What went so horribly horribly wrong?

What went so horribly horribly wrong?

>AEDU MMORPG design plus Mearls is a nigger.

A fanbase reaction based on ignorance and misunderstanding, grossly exaggerated sales expectations by Hasbro who thought D&D could become a MTG style earner, without realising the difference between the properties, and the murder suicide of the lead developer which torpedoed the promised online tools.

Also essentials, which took a great game and ruined it.

Is there a better way to run a

>Tactics Ogre
>Disgaea
>Super Robot Wars

System other than 4e?

This.

Theoretically Battle Century G is better for SRW, but my own experience with the system has left me extremely unimpressed.

It just didn't feel like D&D.

people not realizing that the mechanics they so hated had always existed, and 4e just made them more plain to see.

They had a ridiculous publishing schedule (at least one product per month) and attempted to do it all by relying on a lot of permanent staff rather than contracting and freelancing as is usually done with D&D.
That meant that despite continuing the trend of making more money than its predecessor, like every D&D line before it, a lot of it was eaten by overhead and departmental entanglements, and that over time they were competing with themselves for shelf space.
Plus all of the releases intimidated possible new players. Instead of getting the necessary one, two, or three books (depending on just what they needed) they *didn't* get any of the 8 books they thought they needed from a glance.
If anyone tells you Essentials ruined 4e then they were never really paying attention to start with. It's entire goal was to solve the above problems and to give 4e--which was still in print and distributed the entire time that Essentials was--its own 'Basic' equivalent. It gave people a cheap and unintimidating way to start and opportunities to buy the normal 4e books to bootstrap and supplement as they liked.

I didn't like the UX at all; while the power system's card-like presentation was efficient in telling me the exact mechanical ramifications of everything, when you communicate solely in mechanics the narrative elements are mitigated. It directs so much of how you interact with the gamestate, but is all so dry. As someone who's never been a "mechanics first" kind of guy, this turns 4e into more and more of a slog as characters level and things become more preoccupied with the spin of those mechanical touches.
It all would have been wonderfully justified if their digital backend/VTT plans were able to come together, but the whole murder/suicide thing really put the kibosh on that one.

I didn't much care for how they kept 3.X's model for Feats.

A dev team not realizing that flavor and tradition is why D&D is so beloved to this day, throwing away many of the old trappings of D&D in exchange for new mechanics that people didn't all care for, while also changing fluff of beloved settings to add more universal shared races and gods and planes despite no real call for it, while also putting together a purposely-fluff-lite setting instead of expanding on an existing one or creating a new in-depth one that people could truly learn to love like they had with Eberron the edition before.

I prefer how Gamma World 7e streamlines the formula and keeps things a little more open-ended. You can ignore the semi-awkward card mechanics if you like or just find scans and treat them like magic items--or mech loadouts. That's how I handled it for an Armored Core game I ran.

I find this kinda interesting. I adored how clear and direct 4e was in conveying you the mechanics. I can fill in the fluff side just fine, but the rules being clearly laid out and easy to use is something I can't really do myself. It's made me get increasingly annoyed with badly laid out and confusing RPG books which blend fluff and mechanics together or avoid stating things directly, instead of just telling me how everything works under the hood.

Essentials were pretty shit, I guess.

Pissy fanbois.

Also,
Pissing on your fans.

Oh, I can definitely appreciate that. A little bit of clarity and a smart layout can go a loooong way. I mean, just look at FantasyCraft: it's got so many compelling and evocative parts to it, but it doesn't quite know how to teach the actual mechanics to new players and you have to jump all over the place just to get a clear picture of how some things work.

And I'll acknowledge that 4e for the most part can work well with a good GM who knows how to run a scene independent of mechanics--but those aren't always what you get, you know?

But how is that particularly different from earlier editions? Do you think the greater obfuscation and extra fluff sections really made a difference?

The important thing to note is that "the medium is the message"--how you present something and describe something is part of the larger picture of what's communicated. Often the words help build it up into something larger than it otherwise might end up.
Now, don't take any of this to mean that I'm exceptionally attached to 3.X or TSR editions of D&D, they certainly are at least a little more arduous than they could be. But for me 4e's way of it still feels like something's missing. Like, there could be more of a narrative payload baked in or better ways of welcoming players to introduce their own.

It's like if you ask someone what their character is and they say "I'm a lawful-neutral 3rd level Wizard"--that's not untrue, but I wanted to know who the character was, not the statistics that represent the character. That's an uninspiring fragment of what I wanted to get out of that interaction.

I don't know, I guess it might just be a matter of personal preference. I felt sections like this excerpt from the PHB conveyed that side of things very well, better in my eyes than more confusing things full of setting lore or genre concepts.

>Your character is more than a combination of race, class, and feats. He or she is also one of the protagonists in a living, evolving story line. Like the hero of any fantasy novel or film, he or she has ambitions and fears, likes and dislikes, motivations and mannerisms, moments of glory and of failure. The best D&D characters blend the ongoing story of their adventuring careers with memorable characteristics or traits.
>Jaden the 4th-level human fighter is a perfectly playable character even without any embellishment, but Jaden the Grim’s personality—brooding, fatalistic, and honest—suggests a particular approach to negotiating with NPCs or discussing issues with the other characters. A well-crafted character personality expands your experience of the game dramatically.

emulation

Let me guess, you started with 3e.

Look at the picture before replying, user. It's a classic mockery of the people who sincerely made that complaint.

I'd say I feel stupid now, but I was up all night and I've been feeling stupid for hours already.

Didn't change Forgotten Realms enough.

I've honestly never understood why anyone cares about FR. It's a terrible setting.

It gathered a fandom that loves to rabidly defend it from ignorant 3.PF and 5e lovers but hates to actually talk about the game.

The recent surge in adoration for 4e is just typical Veeky Forums contrarianism.

The problem is that there's less to talk about, since the system generally works and what doesn't is well known and easily tweaked. Given that and the lack of new content, conversations have somewhat run their course.

Because once you've put in $400 in books in the setting and spent 150+ hours reading up on it you've gotta make use of it, you aren't an idiot, so that time and money you spent was REALLY worthwhile.

I don't think it's really all that bad, but I don't know anything about it.

So that's why 3.PF continues to thrive, despite official content for it having slowed to a crawl.

PF still gets loads of third party support, which I think helps perpetuate it.

I have wondered about this in the past though. Whether having some obvious issues to drive conversation and discussion is actually some sort of twisted asset for a system. You certainly hear a hell of a lot of discussion about very flawed systems, and even obscure ones are remembered when other, better games are forgotten. Cthulhutech is a great example of an awful game which is still talked about every now and then, and got a lot of attention back in the day because of the issues it had, perhaps, rather than in spite of them.

Didn't they decide to stop selling digital copies of stuff because of piracy, despite the fact that the first round of PDFs out there were leaked copies of the ones they sent to the publisher that was printing their physical books?

Yeah, that was another incredibly stupid decision which damaged the game.

The memetic stickiness of 3e's ivory tower design (creating the same addictive positive feedback of gambling or fremium phone games) combined with the memetic stickiness of 3e coming out right when the internet passed the tipping point between secret clubhouse to normie ubiquity, plus the memetic stickiness of the OGL causing nearly every game published for a decade to play and feel exactly like 3e (raising an entire generation who only associate the feel of 3e with "feeling" like RPG's) meant anything that wasn't either 3e or 3e-in-all-but-name, that still had the name "dungeons and dragons" attached to it was doomed to failure from the get-go. Hell, it wasn't until they released a new edition that WAS 3e-in-all-but-name (5e) that they got those people back. 3e wasn't good, by any menas, but it was memetic-marketing lightning-in-a-bottle. 4e could have been perfect, and it wouldn't have lived up to a scale of "rpg-nes" where "rpg-nes" is defined by how similar a game is to 3e.

Also essentials was a TERRIBLE marketing choice to try and deal with the above issue. They tried to make 4e feel more like 3e, which alienated the people who liked 4e for what it was, but still wasn't 3e-ish enough to get back the people who would (and will) only ever like 3e.

Personally however, I love running 4e. If you give out tax-feats for free, and only use material from that sweet-spot in time, after the MM3 came out, but before essentials came out, you'd be hard pressed to find a better game for running a game in which the PC's genuinely feel like the protagonists of a fantasy novel. I don't see my table changing any time soon, save for our occasional forays into pallet-cleansing one-shots of light systems.

It's dnd

Essentials had good stuff, it's real problem was just class design.

It brought back the worst elements of 3.5

Maybe it was just a shit game. Ever thought of that?

Every time some tard tries to sell me stale memes.

Essentials was awful.
>Let's simplify things, guys!
>Rather than picking up a kit of several combat options with a choice between several per level, you get to pick a class, then between two powers every few levels instead.
>That will make things much simpler!
>What's that you say? Mess with feats, a bloated and byzantine subsystem where you pick off a list of hundreds to get either tiny fucking bonuses or the core features of your character?
>How ridiculous. THAT wouldn't simplify anything.

4E and essentials' biggest problem was not killing sacred cows, it was killing the wrong goddamn sacred cows.

They tried to make it play like a video game, and that worked about as well as a peanut butter and horse cum sandwich.

Those are all class design problems

Essentials feats, magic items and monsters were all good

There are some gems in essentials, and you need to know specifically what material to port from essentials to the "sweet-spot" of 4e that I mentioned here.

Essentials came out when it was already dying. It didn't kill it, it just failed to save it.

I know it's cool to harp on 5e for not being 4e, but it's really quite a step up from 3e, and I say this as someone who prefers Savage Worlds and OSR games.

>only after the MM3 came out

You mean after all the fantasy staples were already botched and all the classes were weird bullshit?

It's got a very small amount of options and monks still suck, I'd rather play 3.5

Yeah, but the options that are there are mostly pretty solid, barring some noteworthy exceptions. The monks have a decentish kit that can at least hold its own, even if the others are garbage, and it's less garbage than the 3.5 monk.

It's also considerably simpler and less clunky than 3.5, which is what I like about it, even over 4th edition (which had a very intricate system that required keeping track of a lot of shit).

>5e
>but it's really quite a step up from 3e
>noticeably different from 3e in any meaningful way.
Best joke I've heard all day.

Yeah, OK. It's not like they vastly simplified the core system or anything. I guess it must be 3e because they preserved some of the artifacts and shortcomings of its class design, nevermind the fact that wasn't even in the top 5 for worst aspects of the game.

>all the fantasy staples were already botched

Please tell me how 4e "Botched"them in a way that doesn't define "the fantasy staples" by what they were in 3e. I'd love to hear.

Leaned heavily on a digital support system that dies with its creator.

You were the one saying to use only material from that sweet spot, which means that those classes must have botched, you fucking cock waffle.

sure, at least it wasn't the pathfinder take on 3.5.

>I started with 3e, and my "branching out" consisted of playing 3e clones built on the OGL engine called [Insert Franchise]d20, to the point that even the slightest deviations from the OGL format seem like meaningful changes.

Thanks for sharing. I think this would be more your speed.

>savage worlds is an OGL clone

Does your mother know that you're retarded?

It was too soon, should have been released after 5th Edition. And people are just faggots whom don't want change.

Green, red, and grey boxes broke MUH IMMERSION for a lot of people apparently.


Woulda been great to combine the 5e streamlining with the 4e unification.

Its obsessive focus on lengthy tactical combat was a turnoff.

>Mearls is a nigger.
every fucking time this fucking degradation of language

Is it too much to ask that what I purchase D&D I expect something resembling D&D?

4E is like a completely different game.

They should never have branded it as D&D.

Agreed. When a single encounter takes up the majority of your session, something is wrong.

>Agreed. When a single encounter takes up the majority of your session, something is wrong.

Agreed.

Either players are idiots, and/or you are using pre-MM3 math. Both can be fixed though.

What you think of as "something resembling D&D" is not necessarily what everyone else thinks of as "something resembling D&D"

>Agreed. When a single encounter takes up the majority of your session, something is wrong.

Yeah, honestly it was just continuing a trend that was started with 3e (which in my experience was typically run as a sequence of combat encounters) but it exaggerated a feature of 3rd that I already didn't care for.

I'd wager even post-MM3 math encounters take too fucking long.

The market speaks for itself in this regard.

>AEDU MMORPG design
what MMO has encounter-based AEDU design? I'm familiar with the 4e = MMO meme, but it was always in reference to the way the classes were designed with roles to fill like MMO tank or DPS etc.

it annoys me when people compare 4e to MMOs because if there was actually a roleplay-intensive Final Fantasy Tactics MMO out there I'd play the shit out of it

>I know it's cool to harp on 5e for not being 4e, but it's really quite a step up from 3e,

this, for me 5e is an acceptable compromise between the D&D I want to play and the D&D everyone else seems to want to play. Christ I'd be happy to go back to AD&D 1st edition if it meant never having to play 3.5 again

Indeed, 4e outsold 3.5, 5e outsold 4e, 3.5 outsold 3e, 3e outsold 2e

It is fortunate that D&D has such mass appeal that it can keep growing like this, through thick and thin

Sure but it would seem that most people feel the way I do judging by the reception 4E received.

You forgot the part where 4e started to rapidly decline following the release of Pathfinder, and don't blame Essentials, it was already dying.

>4e outsold 3.5
You sure about that user?

Yes, if you remain in the hugbox

But from what I've seen, outside of people who started with 3.5, 4e is either enjoyed, or seen as a good game that doesn't necessarily appeal to your direct tastes.

Then again, a lot of RPGs are like that, I understand that Mutants and Masterminds is a cool game, but the mechanics aren't my cup of tea

that's according to the man at WOTC who killed 4e and had no reason to lie about its popularity

Mearls said it in an interview (that was quietly removed from the WotC site in the great purges), and he's basically responsible for murdering it.

specifically he said of 4e's popularity that "Every edition of D&D has outsold the previous one."

Okay well if we're going to be anecdotal I don't know anybody outside of Veeky Forums who likes 4e. Nobody I know plays it while plenty of people still play 3.PF

People on Veeky Forums just like to be contrarian.

>Mearls killed 4e

wtf I love Mike Mearls now

Very few people I know play it either, although after asking around the reason for that isn't that they dislike it, but because it's not a living game with new material coming out and support from the developers

Maybe you should ask around? You might be surprised

4e was already dying. WotC shat the bed with their marketing. The core was bound to sell well based on sheer market momentum, but they alienated their fanbase on multiple fronts and then Paizo ate it up. 4e was doomed from the start.

Not that guy, but the few people I've heard talk about 4e parroted those old lines about it being WoW on paper and not feeling like D&D.

Because it is WoW on paper.

They copied WoW right down to the monthly subscription model for D&D Insider.

They really didn't. At most, they borrowed from the visual aesthetic to appeal to what's popular in fantasy at the time.

I wish there was a "WoW on paper" game

With proper mechanics for aggro, powers with round-by-round cooldowns, and balanced utility between DPS, Tank and Healer

The official D20 warcraft system was an OGL mess of a system that failed to encapsulate anything distinctly "Warcraft" beyond names

>With proper mechanics for aggro, powers with round-by-round cooldowns, and balanced utility between DPS, Tank and Healer

I think there's a Sword Art RPG that does that, but not sure.

Hmmm... sounds like by definition it must be utterly terrible by association with Sword Art

It most likely is. Japanese "popular IP" based RPGs are universally terrible cash-grabs, from what I know.

you're kidding right? 4e plagiarized wow almost completely.

Fighter, Rogue, Wizard... they barely even bothered changing the names! Not to mention class roles, sure 3.5 had class roles too, but 4e actually said them out loud! Just like warcraft!! Just think about how many utility powers got lifted from WOW directly. WOW's trademark turn-based tactical combat based around shifting is a clear influence. Not to mention Elves, Orcs, Dwarves... honestly WOTC should just consider themselves lucky they never got sued.

So tabletop games can never borrow ideas from video games since tabletop games have been around for longer?

you're an idiot

I know reading sarcasm on the internet is hard user, but make an effort at least, jeez.

I hope I'm not making the mistake I'm complaining about...

I see what you did there!

>TFW no more Greyhawk ever

At least 5e has a few mentions of it in the core rulebook.

I mean Post-Greyhawk Wars is great for a grimdark S&S setting, but I can't keep playing it forever.

>liking 3e is just memes and conservatism
And that arrogance is exactly why nobody likes 4rries.

The murder.

>parroted those old lines about it being WoW on paper and not feeling like D&D.
Maye, just maybe, these old lines get repeated so much because there's something to them?
Unifying power mechanics between each class was a dumb fucking move, and if every single class ends up with a bunch of "push button - receive effect" abilities that are even color coded based on cooldown, of course there are going to be WoW comparisons and of course you lose flavor if a wizard works by the same mechanics as a rogue or a fighter.

SPBP

Why the fuck can't we get a Pathfinder-like of THIS system instead of shitty 3.5?

>Unironically liking hot garbage
>This much gaming Stockholm syndrome
And that is why nobody likes annoying millennial 3aboos who started with OGL and never branched out.

Lack of OGL and opportunism.
Also, do you really want a version of 4e blindly copied by people who don't understand anything about the system?

I don't even play 3.PF, I mostly play WHFRPG and various Chaosium titles.
Nice try, you mongoloid mouth breather.

A copied mediocre thing is better than a copied bad thing

>didn't play the systems
>somehow entitled and educated enough to offer opinion on system comparisons
???

user, are you literally autistic?

Not calling it dungeons and dragons tactics and hp bloat mostly
the cosmology was also fucking shit.

D&d next was 5e right?
She really let herself go after marriage.