Yeah, I know that bashing 4e was the most recent big meme on Veeky Forums, but its glory days are gone now. So, let's be honest: were there any lore changes that you actually liked? Are there any ideas from Points of Light/Nerath Vale you wish WoTC had brought over?
I've got my own share of things I liked, but way more than will fit in just one post...
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Since I started this, I figured I should get off my high horse and share my own opinions. Sorry, but I have trouble mapping things out, so this is going to be pretty stream-of-consciousness rambly, and for that I apologize.
he Nentir Value spoke to me in a way I couldn't really recall any other setting doing so before.
The addition of Dragonborn as a core PHB, especially after having lost their rather awkward "Races of the Dragon" fluff, really was a huge upside to me. When I read the "Races & Classes" preview book, I found myself nodding along with the book talking about how dragon-men were an obvious niche to fill and just inherently cool - but then, I've never been a huge fan of the bog-standard "Tolkien rip-off" flavor of the classic races, and fond of monstrous humanoids as something more than just enemies to kill.
Actually, that brings me to something else: I love the way many classic races were tinkered with and redefined in 4th edition. Each step from Basic took the "classics" a little further away from just straight-up ripoffs of Tolkien's work, but 4th edition was the cleanest cut of all - and yet they all still felt "right" to me.
Dwarves... well, okay, dwarves didn't change that much, but they still felt richer and deeper to me. I also liked the shedding of Tolkienisms like bearded females (which was mostly something that people laughed at) or rarer females.
The Elf/Eladrin split made a huge amount of sense to me; the Elf archetype in D&D has always basically been two ideas stuffed crudely into the same space, ultimately contradicting themselves. I mean, we've got a race that is simultaneously described in a very druidic fashion and supposed to be incredibly talented arcanists, despite the fact that druids and wizards are traditionally enemies. There's a reason why a Dragon Magazine article on magical plants points out that engineering life in such a way runs antithetical to druidic beliefs. A clean seperation made both stronger, as now they could stand on their own.
Gnomes! Oh, where do I start with gnomes? I never liked gnomes prior to 4th edition; they were always just lazy amalgamations of dwarf and elf traits, with no clear identity of their own. The closest we got were the Tinker Gnomes of Krynn, who were, like the Kender and Gully Dwarves, essentially a disastrous attempt at a "comic relief race". 4th edition was the first time I actually saw gnomes having any sort of value.
Half-Orcs dropping the default rape baby assumption was a huge step up. It was an ugly and limiting assumption, and didn't really add anything to the game.
Halflings finally dropping all vestiges of their hobbit ancestry and becoming new and unique was a huge leap forward, although I will admit that 3e had already made some pretty good steps in this department from their 2e portrayal.
Add in that the various new races of 4e tended to be so interesting - angels who forsook the heavens to live amongst mortals! Sapient fragments of a gate against the Far Realm! - and, all in all, 4th edition was a huge breath of fresh air in terms of racial fluff.
The settings outside of Nentir Vale... well, I can't really call myself able to play that game either way, seeing as how I didn't have the huge investment in Forgotten Realms, Eberron or Dark Sun that others did.
Honestly, I kind of liked the Spellplague and the loss of many of the more "novel-gluing" characters for FR, but I can understand people being annoyed at what they saw as a rather hamfisted rehash of the Time of Troubles.
For Dark Sun, though, I was pretty much in favor of everything that happened there. Tweaking defiling into a constant temptation for all casters felt so much more right than just making it another wizard subclass. As for the loss of mul sterility... I'll be honest; I've never seen any believable justification for there not being half-dwarves that didn't boil down to "but Tolkein never had them!" Beyond that, I also object to grimderp - a bit of darkness or edginess can do wonders, especially in the right setting, but making muls sterile and usually kill their moms in childbirth felt like just trying too hard to be edgy.
Speaking of darkness... I love a lot of the various lore we got for monsters in 4th edition. It's hard to really point to any one thing in particular, but a few things that stand out...
The "Playing Gnolls" article in Dragon Magazine was a huge thing for me. I always liked the idea of gnolls, but they've been traditionally one of the less represented "savage" races - despite their long history of being playable at the same time. This Dragon article gave them some of the best and most well-thought-out fluff they've ever had, and I was bitterly disappointed that it didn't make it into the Dragon magazine Annual, even when the goofy "Santa Dragon" mini-adventure did.
Shadar-Kai were awesome, going from a particularly assholish breed of fae from the rather dull Plane of Shadow in 3e to a race of immortality seekers who got what they wanted... at a cost. Essentially, they were playable, not necessarily evil cenobites, and that was an awesome idea.
Dragons were a huge upgrade, to me. When the designers decided to stick with the idea that "no monster actually in the monster manual should be Good, else what are your reasonable expectations of using it", that led to characterization of the dragons that I found more enjoyable than what they had before. Additionally, I have never really liked the core Metallic quintet being Gold, Silver, Copper, Brass and Bronze, as indicated in the threat I started about it - Iron and Adamantine just fit the core five so much better, and the subsequent metallic & chromatic dragons they added were awesome. Orium and Purple Dragons in particular were really cool.
Angels! Oh, I loved the change in Angels. The Celestials of old were... well, they tried, but they never really stuck out to me. Part of that was just my general distaste for the alignment, part of it was bad artwork (seriously, I say this as an actual fan of anthros: the 3e Guardinals were hideous), part of it was just a generally bland feeling they gave off. 4e's Angels, however, were everything I could have wanted in a standard Celestial. 4e's design paradigm of "if it's only Good, it doesn't really warrant stats in a monster manual" led to one of the most interesting and sincerely "angelic" Angels; aloof, powerful, and concerned only with the will of the gods.
Likewise, the elementals of 4e were a huge upgrade. Prior to 4e, elementals were... well, boring. For creatures as iconically fantastical as they're supposed to be, pre-4e elementals are just bland. I don't know who they are or waht they do, and I could care less. The most interesting things in the Elemental Planes were always "sub-elementals", like Genies and Azers and Salamanders and Tritons. 4th edition changed that. It gave us so many new and varied forms of elemental, all with their own distinctive forms and abilities, and really sold the beauty of the Elemental Chaos. Best part? You could still have your vanilla elementals, both as themselves and as the awesome "elemental soldiers of destruction" that were Archons.
Which brings me to the Cosmology... I've never really liked the Great Wheel. Why? Well, to be blunt, it falls into two reasons: grid-filling and blandness.
The grid-filling is obvious: we have seventeen different planes all based on desperately attempting to explore different conjunctions of Law, Chaos, Good and Evil. And the only reason we don't have nineteen to twenty-three planes is because TSR couldn't come up with any ideas that even they considered decent for "Neutral Good/Evil and True Neutral borderplane" and the like.
And that's just the Outer Planes! We've also got no fewer than sixteen Elemental Planes (four elemental, four paraelemental planes based on conjunctions of the former, and eight quasielemental planes based on conjunctions of the elemental planes with the Positive/Negative Energy planes), plus the Astral and Ethereal Planes, which have never really been defined in any way that made the distinction feel organic to me.
The blandness stems from that; we've got too many damn planes, so the interesting stuff has always been scattered sparsely over the whole overly saturated lot of them. To say nothing of how the Elemental Planes were pure "gotcha!" territory - you went to the Plane of Fire? You either fried outright, or you were presented with the "riveting" scenario of wandering through an endless 3-dimensional expanse of nothing but fire. Fire to the left of you, fire to the right, fire in front of you, behind you, above you, below you. Boring! And it was so boring that even TSR had to mix it up with the incorporation of some "elemental contamination", like floating islands/cities in the Plane of Air or the very existence of the City of Brass.
The World Axis, in comparison was organic. It was fluid, it flowed smoothly, it felt real, not forced into place to make up for everything. You had the classical but never really explored by D&D Worlds of the Dead and the Fae. You had the Astral Sea, which holds all the dominions of the gods together - and the dominions are brilliant, because they let you recreate and emulate the better ideas of the Great Wheel, like the clockpunk world-engine of Mechanus, without having to force them into fitting the framework of alignment. You have the awe-inspiring Elemental Chaos, with some of the most fantastic vistas ever seen in D&D and which would have been impossible under the old cosmology.
The Shadowfell also stands head and shoulders over the old Plane of Shadow for me because of a simple reason; it's nowhere near as monodimensional as its "basic" planes. The Plane of Negative Energy was basically the ultimate "Gotcha!" Inner Plane, being a featureless, empty void that sucked out levels by the second. The Plane of Shadow was essentially a mirror image of the material world, but if you turned off all of the lights. The Shadowfell is more than the sum of its parts... still dark, gloomy, creepy, and full of dead people, but there's a mythic feel to it. When I think of the Shadowfell, I think of the scenes from Disney's Night on Bald Mountain, where ghosts are rising from their graves, with a dash of Tim Burton's gothic works, like Beetlejuice and Nightmare Before Christmas.
One of the things I loved was the little tweaking between gods and their followers. We have Invokers, which are essentially divine sorcerers cum prophets, who draw upon the most fundamental energies of a patron deity, and we have Avengers, who practice esoteric rituals as, literally, "holy killers". And none of this is alignment based. You can have an Avenger devoted to Sune or Wee Jas or any other god of beauty who's out to kill all sources of ugliness. You can have an Invoker of Lolth or Lamashtu who is Good aligned and seeks to redeem her patron goddess. You couldn't have that in 3e or AD&D - although, to be fair, you can still kind of have it in 5e, as it at least maintained 4e's attitude of "mechanically enforced alignment sucks and is counterproductive for interesting characters".
Similarly, some of the features of the Elemental Planes were just so incredible. The Riverweb was an enormous spider-web like array of rivers floating in midair. Gloamnull was a demon-haunted, noirish flying city full of genasi. Heck, even the City of Brass got some shiny new features to it.
Still on the cosmological scale, the Primal Spirits from 4e were an awesome addition to the pantheon of gods, elementals, fiends and faeries. In all honesty, I never really liked the druid; like the monk, it reeked of token culturalism, an almost obligatory "Celtic" addition alongside the monk's "oriental" addition, but whereas the monk filled its own niche as a bad-ass barefist kung fu warrior, the druid was just an awful jumbled up mess, not quite sure if it was some sort of wilderness wizard or a nature priest. What really made it seem like a tacked-on addition was when actual nature-god priests became a thing in their own right, leaving you wondering just what the hell was the point of the druid.
The Primal Spirits answered that. They finally presented an "Old Religion" that really felt different to just "the resident rural deities" of the bog-standard pantheon. They gave a flavor to druids that made them stand apart, rather than just feeling like they were given the barest of handwaves to explain it.
But monster lore also played its part in why I loved 4e so much.
I will admit that Volo's Guide fleshed out the individual giants more than 4e, but the Ordning still doesn't feel good to me. I loved their 4e fluff, where the giants are the weaker imitations of the titans, the life wrought by the Primordials themselves in imitation of the Gods. A giant is fundamentally opposed to the world of mortals because it carries within it a spark of that ancient time, when the world was raw and untamed, and it wants to shatter the laws the gods put in place to make it different.
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