Should 4th edition have been given more of a chance?

I think it boils down to the fact that if I wanted to play WoW, I'd play fucking WoW

Of course you would. 4e is nothing like WoW, that meme is bad and needs to die.

Essentials had some good ideas, but too many essentially classes were just worse versions of existing classes with less options. Which was considered a good thing because it'd be easier to play for newbies, but 4e isn't particularly hard to play anyway so that didn't mean anything.

The perception that you're presenting there is exactly the issue. It was D&D with more sound combat; Nothing was removed or restricted beyond that, but people acted like it was a totally different system. You'd hear stupid shit about it being "WoW" or a card game or whatever when it literally boiled down to combat being more balanced and engaging for everyone involved. You could easily tell that most people had never even touched it because it was all so trite and parroted. It was a mechanically refined progression of things. You could still do anything you wanted, and even focus on story or social shit if you felt like it. All it meant was that when combat popped off everyone had more fun than "I make a full round attack" or the wizard ending it with a wave of his hand.

>eriously, though: 4e is a fun game. It's just too much of a miniatures wargame for a lot of people, with too many baked-in assumptions about how games are supposed to go. Part of the reaction to it was because it was such a big change (tell people you're bringing them pizza and they'll be annoyed if you show up with gazpacho, even if it's good gazpacho,) but part of it really was because the system was too mechanically restrictive and balanced around steady combats.

None of this is more true than any other (modern) version of D&D. It's been all about discrete combat encounters on gridded battlemaps since AC started ascending.

4e's crime is apparently being up front about what it is, because the rules are certainly not more restrictive than other D&D's when it comes to the variety of characters you can make, actions you can perform in play, or stories you can tell.

Thank you for contributing to this thread by mindlessly repeating nonsensical information that you once saw someone else post in order to try and pretend you know what you're talking about.

>Despite generally being tired of D&D at this point, I'll still go back to 4e
Same here. I've moved on to different systems and generally wouldn't touch D&D with a 10' pole--especially as a GM--but if someone offered to run a 4e game or really really wanted me to GM it, I'd jump back on it without too much of an issue.

>"I'm going to use my utility exploit Get Over Here to pull my colleague to me from 10 feet away, because that's plausible. God I love the name of this exploit!"

>"I'm going to use my daily exploit Split The Tree to shoot two targets... damn, it did nothing.
This game is awesome!"

from user's diary

I always say this. 4e is actually a lot like 3.5, except that it works. But the single biggest change, and biggest apparent problem, was layout and presentation. Being honest with players, not obfuscating and giving everything standard templates and formatting, IMO, makes it one of the best and easiest to use RPG books ever made... And apparently completely ruined the experience for some people, which I find so hard to understand.

>You could easily tell that most people had never even touched it

It's funny because even though you're doing your best to make it sound boring, it's still way more exciting than "I roll to attack with my sword. I roll to attack with my sword again. I roll to attack with my sword again."

It's also the continuous refusal to take the game on its own terms. That most powers exist as combat system abstractions and that the game gives you the freedom to fluff them however you like is a strength of the system, and yet you get endless whining from unimaginative assholes about how power x or y can't possibly make sense. It's like they're incapable of using their imagination without the system constantly telling them exactly how everything works.

I know it'd be a beast, but I would so dearly love a clone of 4e that condensed things down into one or two books and focused on the Heroic tier of play.

There's a certain kind of person who will always get mad that someone else doesn't have to deal with the same pointless struggle they did.

Some people prefer to get fooled into a sense of simulationism.

Yes, the objections at the time were overwrought and silly. 4e doesn't have much in common with WoW (although the baked-in expectation that you'll all be steadily upgrading your gear is a fair objection.)

But that doesn't mean 4e is for everyone. Building everything around balanced combat is good for some games, but created some weird, immersion-breaking stuff. Just for instance:

>A swordmage can teleport, no limit on how many times
>But only if a marked enemy attacks an ally

What does that mean for my character? How does he experience that? Does he know how to teleport, but he's only willing to do so under certain circumstances? Can he teleport across a chasm to his friends if the rogue yells "haha, I betray you!" and waves his dagger at the wizard? It's something that makes sense within the game mechanics, but is pretty strange in the gameworld.

4e had a chance. Some people played it. Lots of people had fun with it for a while. But most people have moved on, and you can't actually claim they're wrong and dumb for not liking what you like.

4e's Gamma World spinoff does this, sort of, but steps pretty far away from pseudomedieval fantasy.
It's a lot easier to fluff into being other types of settings, but it'd be hard to represent D&D-style magic with it, or any setting that's supposed to have a big panoply of spells that single people can have access to.

Yeah, 7th edition Gamma World is still one of my favorite Gammas to play, but I want 4e D&D: BECMI style. Shame I'm so much of a brainlet or I'd try to do it myself.

Any reason Strike! doesn't do it for you?

Would attaching it to a d20 system help?

Well, that's how an Aegis works, so yes, actually, if he put his Aegis of assault on the rogue and he then the rogue attacked someone, he could teleport next to him (probably sword first, but I'm a lenient DM so I guess I'd allow him to intentionally miss with the attack).

You know, I don't know why Strike! doesn't do it for me. There's just this nebulous sense of "I don't like this." and I put it away. Not knocking it for the folks that do like it.

Easy enough to make a judgement call on what would plausibly work, and probably more so than the opposite end of the spectrum of using way too casual language. In that case you could glance at your powers and say hey, most of these are melee triggered, require a very close range initial mark or something similar, so you can teleport however you want within a couple squares but if you want to clear a large gap you've somehow got to lay some close range magic on something that is currently out of your reach so figure that out.

I just find Strike! a bit shallow in comparison. When building a 4e character, even for a class I've played before, there's so many options to explore and different ways of doing things, I know I'll enjoy the experience of figuring them out.

When looking at a Strike class, even with their ability to mix and match roles, it feels like I can see absolutely all of their options and intended playstyle right there on the page, which doesn't particularly make me want to play it.

I also think dividing classes and roles was a bad move. Having a specifically designed class to fill a role lets you have more interesting design than trying to keep everything so open.

Is there a PDF of all the cards?
Actually putting important game elements in booster packs was a major dick move.

It's ironic that for all the comparisons people make, 4e is actually the least suited to being a videogame. All other editions of D&D can be pretty much directly translated into a game and work fine, but 4e would be completely miserable to play given all the off turn actions characters have. It would be like those old gba Yugioh games where it stopped and gave you a prompt every single time priority was passed.

I could see it working as a tactics RPG, you'd just need an elegant system for noticing the triggers of out of turn actions and giving you a reasonable window to say yes or no before progressing the turn.

Too much book bloat.
No pdfs.
Killing off the giant third-party support that was in place and, with it, all of their good will.
Not to mention that the game falls the fuck apart if you make a simple mistake like having more then four players at a time.
A lot of things went into the failure.
Revisionist horseshit. People said it all the fucking time when the game came out, as a positive trait; it's only now, when mmos are a complete joke and the game's been left behind for a new edition, that people try to pretend otherwise.

They were still wrong. The '4e=WoW' meme is and has always been trash repeated by people with no actual understanding of the system.

Both PDF and full prints of the cards are on DrivethruRPG to the best of my knowledge.

>Not to mention that the game falls the fuck apart if you make a simple mistake like having more then four players at a time.

What? When the fuck was this a thing? 4e works fine with larger group sizes, the scaling rules are right there in the DMG.

Man, I was really hoping for a 4e vidya. People made such cool shit out of Neverwinter Nights 2 back in the day, and I love turn-based grid combat like in FF tactics. Figure out a way to handle off-turn actions (maybe make them weaker, but automatic,) and you'd have something fun and modular and easy to build with.

4e wasn't my favorite game, but I thought it had real NN-style potential.

I desperately wanted a direct translation type of 4e game. I never understood why it didn't get done with the more modern D&D games, and tried so hard to like the pile of shit that was D&D Tactics because it was sort of that but holy fuck it was bad.

>Revisionist horseshit. People said it all the fucking time when the game came out, as a positive trait; it's only now, when mmos are a complete joke and the game's been left behind for a new edition, that people try to pretend otherwise.
I take it the first part of that is a description, not an accusation. Because that's some damn fine revisionist horseshit you're posting there.

Is it the book or the rules itself? The book is kinda terrible.

Yeah, the character building minigame isn't really there because everything is kinda obvious. I still think some Role+Class combinations have pretty cool interactions, but there really should be more to Roles.

I have been considering doing a grand homebrew project where I split/expand the roles and classes a bit + do something like Legends' 3 tracks where you get to pick Class+Role+Theme (basically power source), to make a character, but you could also pick Role+Role+Theme (for simple characters with not many powers), or Class+Class+Theme (for complex characters with lot of powers) and somehow make that work.

I wouldn't want a direct translation, I want a team based beat'em up that's a spiritual successor to Shadow Over Mystara, where you can slot your powers in like in God Hand.

You wouldn't happen to have seen a download of it somewhere? No way I'm going to pay extra for something that should have been included in the rulebook.

>the game falls the fuck apart if you make a simple mistake like having more then four players at a time.
I've been in a game with 8 players and you're wrong. Sure it slows down considerably, but the same is true for every turn-based game, especially with a strong tactical element like 4e has. Scaling itself is not a problem unless your DM is a noob.

The designers of 4e knew that anyone who didn't play with a grid was a gigantic faggot, so they made the rules around grids. It still annoys me that in 5e they went back to measuring in feet instead of 5 foot squares. Let the retards who think they can play without a grid do the conversion.

The only negative is that combat takes a long time because players have so many options. It's like everyone is playing a 20th level Wizard from 3.5 at level 10.

I liked and still like 4E, I only stopped because I got a new computer and I don't have the sick ass character builder anymore

Google search and you shall find.

The offline character builder is still floating around, look for a link in the next /4eg/, I don't keep it on hand sadly.

I've always been such a bad person at eyeballing distances, that one square and 5 ft means the same to me.

Sorry brotato chip, 7e PDFs are hard as balls to find.

The main issue was resource management. The AEDU system made every class play the same early on and it wasn't until near the end of the game's lifespan that it started to get sorted out. For a while only psionics stood out because they used a spell point system instead of a vancian one. Later martials got stances, at-wills that modified basic attacks and reliable encounter moves, primal classes either got a pet or an alternate form (literally for things like druids, mechanically for barbarian rage mode) and classes started to actually feel different to play.

The other big issue was the encounter maths getting wonky at high levels but GMs should be editing monsters to fit their campaign anyway. And anyone who thinks it turned D&D into a wargame of five foot squares and flanking clearly doesn't remember when 3.0 turned D&D into a wargame of five foot squares and flanking.

4e had some good ideas but the implementation was fucked from the start and the game was retired just as it was sorting itself out.

I'm not sure that I can call Essentials a "panic" move, given that they came out in late 2010, three years after 4e's 2007 release.

>where are my 4e video games?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_&_Dragons:_Daggerdale

Be careful what you wish for, OP - you just might get it.

> because within 5 years after launch

If within 5 years of launch, the system hadn't taken off, then it's a good sign that it's probably not going to. The final nail in the coffin - that is, the sign to Wizards of the Coast that 4e was a failure as compared to previous editions of D&D - was probably when Pathfinder outsold 4e. Yes, it was only for a single quarter, but the fact of the matter was that since its creation in 1975, Dungeons & Dragons had been the top-selling RPG on the market, with nothing else coming close. Even at the height of World of Darkness or Rogue Trader's or whatever's popularity, they never even touched the awesome power that was the brand name "Dungeons & Dragons".

Until Pathfinder, which was problematic for two reasons:
1) It's not owned by Wizards of the Cost; but more importantly
2) It uses the 3rd Edition D&D ruleset, or something close to it.

If a clone of your previous edition can outsell your current edition - or, Hell, even just seriously challenge it on the market - then it's a sign that there's something wrong with your current edition.

Gosh I will be glad when the last of you 4rries finally lose interest drift away from the hobby, nobody wants your flavourless skirmish minis wargame.

It was declared a failure by Hasbro, not WotC, because it failed to meet their impossible internal goal of elevating the D&D brand to an MtG level earner. Even without the disasters in the marketing and the murder/suicide ruining the online support, it would still have failed because what they were asking of it was impossible. It's why 5e is very much a budget effort.

>then it's a sign that there's something wrong with your current edition.

I want to take a moment to clarify this - I don't mean to suggest that there is necessarily something wrong with the rules system of 4e; that can be argued, perhaps, but it should be argued elsewhere, as this thread is more about 4e's ability to survive on the market, rather than its mechanics.

Rather, there is a deep problem with its appeal and marketability of a system that is outsold by its predecessor, or a clone of its predecessor.

Tellingly, while I believe 4e's PHB sales outsold the lifetime sales of the 3e PHB (as I believe the 3e did the 2e, and the 2e the 1e - WotC sticks to the claim that each edition's PHB has outsold the previous edition's PHB), sales of subsequent splatbooks were abysmal.

>Killing off the giant third-party support that was in place and, with it, all of their good will.
Third-party support was a mistake for day one. Most of 3.PF books are fucking garbage.

Nobody ever called it WoW positively.
Nobody.
It was always derogatory, every single time, always has been. There's no revisionism, it was always to paint it as being nothing but a video game ported to the table and thus inferior. People who played RPGs didn't like WoW back then any more than they do now.
It was accompanied by using MMO terminology to further deride it.
And, in all fairness, 3E was called Diablo Edition.

I don't know if you can say there's an issue with the marketability of the game so much as Wizards is just horrendous at it. D&D has incredible potential to be so much more than it is. It's essentially a household name and what people think of when they think tabletop roleplaying, but at the same time nobody gives a shit and it's still niche. Everyone knows what D&D is and they have such a powerful NAME, but aren't making any effort to get it into new hands regardless of edition.

While I'll readily admit that D&D being a Magic-level earner is impossible by its nature, that doesn't address the fundamental problem that 4e has the dishonor of being the ONLY edition of D&D that was EVER outsold by another RPG - and it has the double-dishonor of that other RPG being a clone of D&D 3e, the edition that 4e was intended to replace and be superior to (or at least that is how it was both marketed and presented during the playtest cycles and previews).

I know you are trolling, but this reminds me that 4e probably has the most amount of flavor packed in your average character thanks to PPs and EDs.

I understand why 5e dropped it, but it's still mising.

I'm gonna back up another poster. I was on the Wizards.com message boards when 4e was being developed. Right from the get-go, people were comparing it to World of Warcraft. Right from the get-go, no one meant it as a compliment.

The only thing I liked about it was Warlord.

I think that's more to do with the unique position 3.x had in the market than any particular traits of the systems.

That doesn't count online sales and insider though.

Pulling PDFs was stupid, but insider was a cash cow. Subsequent books didn't sell much, because insider removed the need for selling the books.

Don't forget the part where you don't budge an inch, because you so much as take a light jog then you're down to one attack.

It should have had a few more years, I agree. I'm still looking for a good 4e game to play in to (want to revive my Drow Rogue who focused his feats and powers on ones granted to him because he was a Drow such as levitation, darkness, and more).

Also, they tossed our errata removing things from the original classes to try and make the new essential ones suck less.

>4e's crime is apparently being up front about what it is

Thanks user, you saved me figuring out how to shorten my wall of text. I've always thought that 4e's most unforgivable sin in its detractor's eyes was that it stripped away all the dressings and admitted it was a game.

>And, in all fairness, 3E was called Diablo Edition.
>more desperate revisionism

Not just "a game" but a game for human players. Not just for hardcore rules fetishists that came from 3.5/PF

...No? It literally was. Comparing new editions to videogames was a thing even back then, it was a criticism levelled against 3.x by the 2e grogs.

It's funny because AD&D has a Diablo supplement.

And 3e has a WoW supplement.

And 4e actually only has D&D supplements.

Um, no? It really was called that by a lot of people, myself included.

The only difference is that people stopped calling it Diablo Edition after a while and didn't keep calling it Diablo Edition well after it died.
Maybe we should call it Diablo Edition again.
Then we can call Pathfinder 'Diablo Knockoff Edition' and Starfinder 'Diablo Knockoff In Space Edition'

It's a unique position that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro could have taken advantage of (by giving us 3.75 Edition themselves back in 2007), but didn't, and as a result Paizo outsold them with their own 3.75 Edition.

Again, I'm not trying to discuss whether or not 3e was GOOD, only whether or not it was still capable of turning a profit from 2007-2015 (during 4e's run). The answer is, obviously, "yes". Wizards and Hasbro probably spent a lot of time kicking themselves over wasting time, money, and energy developing a new edition of D&D when Paizo showed that the current edition was still capable of making them plenty of money.

Again, tellingly, 5e hews closer to 3e and 2e than to 4e, and all sales statements made by Wizards and Hasbro lead us to believe that it's selling EXCEEDINGLY well as a result.

The terrible fact of the matter is that even if 3e isn't a particularly good system from a design perspective, it still SELLS well, which is the most important thing for a product to do. It doesn't matter how good (or bad) something is, if no one is buying it. 3e may well be the "perfect" edition of D&D for that reason - it's the one people keep coming back to.

Not that no one bought 4e, it's just that it turns out that they could have made more money off of repackaging.

3e also has a Diablo supplement, called Diablo II: Diablerie.

>And 3e has a WoW supplement.
Everquest too.

>that doesn't address the fundamental problem that 4e has the dishonor of being the ONLY edition of D&D that was EVER outsold by another RPG

2 things to note here

>1.
D&D 4e was in the awkward position of having to to both match MTG's profit and unable to be lumped in with it. 3.x didn't make MTG sales either, but they could take the profits of both, put them together as one number, then present THAT to Hasbro. 4e was the first time D&D had to stand on it's own. Even by Mearls' admission, 4e sold more than 3.x, so this definetly isn't a problem of 4e not selling enough. In fact....

>2.
4e outsold Pathfinder. By quite a large margin. Pathfinder didn't even start catching up until 4e stopped making new material. And even then it took an entire year for Pathfinder to selling as much as 4e, even longer to actually pass it up.

One element to consider is the fairly dramatic transformation of the tabletop scene in the relatively short time period from 3.5's heyday to 5th's release. Tabletop stuff has seen a huge renaissance and card games and board games and RPGs are are vastly more popular and accepted and the consumer base has really been blown wide open. Even if Wizards are shit at capitalizing on their position and doing proper marketing, just by virtue of releasing a new D&D edition in this environment they were almost certain to have a hit regardless of what's written on the pages.

>myself included

>I, a 4rry, called it DIablo edition last week.
>That means everyone always called it DIablo edition

Wow, you sure showed me.

>4e based beat-em-up with God Hand's ability system.

You. I like you.

3e sucks. 4e sucks. Try playing a version of D&D that encourages roleplaying rather than character building.

I think the biggest problem 4E had to surmount, and failed to, was that it was saddled with a lot of new ideas all at once, and not all of them held up to expectations. Insider was a mixed blessing, offering a great resource for anyone that paid for it, but as has been mentioned, cutting into sales of hardcopy books, while simultaneously putting a paywall between players and official content for nayone who was primarily interested in hardcover books.

4E also had a glut of content that clearly wasn't to everyone's tastes, given 5E's comparatively anemic release schedule.

finally, the digital tabletop, and digital tie-ins that were dead in the water when the lead programmer (i think, I've heard a lot of heresay but no specific news) killed himself. For some reason one guy's absence killed the whole project, which was supposed to be a major selling point. WotC's digital department is a known mess, and 4E really strongly hitched itself to that success.

All of that is above and beyond the actual changes to the system 4E brought. The edition wars and angry grognards might've been ignorable, but not in the face of every other business decision going against 4E's popularity and sales. Essentials was pretty clearly an attempt to rope in some of that lost audience, but only piled on more poor decisions.

4E got its chance, got a lot of chances all at once, and couldn't deliver on all of them. In a lot of ways 5E is a return to form and a conservative approach, which makes sense. Maybe sixth will have some more of 4E's innovations without getting dragged down by business mistakes.

I literally saw the gamer guys in high school deriding it as such back when I was a freshman and had no idea wtf they were talking about for a good 4 yours. I've met several other people with loads of 2e->3e butthurt.

They also massively fucked with the lore to fit the mechanics.
>Everyone's new to this game now, fuck being familiar enough to lure in old players

You can actually find news reports on the story, the lead developer murdered his estranged wife and them himself in a murder suicide.

Let's keep this civil please.

I'm not implying that everyone did, but a fair number of people did just as many but not most people called 4e "Warcraft Edition". Surprisingly I have not seen 5e being referred to by a video game moniker...

>Let's keep this civil please.
Sorry 4rry, you pick a fight, you see it through. You don't throw the first punch, then start crying because I threw back.

3e was the birth of the "character build" though, user, 4e just made most of the classes level on the playing field (mostly. There are still hiccups here and there but by and large the classes are equal in power).

How did I throw a punch? I simply stated I called 3e "Diablo Edition" as did others and then you try to saddle me with a clearly derogatory term. Do I like 4e? Yes. However, my preferred system is 2e, not 4e.

To be fair, everybody from 4e was already gone at that point. And everybody from 3.5 is playing pathfinder.

>And even then it took an entire year for Pathfinder to selling as much as 4e, even longer to actually pass it up.

It still remains the only edition of D&D that this has happened to. AD&D 2nd Edition was never outsold by World of Darkness. Or in perhaps a better analogy, it was never outsold by any of Gygax's post-D&D works.

It doesn't look good on the resumé, is the point.

Possibly, though the popularity of Pathfinder, the fact that it did outsell 4e if only for a short time, and the extensive playtesting of 5e revealing that playtesters seemed to prefer a more 3e to 4e playstyle certainly lends credence to the idea that 3e is the more marketable system, regardless of which one is "better" (frankly, probably 4e, even if I personally prefer 3e).

In all honesty I'm of the opinion that new editions should cease entirely, at least in the vein that they have been coming out. Instead I think that 6th Edition should be focused on refining the existing 5e corpus, taking into account things like errata and playtesting. New art and layout to make it look different, re-releases of the PHB and stuff, but fundamentally the game game. Skip the "edition wars" bullshit entirely and just try and refine 5e into the best form it can possibly be.

>3e was the birth of the "character build" though, user, 4e just made most of the classes level on the playing field (mostly. There are still hiccups here and there but by and large the classes are equal in power).

3e shat the bed. 4e smeared the shit around evenly so everyone got an equal share of feces. Congratulations. Both 3e and 4e are bad systems. 3e's overall damage to the roleplaying community cannot be overstated, but 4e made no attempt to rectify this. 5e keeps chugging along with the same problems, but at least it made some design improvements along the way. (A lot of design failures, too.)

Actually, the playtests for 5e involved a lot of 4e-esque mechanics which were very popular.

Unfortunately they kept removing or editing polls and stripping out shit for grog appeal. It's a fucking travesty.

Actually, AD&D started throwing character options at players like candy.

5e could probably be termed "Infinity Engine" edition, given that its entire goal has been to be as D&D as possible, and for a lot of people Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and especially Baldur's Gate are the epitome of the D&D experience, at least where video games of it are concerned.

Fuck you. That it doesn't suit your playstyle doesn't mean it's inherently bad. It's the exact same logic as D&Dfags who dismiss all other RPGs.

Starting shit and making up false criticisms about 3.x just to make your precious, and need I remind you dead, 4e look less shit.

>b-b-but I like 2e
Sure you do kid