Precisely how did Essentials kill 4e?

They promised, essentially, 3.5 but better

They promised monks would be able to compete, they promised clerics and druids having their overwhelming power reduced, they promised more features for classes with dead levels, they promised changes to skill mechanics.

Essentials was just the last nail in the coffin. 4e was killed by bad marketing, angry grognards, the obscenely influential effects of it's predecessor, failed online integration and freakishly bad luck. Esentials was just them admitting they had no faith left in their original product.

Essentials was MEARLS admitting he had no faith left in his product

Heinsoo still seems pretty proud of it

4e fought the good fight and was taken from us too young...

As he should be.
Can't say I'm thrilled by his other work on 13th Age though

4e comes out, and yeah, it's fairly different than 3e, but it does have some cool ideas, there's been a ton of streamlining, it seems much easier to get into and get working with than 3e was.

But a series of flawed decisions, outright mistakes, and actual crimes crippled the game.

Let's address the most tragic: D&D 4e was intended to have, very shortly after launch, an impressive set of online tools: a virtual tabletop with custom design features, a character creator, monster designer, basically everything you would need to play D&D online.

The Senior Manager of Digital Technology Projects, discovered his wife had had an affair, bought a gun, and killed both her and himself.

This crippled the launch of the digital components, with the Virtual Tabletop never being realized, and the other programs being delayed.

One of the flawed decisions that plagued the game: a primary intent of the game was to be easier to get into for new players. Unfortunately, someone decided this should also mean, generally speaking, "easier". As such, the damage dice of monsters, and their health pools were balanced to provide 2 things: first, little risk of actual character death. And second: sufficient time for the players to use several of their "cooler" abilities.

This lead to fights that weren't exciting, because neither side was making appreciable progress. They eventually address this...2 years into the publication history.

Now, this could have been used, with proper marketing, as an upside. The release of D&D 3.5 didn't cripple 3e sales. They could have marketed it as a unlocking of the game's "hard mode" or so forth, releasing "optional upgrades" to the first few monster manuals "for the truly hardcore".

Instead, they just released the monster manual 3, using the new math, and tried to ignore the fact that they screwed up the math the first time.

(cont)

13th Age is a mix of really good ideas and really bad ideas

Which ideas came from which designers is impossible to tell, but I think the power discrepancy between "simple" and "complex" classes is probably Tweet's fault

I think at this point 3.5 might be less bloated and busted than Pathfinder at this point, which I absolutely floors me.

>The Senior Manager of Digital Technology Projects, discovered his wife had had an affair, bought a gun, and killed both her and himself.
Actually, I believe they had divorced, he stalked her for some time, then finally snapped and ended it all

I thought by the point of Essentials it was out of his hands.

It's my understanding, knowing some folks associated with Hasbro, that they had far too high expectations and pretty much every year they weren't met (i.e. every year) they interfered more and more.

There are a lot of good ideas in 4e but they just never seem like they were properly pursued. It felt like one of those movies that the studio starts fucking around with it too much.

>This crippled the launch of the digital components, with the Virtual Tabletop never being realized, and the other programs being delayed.
What upset me the most is that the tabletop was functioning. I used the beta version of that. It worked just fine, and then they just announced they were ending development. It was the only tabletop app that had software to make my voice to sound like half-orc batman. I miss it.

I think it is in part of the "lesson" from 4e was "accessibility = simplicity = sales".

Much lilke 4e, 13th Age harbors some great ideas that just aren't hammered out properly into something really brilliant.

The problem is not that the 13th Age simple classes exist, it's that they are weak

The general power of a 13th Age class almost perfectly matches it's place on the list in the book scaling from simple to complex, with wizards being the most powerful class, and rangers just beating out barbarians for the weakest

>I thought by the point of Essentials it was out of his hands.
Mearls was made lead designer in 2009, a year before Essentials came out. Mearls is a rules-lite and story-focused DM by default, and that shows in Essentials and 5e.

So for an user that completely missed 4e and wants to try it, should I pick up the Essentials stuff?

Despite the hate, everything but the class design is an improvement. Many of the feats are staples for character building, and the expertise feats specifically lessen the pain of the feat taxes. The Monster Vault has the best versions of several monsters and some of the heroes books, like Heroes of the Feywild, have great fluff material.

I just wish someone was there to tell Mearls he can't design a class worth shit

My bad, my brain got confused a sec, had to double check:

It was Heinsoo who started 4e and then went to 13th Age. That's who I was referring to. He had a clear vision and then got interfered with until...

Mearls is the one that rode 4e into the ground and is much to blame for problems with 5e.

Yes, but the classes are really bad

Just... so bad

The 4e generals have a link to a mega collection of all of the 4e books

I don't have the link right now, but I know it exists

Speaking of bad math: the design teams had also somehow not noticed that their progressions were slightly off in regards to player attacks vs monster defense and vice versa: by the time players reached the epic tiers, monster defenses were higher than they had ever been in relation to attack bonuses, and their bonuses were higher than the character defenses.

Now, to be fair, this error was around only around 10%, meaning it could be fixed with a simple "Hey, at every level ending in 5, the characters get a +1 to attacks and defenses" and it would have sorted everything out. Simply release this as part of your "Fortune Favors the Bold" re-release of the maths, and you cover it all up.

Instead, they released feats to cover the gap, which reinforced a continued discussion of all these decisions and the edition as a whole being because "Wizards is greedy".

At this point, 4e's sales are nowhere near 3e's, for all of these reasons and more. So Hasbro and Mearls think "Well, if we make something a little more like 3e, maybe we can sway some of our lost lambs back."

This is what birthed Essentials. And instead of doing what they hoped, it instead gets touted as Wizards recanting/selling out/giving up, in general being counted as the final blow.

So claiming Essentials killed D&D 4e is a vast oversimplification.

For one thing, data is still mixed based on sources for if 4e was a commercial failure, or if it simply wasn't AS successful as Hasbro wanted. Some reports show the only time Pathfinder beat 4e was during a couple months where 4e didn't release anything, others claim it was selling better from the get-go. It's hard to prove either way.

Let's use an over-extended analogy to illustrate my point from a subject I know Veeky Forums loves: sports movies.

Imagine D&D 4e was Rocky Balboa, and this is the equivalent situation: His manager, after years of training Apollo Creed, says he's going to manage Rocky. People start calling him a sell-out, so Rocky's image is a little tarnished by proxy. Creed's son, who Rocky has been training, openly takes his father's side, to the approval of the masses.

Then, two days before the big fight, Adrian kills herself, leaving Rocky to deal with this tragedy, AND the last two days of training, on his own.

Rocky beats Creed, but now Creed's son is making a push for Champion. He knows Rocky's style, so he's making headlines, calling him out. The fans are with him, making Rocky feel alone, isolated.

Eventually, Rocky knows he'll have to fight YC, and knows his Rope-a-dope may not work, so he goes into his next title fight with a more aggressive style, to no real success. He's an older man, he can't box like Young Creed can.

After the fight, he announces his retirement. Normally, it'd be nothing remarkable. He's an older man, faced some tragedies, better to bow out now than lose his dignity later. But the sheer NUMBER of things that went wrong continue to spark conversation for years. Which of the problems were the ones that took him down? The answer is: All of them.

My research shows they had not yet divorced, but were in process of it, initiated when he revealed his knowledge of the affair, and revealed that he had bought a gun. (June 5, literally the day before 4e was released.)

She moved out, and he stalked her for a little over a month, culminating in their deaths. (July 28th)

Surprisingly fitting analogy

This is not the problem with 13th Age's class scaling at all. The classes are actually fairly even with one another... at levels 1 and 2. At level 3 onward, the scaling gets much more dubious.

I go into this further here:
archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/51201312/#51211223

pastebin.com/85Hm56k5

Here, 4e resources

It was a break from the 4e formula and also bad. Accusing Mearls of intentionally trying to kill 4e with it may be a bit of a stretch, but it really fucking shows that he simply did not like the game as it was and wanted to push his own agenda, with the cover story of recapturing the audience they lost to PF.

Unsurprisingly, the fans of 4e didn't like this, and those who disliked 4e either didn't care or considered it vindication.

Weren't the changes to the Forgotten Realms a pretty big hit to their credibility as well? I can't think of anyone that liked those changes.

oh man, they were so bad. Not that FR was great to begin with but still. Conversely, I think 4e had the best default setting out of all editions, "points of light" was pretty cool and left a lot of room open for the DM to make shit up.

>AD&D has been taken over by people who prefer other game systems

Truer words were never spoken. All these fags whining about balance and "traps" and championing 5E like it's the 2nd Coming. Ugh, letting normies into hobbies fucking ruins everything.

Let's be fair, 5e is a pretty big shift away from 3.x and a push towards moving back into the realm of 2e. Which isn't saying much considering that 2e was a big enough change from 1e that it was directly responsible for creating 3e in the first place.

So we're either going to see 6e go full into OSR territory or just become 3.6e.

Didn't Wotc fired many 4e developers each year after its launch?

Also, I don't get why Mearls kept his job, btw.

>6e
It'll have "powered by GURPS" across the bottom the front cover.

>And second: sufficient time for the players to use several of their "cooler" abilities.
You mean it made damage over time effects and status effects that weren't "you are crippled and lose" effective instead of a total waste of time.

The real problem was that you could still do that without having HP at the level 4E did, which later printings, and especially constant damage boosts from better feats and powers adding up over time, proved. Oh, and 5E carried that over, arguably making it worse than it ever was in 4E, while not having the tactical combat that justifies its existence like 4E. Fuck that.

>Oh, and 5E carried that over, arguably making it worse than it ever was in 4E, while not having the tactical combat that justifies its existence like 4E. Fuck that.

This.

5e either needs to tone down on the HP or up the tactical combat back up. It can't really do either without a .5 though.

The frustrating part is that it wasn't in the playtest. I knew something was wrong when it took my Fighter 5 swings to kill an ogre, but it really didn't click until I ran the math and found out that 5E Fighters were less effective against 5E monsters than all Strikers but the Assassin and Vampire. What in the fuck would possess you to do that?

You forgot the insulting PR speeches they made at events which customers of course took personally, and the clawback of access to all legally purchased PDFs, which some more of us took personally.

And oh god is 4e Faerun terrible.

It was a confluence of bad business decisions and terrible PR.

So I spent 4e avoiding spending money on them, and instead bought games from other publishers and buying older D&D books on eBay. When the subject came up, I would say why.

There were lots of reasons, without even touching on how I felt about the game mechanics.

I heard from many others who had similar experiences.

Wizbro shat the bed.

4e Faerun is terrible, but 4e Dark Sun is on par with 2e Dark Sun and 4e Eberron is the best Eberron out there. Not to mention the points of light setting, which is surprisngly rich.

This. They shat on Forgotten Realms and fucked it over to 'modernize it' or whatever, destroying it's unique cosmology and such to make it more like PoLand when PoLand was pretty much perfect.

It should be noted that Kieth Baker, guy who made Eberron, loved 4e and I think he still uses it for his home games...

4e dark sun is okay, and I've heard 4e Eberron is better than 3e. I hated PoL and 4e Faerun though.

It wasn't just FR. A lot of people including myself took the removal of the Great Wheel pretty hard.

I'll have to confess to a mild amount of user bias in regards to that:

While you are correct, I was never a particularly big fan of the Forgotten Realms lore, and didn't actually start playing 4e until long after that was relevant, so I just completely forgot it.

But yes, one of the first product lines launched in 4e MASSIVELY changed a well-beloved setting in ways not generally approved of, and that definitely didn't help with their "They're ruining the spirit of D&D!" detractors

I'd argue that most of your damage over time and status effects were part and parcel of your "cooler" abilities.

And, arguably, damage over time effects and so on gain MORE power the less HP an enemy has, since it represents a longer proportion spent impaired.

I'd argue that a lot of things like "5 ongoing damage (save ends)" DIDN'T feel effective in vanilla 4e because of the increased health pools, and the likelihood of a save.

But I do see your point in regards to letting those abilities be showcased. Slowing a monster, for instance, doesn't mean anything if it dies in the first round.

No one knows why Mearls has a job. Especially anyone who plays 5e. Realistically he should be blacklisted from ever working in TTRPGs again, but sadly it isn't the case.

The man is a bigger hack than fucking Monte Cook.

It's insane to look at Eberron actually

The setting was custom built for 3e, and yet it fits so perfectly with 4e, or at least was adapted so perfectly for 4e, that it looks like it was built for 4e and the 3e version of it is a adaptation

>And, arguably, damage over time effects and so on gain MORE power the less HP an enemy has
What no

If you can kill an enemy quickly without even bothering with damage over time it's 100% worthless to even attempt and classes like Warlock lose their relevance compared to Rangers and especially Rogues as the latter has a similar role setup but does their damage upfront.

>Some reports show the only time Pathfinder beat 4e was during a couple months where 4e didn't release anything, others claim it was selling better from the get-go.
It's AoS vs Fantasy all over again. Grognards will shill and lie till the cows come home to force their narrative on everyone.

Why do you hate PoLand? It's like the perfect setting. Fuck, when I recently ran Curse of Strahd for 5e I started my players out in the Nentir Vale and had them do a few missions there to get them to level 3 fighting down 'creatures of the night' BS to set the mood before the mists rolled in.

Mostly because 4e is actually a fixed 3.5.

I have been saying this, but both 4e and 5e are products of 3.5. 4e took a look at what 3.5 become, and fixed/perfected it, with its tactical combat, and loads of magic items, and high flying action. 5e took a look at what 3.5 was trying/claiming to be, and tried perfecting that.

I think the thing about 4e is kind of funny.

See Eberron wasn't built to be what 3e thought it was. 3e Eborron was built around what 3e ended up being, where magic items are common place and where the ancient wilds hide untold riches.

4e though as a system was built around what 3e was and making that work as intended and so made Eberron more fitting for the system, as well as adopting the custom rule-hacks the setting had for 3.5 and making them core.

I considered bringing up the flawed attitudes present in the early 4e PR and marketing, but I didn't want to do that without producing evidence, and when my first google search didn't grab me anything quickly enough, I decided it wasn't worth discussing.

I will say that I personally was put-off by the edition early on, and didn't actually play it until roughly 2 years after its release. Once I did, I actually found I liked it well enough, and played in several campaigns.

In the end, I slightly prefer it to 3rd edition, and maybe even 5e, but fully understand if you never felt like trying it, or didn't like it.

It was perhaps the perfect example of a mishandled edition release. It's hard to think of how much more could possibly go wrong.

Personally, I liked every change they made to the FR, and it was their backpedaling that hurt it the most. A massive plague goes across the multiverse and simplifies everything for better games and making it not a clusterfuck of lore noone cares about... But every named character survived because people complained. Made it look like shit desu.

But rogue damage over time abilities are the best damage over time abilities in the game

Bloodbath + brutal wound + bleeding backstab + backstabber deals 25.5 ongoing damage on average at level 11, when most classes are extremely lucky if they can deal 10 ongoing damage

Monte cook writes good adventures, even if his rules aren't great. Ptolus is fantastic. Better if you downplay the chaositech though.

But yeah. No idea why Mearls is still employed.

You're talking about HP bloat, yeah? How many turns do you think enemies should last? Is damage from monsters also off?

I want either a detailed setting like FR, or no setting at all, and I'll make shit up (down to the races allowed).

I don't like vague partial-settings.

I hate the nwod setting too.

So if I wanted to play 4e nowadays, how would I go about it? Essentials, but using the classes from the initial core books?

funin.space

The thing about PoL is that it is a full setting

Just a difficult to handle full setting because the full details of the setting are spread across a whole bunch of books rather than all being put together in one place

Matter of opinion.

4e is t4 3.5 with a shortage of utility abilities, and more emphasis on the poorly explained n/time period abilities that I tolerated but disliked in 3.x.

It's weaker than 3.x mages, and stronger than 3.x fighters.

As a result, it doesn't do what mage players like, and fighter fans complain about "muh everyone is a wizard".

5e is pretty much a watered down 3.5 to my eyes

Thanks, that site seems great, but I require a bit of context. Am I supposed to use this with the 4e base rules?

Yes.

Thanks. Now on to convincing some folks.

Lots of people who played 3.5 first thought that. I think it looks a lot like a modernized 2e. That doesn't necessarily mean good, but it does mean easier to get into, with clean editing and more detailed and consistent rules. And then modern 'enhancements' like Advantage for that narrative feel.

>AoShills actually think their steaming pile has longevity.

The only difference between 4e D&D and AoS is that WotC actually had the balls to scrap their abortion and start over after only 4 years. Enjoy shoveling down excrement for the next 30 years.

Gotcha covered! Some guy over at the Piazza has trawled every 4e book, magazine, etc and put this together

thepiazza.org.uk/bb/viewtopic.php?f=72&t=15210

I feel like you're misrepresenting/misunderstanding the options.

Here's the point I was making:

Let's say your rogue does an average of 10 dpr.

My fighter has 7.5 dpr, but has a daily that inflicts 5 ongoing damage.

Sure, my ability is useless against any enemy with, say, 51 or lower health, since it will die in 3 turns, and my extra damage won't change that.

But against an enemy with, say 100 health, opening with my daily will let us kill the creature in 5 turns rather than 6 (assuming it continually fails/there is no save)

The problem is that base 4e started with that monster set at 200 health, expecting us to enjoy that it took us 2 fewer rounds with all of my bonus damage.

Sure, my DoT did more damage, and even trimmed an extra round off the time, but the damage it was dealing was a bigger proportion of the enemy's health at 100.

I'm not saying high-health enemies didn't have their place, but there's a reason the designers of the game say 'Yeah, you can just halve all the health totals published before MM3"

Fucked up cosmology. I was furious when I first read the description, but tried to keep an open mind and get into it nonetheless. Nope. Primitive shit. Give me back old Forgotten Realms any day of the week.

This doesn't make any sense, does it really? There's very little correspondence between fantasy lore and rule set.

You're the abortion, please scrap yourself away from my eyes.

Mearls writes good fluff. He's clearly a better DM than game designer

I did eventually try it for a 1 yr campaign.

I liked it less than PF. Both lower power, and I hated the scarcity of flexible utility powers, and how far separated the game mechanics felt from the in-character setting.

It's got a bit of a FFT feel to it, but not close enough that I'd actually want to use it for that FFT campaign I've always wanted to play/run.

In 5E terms? For anything that's appropriate to fight short of a boss, 2 rounds in a 1v1 against a Fighter who's not spending their resources, 3 if the Fighter's unlucky, maybe 1 if the Fighter crits with every attack. If the Fighter goes all in on them, they should drop dead in a single round in all but the worst case scenario of luck.
>Is damage from monsters also off?
No. There's a discrepancy between monster HP/damage and player HP/damage that I noted as soon as the first adventure out. Consider what the bugbear can do to a PC of the level you are when you get to him in a single attack.

My group simply houseruled you got 2 utility powers when they came up but you had to go at least 2 rounds of combat between using them unless you spend your action point.

Worked fine with my group and remember, you never really retrain them except on the levels where you can go back and change them (I think it was every 4 levels you were allowed to change your powers if you wanted to, not sure) so with 2 rather than 1 you had far more versatility.

I hated 3.5 cosmology. 4e cosmos was a breath of fresh air

Agreed.

Man I don't know, they made some aide races and monsters kind of retarded in 5e, like Gnolls.

Whatever you say GW

They nuked the continent, and kept the novel characters. But yes.

4e Faerun was designed in a way that excised everything people liked about the setting, while hanging onto a handful of the most powerful novel characters to keep novel characters around. Presumably in hopes of attracting more new fans than they discarded.

5e rollbacks made Fr playable again, but more diminished than it's ever been before 4e. The rollback didn't go nearly far enough. They should have straight up forked the timeline around 1374, and made 4e into a "what if".

4e was a stillborn.
The game had is math wrong and they fixed it only after years.
Most people I know don’t know how to use Skills Challenges even now. And most of them were laugable at best from a mathematical point of view.
It didn’t killed enough sacred cow, just enough to make people angry but not enough to make people think different.
The whole PDF issue was ridiculous, especially since an idiot and retarded like Steve Jackson sell is GURPS shit without even putting a watermark there. And they took away my Rules Cyclopedia and Red Box PDF too. For frag sake you don’t even sell that thing anymore.
The Game has a clear GNS design, it was Gamist and yet the Fucking Dungeon Master books were filled to the brim of second generation shit. Be Forge or not be Forge don’t try putting your foot in two different kind of shoes.
Dragonborn boobs.

Be careful what you're saying, that means he's basically Gygax.

>Dragonborn boobs.

I think it looks like 3.5e with better balance, and action economy that isn't dogshit.

Which is to say, I think it looks like the way some groups played AD&D.

>Change is always hated. And so the cycle continued

I still remember some of the batshit letters at the end of 2E

Multiclass Monk/Sorcerers would be the best most OP characters

On turn 1, everybody would spend their action on "refocus" to get the highest initiative

Letting Clerics use other spells to heal would turn Cleric super OP
(OK that one kind of happened but not by freeing up heal slots)

>I hated the scarcity of flexible utility powers
What qualifies as this? They had lists and lists of class/skill based utility powers, and the only thing I can think of equivalent to other editions exists in rituals and in just using skills. You can't argue this gave martials somehow less utility

The action economy is pretty shitty in 5e.
>shared actions

>4e is t4 3.5 with a shortage of utility abilities, and more emphasis on the poorly explained n/time period abilities that I tolerated but disliked in 3.x.

By 3.5 tiers, 4e classes are pretty smack dab middle of t3. Classes can all handle themselves in combat and have access to ample non-combat options (not in the least because 4e skill system doesn't suck or get bypassed/cockblocked by spells or weirdly specific limits placed on them). They are basically all bard/BoNS tier.

It looks like a more balanced core 3.5.

>I considered bringing up the flawed attitudes present in the early 4e PR and marketing

The "Races and Classes" book preview ended Wotc D&D for me.
The designers carefully explained their focus on stuff I don't care about, their fixes on things that were not a problem for me, the wrong fixes on problematic stuff, and the divergent taste for specific flavours.

Is comically catastrophic.

There's some good, some bad. Even the gnolls are good if you're looking to fill the always evil race slot.
Mearls did primal power and heroes of the feywild, so I can't believe he's all bad

>especially since an idiot and retarded like Steve Jackson sell is GURPS shit without even putting a watermark there
I'm usually pretty good at deciphering low IQ posts, but this is beyond my skill level.

>I hated 3.5 cosmology. 4e cosmos was a breath of fresh air

The Planescape cosmology was a very *specific* cosmology that didn't really lend itself well to a more grounded style.

This doesn't make Planescape *bad* - I have played many good games that used this cosmology - but it does mean that the type of games you could play in pre-4E cosmology was more limited.

4E was much better for what I'd call "traditional fantasy."

Do you mean group skill checks?
Those work fine if you use them only when they make sense; that is, when the group succeeds or fails as a whole.

They're best used sparingly, but my DM has done some cool things with them, like let the two high stealth guys in the party "scout out a route" for the rest of us to use, thus allowing the party to actually sneak into a place together despite having very different dex scores.
Not how I'd run it, but clearly the option can be used for good things.

I don't see it in play very often though; situations where a group pools their effort like that don't really come up a lot unless the PC party is really putting effort into trying to make it work.

>Do you mean group skill checks?

I think he means Warlock/Ranger animal companions.

Yeah, same with me. I really tried, but ultimately just had to give up and sit there with the oddly coppery taste of stupid in my mouth.