What went wrong?

System was OK and LMoP came soon enough to save it.

5e had the benefit of being utterly inoffensive, so it avoided a lot of criticism on that front. 4e, meanwhile, ruffled a lot of feathers, so the failings were far more significant.

You can't just blame its failure on bad marketing.

At some point you have to recognise that the system is fundementally flawed.

It isn't, though.

The base system is really damn good. It had a lot of small niggling issues here and there, but the foundation was a lot more solid than 3.5's. The reason people disliked it wasn't the actual flaws of the system, it was just that it was too different from what they were used to.

>PoL?
Only officially released by a third party. The Nentir Vale stuff was scattered all over the place, making it hard to read up on.

Sure. After all, it is still dnd made by wizards, so there are tons of fundamental flaws. But it is by far the least fundamentally flawed edition of dnd put out by wotc.

That is a flaw in and of itself.

If it was different in a better way then it would have been lauded. Instead it was harshly criticised from day 1.

Different doesn't always mean better. 4e is a good example of this.

The initial 4E module was on a whole 'nother level of bad, but yes, and the difference between 4E and 5E is that 4E toned down everything I hated about it when it came out while everything I hated about 5E is still fucking there over 2 years later.

Nice bait.

4e was better than 3.5, though.

>opinions

Most people seem to disagree with you.

100% serious. 4e was the best edition of dnd in the last 20 years.

>If it was different in a better way then it would have been lauded.
Bullshit, 3.0 was different from 2E in buttfuck retarded ways and it still got lauded.

seeExcept it was better than 2.0 in every way.

See

You're the only one who cares about popularity contests.

Full attacks.

>Except it was better than 2.0 in every way.
Apart from the bit where WotC changed things without bothering to check if their new stuff worked properly.

>Except it was better than 2.0 in every way.

Oh god no. A 2e Fighter and a 3.0 Fighter are on entirely different levels and not on a good way for the 3.0 fighter. 2e fighters actually had good saves, for instance.

I don't know about that. I'm noticing a lot more people ditching 5e lately, because they're so bored with it. 4eg is coming back to tg. I think the shiny is wearing off and people are realizing what they were missing.

Anyways >muh popularity contest.

Nice b8. If popularity determined objective truth, Hillary would have been the best presidential caudate in the race.

And didn't have to sit in the same spot whenever he wanted to attack more than once a round.

And didn't specifically have to use two handed weapons or be completely and utterly useless.

And actually got more HP than most other classes in a game where save or lose wasn't as rampant, rather than being stretched thin between 4 stats while everyone else gets the full benefit from Constitution.

And got a unique mechanic that actually MEANT SOMETHING instead of "lol you hit 5% more often and do maybe 10% more damage per hit than a Barbarian that isn't raging, oh and most of those feats are fucking useless".

People defending 4e are delusional.

It was an objectively horrible MMO RPG conversion of D&D to the tabletop that singlehandedly almost killed the D&D franchise and led to the rise of Pathfinder which has encroached significantly on D&D's market share.

WotC will likely never recover from the disaster that was 4e.

>Skill system made roleplay difficult at a glance

This is one of the complaints that I hear all the time about 4e and I still don't get it. Actual roleplaying has nothing to do with the ruleset of any particular game. There is nothing in 4ed that is stops you from doing roleplaying and there is nothing that says you can't use your abilities in a creative way.

Shit even the complaint in that image is fucking dumb that you can't do anything unless it is explicitly laid out as a ability in the book. If you are the kind of player who has to follow everything as it is written in the rules and can never deviate from that then the one at fault is you not the game.

As a side note, the complaint that it is "Too easy" (Again going from the image) is fucking retarded. Whilst I will admit 4e has a lot of problems (mostly to do with ability bloat beyond 5th level so combats become unbearably drawn out.) One of it's biggest strengths is how welcoming it is to new players. Shit it was one of the first Tabletop games I ever played and whilst I can see the problems now it was very easy to pick up and play.

Looking at that image I really cannot tell if that shit is supposed to be legit or is just trolling.

I don't mind 5e but the issue with it is also it's greatest strength.

It's not bad, it's 'Classic D&D' and plays it very safe if you wanna go with fighting men and mages in a dungeon. It's weakness is also that, however.

It doesn't feel very versatile (The Ebberon test stuff they put out really rubbed a lot of people the wrong way for completely fucking up the most iconic class in the setting) and by going with the safe option, it's kinda left itself a little bland. It tastes like D&D but within that, 5e itself has little taste and no real attempts at innovation.

I'm happy to play 5e but it's not going to be my first choice for a game unless I just wanna get newbies into the basic idea of D&D.

>MMO RPG

Which parts of it were MMO? It has no aggro mechanic and very limited in-battle healing, both of which are very center stage in most MMOs.

>No concrete campaign setting.
Literally the best thing about it

>Spellplague.
It's a terrible thing to change an existing campaign setting like that. I agree.

>Skill system made roleplay difficult
Same skill system used in other games.

Even if skill challenges can work okay in theory, there's still no reason to have them in there rather than simply have the GM narrate bits of progress whenever you succeed on a regular old skill check.
Committing to a particular number of successes/failures ahead of time causes more trouble than the subtle issue of "the GM might ask for one roll too much or too little compared to some other situation and that feels slightly weird when you think really hard about it"

>marketing disaster
It certainly turned fans of D&D against it in a big way.

I heard that Mines of Phandelver or whatever was breddy gud.

---
My answer to this would probably be "They called it D&D".
It's such a large shift from the previous development of the game.

- On the aesthetic side it eschews many iconic elements (not the least of which are many entries from the D&D spell list, but also the interpretation of various character classes, etc.) and goes for a more cartoony art style that reinforces fantasy themes with much much more magic everywhere than previously. This is a stretch, and is somewhat bold on its own - but the sort of thing a sequel (!) could get away with if it wasn't...

- From a design perspective, an entirely different game. The existence and reliance on power cards, and the level of specificity demanded by them and the game rules, shifted the focus dramatically - from (especially prior to 3.5e and Pathfinder) fictional descriptions of your character's actions, to explicitly using one pre-baked idea "overhead slash!" over another "bull rush!".
Imagination in combat had always been under siege from those that wanted to play a tactical wargame with strict rules. 4e WAS that.

What's the bottom bar? B/X?

care to source that graph freindo?

also
>It was an subjectively horrible MMO RPG

fixed that for you

>From a design perspective, an entirely different game. The existence and reliance on power cards, and the level of specificity demanded by them and the game rules, shifted the focus dramatically - from (especially prior to 3.5e and Pathfinder) fictional descriptions of your character's actions, to explicitly using one pre-baked idea "overhead slash!" over another "bull rush!".
Imagination in combat had always been under siege from those that wanted to play a tactical wargame with strict rules. 4e WAS that.

I've never really found this when playing 4e. The abilities are all relatively vague, giving you a few narrative cues and a mechanical effect, but you can fluff them almost any number of ways. I guess the difficulty there is disassociating your specific mechanical options from specific in character actions, but I've never really had an issue with that.

Powers. Everyone has exactly the same number of skills on "cooldowns". That's straight from video games.

>It's a terrible thing to change an existing campaign setting like that. I agree.

Mind you: This shit happens for Forgotten realms every edition change.

I mean, this isn't even the FIRST time they killed Mystra during an edition change. The Time of Troubles was kinda a thing that reshaped the map entirely.

As we all know, Final Fantasy Tactics is the best MMO ever made.

Except if you ever played it you know that's total horseshit and you should feel bad for repeating ignorant bullshit you heard third hand from someone else who either didn't know or was straight up lying.

well why would they ever try to innovate ever again when everyone had a shit fit when they tried it before?

>Even if skill challenges can work okay in theory, there's still no reason to have them in there rather than simply have the GM narrate bits of progress whenever you succeed on a regular old skill check.
>Committing to a particular number of successes/failures ahead of time causes more trouble than the subtle issue of "the GM might ask for one roll too much or too little compared to some other situation and that feels slightly weird when you think really hard about it"

The players shouldn't think hard about it though, since they shouldn't even know they are in a skill challenge.

You mean the stuff that was directly ripped from prior editions of D&D? The only difference is that it was standardized.

It's also worth mentioning the playtests, which were full of really awesome and interesting, innovative ideas... That were steadily removed with each successive playtest packet, because the surveys were mostly filled out by old school 3.5 fans who rated absolutely anything novel or interesting as low as possible every time and basically shouted at the dev team until they removed it. It was fucking depressing. The Dragon Sorceror in the playtest packets was so damn cool.

There we go. This is what went wrong.

4e wasn't FFT enough.

The most MMO-esque thing about 4e was the fact that it had a subscription service. Sure, it was optional, but more or less every 4e group had at least one subscription among them.

If it plays like a video game, it plays like Final Fantasy Tactics. And that had no multiplayer whatsoever.

FFT had really stupid hotseat multiplayer if you enabled the debug menu.

From what i've heard, 4e sold rather well until Essentials came out. But I have no source.

The biggest issues that hit 4e early on were the murder suicide of the online guy, and, WOTC getting pissy about piracy and saying bye bye pdfs.

Delusional 4ies.

Enjoy playing your tabletop WoW where everything is homogenised and all creativity on the player's part is thrown out the window. Assuming anyone actually still plays that garbage of course.

>and all creativity on the player's part is thrown out the window
what does that even mean?

It means he clearly saw multiple abilities and completely turned off his brain rather than going 'Now that I have these multiple options, how can I use them creatively'.

If you can be creative with a 3.5 spell you can be creative with a 4e power.

>Enjoy playing your tabletop WoW

Thanks, I will.

>The biggest issues that hit 4e early on were the murder suicide of the online guy, and, WOTC getting pissy about piracy and saying bye bye pdfs.

My god, I forgot about that. Yeah, the piracy panic ended up really hurting the game. And it seems especially stupid after games like Eclipse Phase have released their core pdfs for free and done well out of it.

>Vancian casting and the tons of once/day abilities = dailies
>ToB maneuvers + the odd once/encounter abilities prior to that like Barbarian rage = encounters
>Reserve feats + Invocations = at-wills
Literally everything was in 3E before it was in 4E.

Should have linked the 3.5 Warcraft books. I mean, 3.5 literally had books for Diablo and Warcraft.

Despite agreeing with pretty much most of the points raised here, I still respect 4e for trying something new instead of sticking with the seventeen billion sacred cows that D&D has become. It just didn't end up a very good roleplaying system as it focused too much on the "tactical combat", alienating even more old players than your typical edition shift.

I wonder how it'd have worked if they had just flat out released it as some sort of a board game.

What really gets me is that they fixed most of the problems with 4e rather quickly.

2 years later, martials are still boring by design in 5e, a and slightly, but objectively worse than casters.

Hasbro.
Shitty players.

>It just didn't end up a very good roleplaying system as it focused too much on the "tactical combat", alienating even more old players than your typical edition shift.

See. this is something I seriously question. 4e didn't really have anything LESS for roleplaying than 3.5. If anything, it was better as it's skill system was much more functional than 3.5s where half the skills were useless and half the remaining ones could be safely replaced with a spell.

That is a 3.5 Warcraft book you wally. The WoW RPG is effectively the Warcraft RPG, second edition.

2e had the Diablo book, 3e was Diablo II.

It's a meme i'll never get.

I've had some of my most entertaining RP experiences in 4e.

Ah, my bad. Sorry, I thought that was the separate WoW RPG.

I am evidently not smart this hour (Or any hour)

>mfw i still love 4e and would love to go back to playing my kobold warlord

in 17-18 years of playing D&D, he was still the most fun I ever had with any character

My reasoning for not buying into it is that it was way too much like 3e. I'm still puzzled as to how people don't see that the differences are very shallow.

>I thought that was the separate WoW RPG.
It is. The WoW RPG was the 3.5 edition of the Warcraft RPG.

Skill challenges sucked.

People are still using the day 1 arguments though. Most people made their first impression and imo only people who liked what they saw stuck around to see the improvements.

I know all of of the standard advice given about skill challenges. You misunderstand what I'm trying to compare.

My point is.
1) The alternative to skill challenges is just using skill checks normally, giving a bit of progress (or explaining what goes wrong) as feedback after each roll. Eventually they'll have made it or fucked it up.

2) The only problem with that compared to skill challenges (which come with their own irritations frustrations even if implemented the best possible way, following all of the advice, using the newest rules and difficulty tables,) it's every so slightly less strictly standardized. But that's very little gain for something so cumbersome.

What's gonna happen? Is some player gonna go "why did we find the exit to the mysterious forest after 3 successes, when we already found the exit to the cave of despair, which was clearly more trecherous, after 2 successes and 1 failure. This is bullshit! Someone invent a system to track this stuff!"

That's what I mean here I hated 4E on release so much. But you know what WotC did? They constantly introduced more interesting powers, classes, and feats that made boring classes like Warlock suddenly become amazing while adding amazing-from-the-beginning classes like Swordmage and Invoker. They took a hatchet to the defense bloat that plagued Paragon and Epic tiers that meant you were going to hit literally less than half of the time without a Warlord babysitting you by lowering it and introducing Expertise feats - and countered the similar HP issue by nuking Solo monster HP and introducing more and better damage feat and power support. Monster damage shot up around MM3 so that fights weren't a tedious slugfest that was won before the fight even started but took 5 rounds to complete anyways. Skill powers happened.

Not a single one of my issues with 5E will *ever* be fixed by anything other than an entire group agreeing with my perspective and houseruling the game. I don't consider that acceptable.

fuck warlord was such a fun class.

Was really hoping they'd get into 5e somehow but the closest we get is the battlemaster and its shit.

Please stop engaging the troll. You will only encourage him.

He didn't mention skill challenges though

But they did suck

I still feel so depressed at the fucking comments on Warlord during the 5e playtests. How they felt martial healing didn't make sense but they could maybe include some sort of combat medic.

It's like... You fucking assclowns, read your own system. You straight up say HP is an abstract measure which includes the will to keep fighting. That being the case, Warlord style martial healing makes perfect fucking sense and you're just dragging your ass because you don't like it personally. God, it was infuriating.

I wish every person that brings up that complaint was a troll

>Skill challenges sucked.

Yeah but the base skill system worked fine. If we brought in 'Subsystems in 3.5 that sucked' we could basically find 1 from every single book.

Skill challenges are a separate system from the normal skill check system, which is functionally and implementationally almost identical to every other version of D&D.
It's also, even if you do want to use it, only occasionally used.Most published adventures had maybe one or two.

Many groups, certainly most groups in early 4e, played entirely without it.

When it came out, it was shoddy, redundant and pointless. People who still play 4e and who wanted to give it a fair shake have found that if you use the newest version in a certain way, it's now merely redundant and pointless.

should the class itself be slowly converted to 5e? i'd be willing to take a crack at my fav class
I actually want to do it to the Assassin class too that was in dragon magazine

Oops replied to the wrong post.

>2 years later, martials are still boring by design in 5e, a and slightly, but objectively worse than casters.

Martials are always more boring than casters since all martials are good at is combat and even then the only thing they can do is hit things with their sword.

Casters just have more variety by design. They're more interesting and varied due to the fact that spells can produce so many different effects. You can't charm someone or polymorph with your sword.

Yeah that's exactly how I felt.
You can't honestly support the anti-Warlord sentiment without conflating HP with meat points. But that has actually never been true in D&D. Not in old school D&D versions.

>What's gonna happen? Is some player gonna go "why did we find the exit to the mysterious forest after 3 successes, when we already found the exit to the cave of despair, which was clearly more trecherous, after 2 successes and 1 failure. This is bullshit! Someone invent a system to track this stuff!"

This makes it seem like you are misunderstanding all the advice given, or haven't heard the good ones. Skill challenges are a framing device for the DM.

Let's say your guys encounter a bunch of bandits, but both sides are wary of engaging. How many skill rolls do you need to get out of this without trouble? Progress is hard to gauge here. Skill challenges simply gives you a good framework to work with, in situations like this.

And also for chases or other possibly strategic/gamey stuff. Many of the examples in DMG2 could be pretty good imo if tweaked a bit.

They're either a troll or an idiot, either way they won't learn no matter how hard you try to teach them.

>You can't charm someone with your sword.

I dunno, I've watched enough Errol Flynn movies to dispute that.

It's not a troll. In 4e you can't do anything outside of the box. Every round all you do is select one of your 20 different MMO powers to use. It's fucking hilarious that retards still defend this shit.

So... what are the improvised action tables for?

>If we brought in 'Subsystems in 3.5 that sucked' we could basically find 1 from every single book.

Agreed.

I suppose I was excited about the idea of it and frustrated with the implementation in practice.

Good question since nobody ever uses them.

Except the 4e core books had more support for improvised actions than 3.5 ever did. This literally makes no sense and is factually untrue.

I did.

Yes, absolutely. And more importantly, you should post progress updates on Veeky Forums, because I don't know you or whether you can do a good job, but I know that if you do a good one I'll want to see it, and if you do a bad job I'll want to see it spur others into creating and hopefully posting their own improved versions of it.

A good place to direct your attention to begin with, is the Battlemaster trick that lets you make an ally attack by spending their reaction or somesuch.
You probably want a core feature of the class to be able to do a better version of that (I think it has an arbitrary skill check you need to do; perhaps nix that.)

>improvise action in 3.5
>pick two: -4 penalty, eat AoO, use stat check instead of skill check
>any one of which is crippling

yeah your right and I fucking hate how in other editions all a warrior can do is use his hit things with his sword and literally nothing else because the book does explicitly tell me to do those things ability to be creative

well i'll have to slowly start as i'm also homebrewing a setting (and might go well as the 'special' class of the setting, like how FR had sword mages, and such.) anyways off to work, have fun Veeky Forums

I don't understand martialfags complaining about this.

At character creation you have the choice between a mundane fighting man who does nothing except hit things with his sword and a magic man who has access to an entire arsenal of cool and interesting effects.

You pick the fighting man and complain that you can't do all the stuff that the magic man can.

What do you expect a fighter to do besides hit things with his sword? Serious question.

If that chart is millions sold, it's objectively false.
In fact, it reads like a pure delusion, since none of those numbers are even close to accurate.

>What do you expect a fighter to do besides hit things with his sword? Serious question.

Shit you see in an Errol Flynn or Zorro movie?

>(...) seem like you are (...)
No I assure you I'm a regular in those threads. I probably read and posted in most of the threads or forum posts that figured a lot of this stuff out.

>How many skill rolls do you need to get out of this without trouble? Progress is hard to gauge here.
It is not difficult to gauge at all if you actually role play the social encounter. You just describe who is saying what, then have people make Diplomacy/Intimidate/Deception/Insight/Whatever checks as necessary and describe what happens as a result.

It's actually the same with chases.

Anything people will typically use skill checks for can be approached this way, no problem.

Don't feed the troll user. He's just repeating the ridiculous bullshit from the same martial vs caster thread. Which is funny, because 4e showed that it doesn't need to be true even in D&D. Entirely mundane effects like a lot of the skill powers still let non-magical do awesome and useful things out of combat just as much as magic users.

yeah you're right and I fucking hate how in other editions all a warrior can do is use his "hit things with his sword" ability and can do literally nothing else because the book does not explicitly tell me to do those things so my ability to be "creative" is stolen away from me.

(Fuck I completely fucked that up the first time around. Had to fix it)