole condescending attitude is just awful.

        Anyway. I don't even remember 4e being more rules-y than other editions, but I admittedly only played like two campaigns of it, once with new players and once with 3e old-hands. I'd need to see specific sections of the 4e rules that are too rules-y, and how they compare to 5e's implementation.

        5e is missing whole systems, or has barely a skeleton of them (social conflict, metagame currency, degree of success, succeed at a cost, conceding conflict, item and spell crafting, to name a few). Not that 4e had those in spades, but I don't think "5e doesn't even try" is a selling point.

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