What happened to the 4e revival?

I seem to remember just a few months ago there was always a 4th Edition General on Veeky Forums, I haven't seen it in quite a while.
There would also be threads dedicated to the superiority of 4th vs 5e.
Was it just contrarian memeing that got stale or was there a genuine movement that died suddenly?

It lasted about two weeks, with the general getting modest activity. Calling that a "revival" is a bit much.

>just contrarian memeing

yes

4e is a "solved" game from a character optimization standpoint. The veterans of the 4e CharOp board have already hashed out nearly all permutations of top-end builds.

The overpowered material is known (e.g. vulnerability abuse, encounter novas in general that can take myriad forms, various hybrid class interactions).

The general mechanical tips for GMs are known (e.g. use generation three monsters, hand out some tax feats).

Homebrewing for 4e is more arduous than in other editions, no high-profile third-party publishers have ever appeared for 4e, and the Compendium contains neither homebrew nor third-party material.

There is no new material on the horizon.

There is very little to speak of at this point beyond individual campaigns and characters, and getting to that point requires *momentum* in the first place: people have no individual campaigns and characters to talk about because they are not playing 4e, and people are not playing 4e because there is no interest.

This could, in theory, be solved by heading down the /pfg/-style road of people hosting one campaign after another, but that has its own dangers, particularly all the drama that surrounds an application circus. Mayhaps a more low-key scheme of hosting and advertising 4e games would be more ideal.

Is Zeitgeist still doing anything? I know there was also at some point a push for something similar, people using 4e's framework for their own custom system.

I admittedly really miss 4e, as 3.5's spell slots never really made sense nor felt fun to me. The Power Point pool for Psionics and the halfway points that Warlock/Dragonfire Adept, Factotum and Bo9S races create were always the most interesting way to handle per-encounter resources. 5e feels even worse than 3.5 in some aspects since 3.5, like 4e, is at least a "solved" game and you know what you're getting out of it. 5e meanwhile not only makes the same mistakes 3.5 did by trying to go back to it, but has a fundamental misunderstanding of what people liked from 3.5.

classes, not races, but the point stands. I liked AEDU, I liked Roles, and I liked how the system allowed your characters to function independent of gear if need be. There's like three separate fixes for the monster HP/damage scaling too, so its formula works out real well for making encounters on the fly, as opposed to having to rely on the objectively terrible measure that is CR.

more importantly what do I do with my 4e shit, core books, modules, should I start a fire? I wouldn't foist this shit on a kid in haiti

Zeitgeist has a complete, 1 to 30 adventure path with generation three monster math and custom player options.

I could never quite get into it, because it requires heavy buy-in from both the players and the GM.

Everyone at the table has to sit down and read through thick lore for a quasi-Eberronian setting with actual steam technology and a proprietary cosmology. If they fail to, then they will have no idea what is going on. The first adventure opens up with the PCs working security for an upper-class party with international dignitaries of great import, and they have to deal with multiple factions of troublemakers. The rest of the first adventure has heavy undertones of political intrigue, and the second adventure is a dedicated investigation with an even stronger political bent.

It could be great if everyone was on the exact same page and actually invested in this custom setting, but that can be much to ask for at times.

I've got a new campaign coming up in a couple of weeks and I'd be more than happy to share, but, y'know... dro in the ocean etc.

Much like you said, the theorycrafting side of things is done, and all that's left to talk about is cool-ass campaigns or characters etc.

Share it anyway. Let's be /pfg/!

I stopped posting in 4e generals because every single one turned into touhoufag telling everyone they were playing the game wrong. Monopolizes discussions leaving nothing to talk about. Also, no new comment, trolls trolling trolls etc.
I don't think I've ever seen a 4e vs 5e thread past launch tho. There's not even need to, we 4rries are not 3aboos.

Not sure. While there's no general right now, I've noticed a big surge in people discussing 4e in general. It's started to become less and less taboo to recommend it, and nowadays when haters step into to screech "MMO!" at the mention of it they're only one or two people that get shouted down in the end.

I suspect there's just not enough to talk about for a general. 4e doesn't have as much material as stuff like 3.5 or WoD or Pathfinder or whatever, and it's not getting anything new. There's no metaplot or narrative fiction (except the best D&D fiction, Fell's Five) for it, either.

Sell it to someone with taste you fucking pleb

>Was it just contrarian memeing that got stale
Yes. There is a reason Pathfinder exists, there is a reason 4e died, and there's a reason why 5e has very little to do with 4e, and is more of a 3.5 done "right".

Does Green Ronin no longer count as high profile anymore? Because they had converted their Pirates of Freeport setting to 4E.

Yeah, OGL was a hell of a thing

Still have no idea if it was brilliance or idiocy though. On one hand it turned 3.5 into pretty much the only RPG for about 8 years, but on the other hand it meant that WotC gave up copyright to a lot of stuff they owned by default and they'll never be able to claim them again

Pretty much this. 4e is a good game and there's nothing for autists to argue about, so there's no discourse.

The only other case in which you'll see 4e mentioned is by trolls trying to reignite the edition war.

Nobody really cares about Freeport.

Fuck you I care, my first introduction to D&D was sitting in on my dads pirates of freeport game back during 3.5

This. 4e players know that 4e and 5e fill different roles and tones (and that's OK). There is no need for war. 3aboos only went to war because of sunk cost.

True enough, I personally even prefer 3.5 over 5e, and yet I can still understand why 5e is appreciated, and I'm even willing to run it myself if I ever find myself running a game for players who are totally new to RPGs

There's folks that genuinely like 4e, and 4e threads usually have a bunch of articulated and well thought responses.
It's just that dealing with the edition war bingo every single time is pretty tiresome.

And yet they always bring up house rules and recalculation that you have to have in order to enjoy it.

>Have to have

Your views are too black and white man

The houserules aren't necessary, sometimes they're not even worth using, they're just nice to have, especially for new players and DMs

>using MM1 monsters is fine

That's not a houserule, that's a fix released by WotC.

Besides, it's not really necessary, using MM1 monsters just slows combat down, which honestly isn't a problem if your players are quick. It doesn't break the game

No, that's Pathfinder you're thinking of. Most people play 4e as it is.

The only reason why stuff like math fixes for 4e are so focused on is because 4e mostly behaves well as a game compared to 3.5e/PF which will shit the bed constantly.

It's just that the people who play 4e differ from 3.5/PF players, mostly in that 4e players haven't completely lost the all hope that the gameplay can be fun and engaging e.g. from levels 1-2 or 8-30.

Even without "fixing" anything about 4e, it plays better as a game.

Oh, and i'll just add that, as a matter of fact basically all of the things that people typically fix (e.g. tax feats, the to-hit math) have more or less the exact same problems in 3.5e, but much worse and much more difficult to fix.

People's inability to wipe their own ass without six character levels of mostly boring "+X to so-and-so" investment in a feat tree is touted as a "feature" by pathfinder players, but a lesser version of the same thing is seen as a problem by 4e players.

That's not because 4e doesn't work as well as 3.5e/PF; it's because if you play 3.5e/PF you absolutely have to accept those things, because they're completely endemic.

I was one of the guys who was working on a lightweight 4e retroclone. I've basically put the project on hiatus because life happened.
I've been spending most of my energy on my new job.

I still wanna finish it up some day.
Even if 4e is pretty great as it is, there are definitely lots of ways 4e could be simpler, faster, and better, and it's not like we have another game just like it we could just play.

Strike! is a bad joke, for example. It's so deconstructionist that they think it's okay to have completely unusable skill check mechanics. Because who cares about basic functionality and playability, am i right?

But as it is, I just don't have the time.

>Yes. There is a reason Pathfinder exists, there is a reason 4e died, and there's a reason why 5e has very little to do with 4e, and is more of a 3.5 done "right".
5e does use some of 4e's features, including healing surges under a different name.

The reasons 4e was not as successful as wotc wanted it to be come down to marketing blunders, asset mismanagement, and a playerbase that wanted it to fail.

First off, the marketing. Wotc basically invented the 4e=wow meme in a disastrous marketing blunder. People who actually played the system would tell you that the comparison doesn't make any sense, but the meme stuck.

The flagship product of 4e was a digital tabletop simulator with a subscription service. The developer of the product died and wotc decided it was not worth redoing years of manpower for a piece of complex software. Many of the decisions made in 4e were to make it more friendly for a digital tabletop that never was finished. The power layout was designed to be easy and distinctive to render in web browsers and software. The technical terms in the powers like "burst" were made so that players would easily understand how they interacted with the digital board. It's also likely that terms like "healing surge" were literal because gamers already invested in mmos would respond better to literal terms. These elements are mostly superficial, but tabletop players were greatly influenced by them.

Basically 4e was marketed to a segment that wotc would quickly abandon, which damaged its branding.

The second major reason 4e failed was because 3.5e players wanted it to fail. 3.5e had an expansive library of books, had many players invested in learning how to run it and play it. A new edition means having to buy new books and learn a new system. The more 4e games there are, the fewer options a 3.5e player has to play a game without learning a new system. Unfortunately for wotc, 4e was basically a "burner" system to get rid of the 3.5e players.

5e does not have 4e's healing surge feature

It has what the 3.5 fans of the edition wars thought the healing surge feature was

How is it different?

In 4e, healing surges were a limiting factor

You only had so many of them, and once you were out for the day, you were pretty fucked. Your leader couldn't heal you, you couldn't heal yourself. If you were knocked unconscious it was impossible to get back up without very specific surgeless healing means, which were few and far between.

In 5e, hit dice are free healing for when you don't want to spend healing spells or health potions

>Even if 4e is pretty great as it is, there are definitely lots of ways 4e could be simpler, faster, and better, and it's not like we have another game just like it we could just play.
The splatbook model they were using prevented it from being fully simplified.

For example, fighters in the PHB don't get many options for two-weapon attacks. This seems like something that should be a more core part of the rules, but that part of the system was deliberately separated so that the tempest fighter could be released in martial power. The PHB in 4e also has some early weirdness to it. Out of the 8 classes introduced, half of them have to choose an offensive stat. I actually like this idea, but the "X power" books made it more efficient to just have the core version of the class rely on one attribute, and then sell the other attribute versions in additional books.

>The second major reason 4e failed was because 3.5e players wanted it to fail.
Actually, it was more that 4e players drove off 3.5 players by being the most toxic sort of community every created by WotC.

>Strike! is a bad joke, for example. It's so deconstructionist that they think it's okay to have completely unusable skill check mechanics. Because who cares about basic functionality and playability, am i right?

For several months now, I have been running Strike! with a heavy set of house rules covering many classes and roles, as well as a totally revamped noncombat system.

Unfortunately, I do not think I am quite ready to present either document just yet. They are in terribly slipshod states at the moment.

There's also a lot of burden of knowledge stuff. It's frustrating that there are sometimes several strictly-worse or "very close to strictly worse but only very technically slightly different" versions of each game feature (be it a feat, power, magic item, or occasionally even a class feature).
It's terribly terribly messy.

>Your leader couldn't heal you

There actually are a lot of 'leader' class spells that straight up heal with no surge required.

Bullshit, 3aboos were upset about 4e before it even released.

You're a god damn liar, and I know because I was there.

From the fucking beginning, there were people who are EAGER to shit all over 4e. It wasn't their precious 3.5 so it needed to fucking die. There was a vitriolic hatred for the game long before it was released, long before it had fans, because it was going to be different.

If you ask me, Gamma World 7e does a wonderful job of breaking the core mechanics away from sprawling character building. Of course, it still has the card system and is designed to service a type of setting a lot of people might not be super into.

In the unfinished-but-playable game Legend there are a few nuggets of 4e in the ability track power design, and it has the same 'best of two' flexibility for picking your saving throw bonuses. Plus, they have similar power levels over time: start heroic, grow into full mythic.

You have in backwards. 4e players just wanted to play.

There was an era lost to time where you basically could not discuss 4e on Veeky Forums because the moderators thought the best response to 4e threads getting spammed with trolls was to delete 4e threads.

You don't have to take my word for it though, just go on youtube. There are few if any youtube videos that insult 3.5e players for not playing 4e, but videos attacking 4e were a popular bait (as in "this is bait") and a popular clickbait so internet personalities could stir controversy for views.

Touhoufag was no saint, but he literally made dozens of threads merely offering "a gift for you," but the threads could not exist in peace due to anti-4e shitposting.

>5e does use some of 4e's features, including healing surges under a different name.

Also Tieflings, Dragonborn, and Warlocks in the PHB. And officialized the High Elf/Wood Elf split in the PHB that Eladrin/Elves started. No racial stat penalties, only bonuses. And Backgrounds are based on 4e Themes. And Battlemaster maneuvers are weaker version of Martial Exploits. Eldritch Knight teleporting is a nod to Swordmages. At-Will Cantrips. Ritual spellcasting. I could go on about the stuff from 4e that made it in under a different name/presentation.

But yeah, everything else is more or less spot on. It was very much presented/interpreted as "Not D&D" at a time when 3e D&D was so popular that it's ruleset had pretty much taken over the entire RPG market. Everybody was making a d20 version of their RPG, as there was little market for anything else.

What utter revisionist nonsense. You were clearly not around when 4e came out. The hate was extremely one-sided.
And even if you legitimately were around, it's even worse; if one of you guys managed to get butthurt and focus on what could only have been a few a single indignant counter-insults in the middle of your overwhelming and constant roaring flood of repetitive shitposting, then you deserve nothing but the deepest of scorn.

Fucking this

Wasn't Legend the one where everything was a proc and you never really did anything yourself?
...or was that maybe 13th age?

I honestly wish that Paragon Paths had returned in some form.

No, that's definitely not Legend.

Guys I made a meem XD.

Shitposting aside, I now got the itch to run a 4e game. Just with the core books and a couple of printouts I could make some great encounters, and I even have some house rules to spice it up.

The only people who bring up 3.x in 4e threads are angry 4rries, though.

Only sometimes. The truth is that some 3e players still like to stir the pot.

Even if 3e did get some hate, can you honestly blame the 4e posters? An entire paradigm of gaming was systematically shit on using tactics that would make the Russian social engineers proud.

>Touhoufag was no saint, but he literally made dozens of threads merely offering "a gift for you,"
Piracy is shitting on publishers.

I've been developing something like that in my free time, but it's difficult to have it sit well ability wise while also being conceptually flexible enough for broad use.
I think I might deconstruct it and have there be "Paragon Boons" that can be chosen at certain levels. That'll also let me do some interesting stuff like introduce prerequisites of backgrounds, classes, or subclasses and have more variable rates for gaining them so DM's can have a better handle on the scope of things.

Well yeah

It's basically PTSD by this point, any insult aimed at 4e is immediately attributed to 3.5 fans because, well, that's what was always the case for pretty much the entire lifespan of 4e.

This isn't hard to understand

All I see in those threads is angry paranoia honestly. Look at your own post, going on about it being some kind of malevolent conspiracy.

Oh and subclasses. In 4e every class had kinds of subclass's which were more like "templates", that listed 1st level feats, skills, and abilities tied to specific style/mechanics. As you continued to level, you could stick abilities tied to your subclass or pick others.

In 5e, they simplified things and just made subclass something you pick once and all the abilities you get as a result are automatic.

A tenable position, but piracy is going to be an option no matter what and they served as mini 4e-generals discussing the new content. Piracy was only brought up as another tool to attack 4e by proxy through attacking touhoufag.

But that's dumb. Nowadays plenty of alternatives to 4e exist, as do their fans.

Everything in 5e is simplified, whether it was taken from 3.5 or 4e

I know a lot of people like it this way, but I personally find it a little bit insulting, like they don't trust me to make my own build decisions

If you think that post is bad, you should see how some people talk about Essentials.

Touhoufag deserved it.

I don't dislike 5e, but character progression feels a little suffocating. It's bizarrely difficult to branch out, whereas in 4e it was a fuckin breeze. I'd be interested in your system if you ever get it up and running, user.

It's not paranoia though. Lorem ipsum poster single-handedly destroyed 4e topics on Veeky Forums because the moderator response to his posting was to either delete the threads he posted in, or delete whatever he replied to. This meant that for months that a single shitposter was acting as a de-facto dictator of what could or couldn't be posted on Veeky Forums.

We JUST had a thread about 4e where an angry 3aboo outed himself as a sameposting shit-stirrer while screaming about how 3.5 is better.

Get your alternate universe bullshit outta here. 4rries call 3aboos out on their shit when they come to fuck things up, because that's what 3aboos do.

There isn't a whole lot to discuss and, while 4E memes aside the system has a lot of nice features, it just doesn't hold a sizable fanbase.

It's like how FantasyCraft will pop up for a couple weeks and then fade away.

>plenty of alternatives to 4e exist, as do their fans

What do you mean by "as do their fans"? That doesn't really make grammatical sense

Also, how does that relate to my post at all?

It wasn't that one-sided, since 4rry defensiveness (which I sympathize with) did absolutely come from somewhere. But anyone saying "muh balance!" shit didn't turn people off of 4e are woefully incorrect. I've had more than one 4e fan accuse me off either not understanding or straight up hating fun because I didn't buy into balance as the be all end all of tabletop. Hell, I was told after a botched game of 4e that I'd had fun but was in denial. This shit popped up constantly in edition war threads.

Because you can be a fan of something else than 3.x and still criticize 4e. How is that hard to understand?

Never let him forget this

Nice narrative you got there mate.
So that's why 3aboos don't like narrative stuff in their games. They have more than enough of that in their lives, to validate their preferences.

Yes, but that's not my point

My point is, regardless of whether you like e.X or not. The vast, vast majority of badmouthing of 4e came, during the lifespan of 4e, from 3.5 fans. To such an extent that 4e fans now automatically attribute any insult as coming from a 3.5 fan, because that was an extremely safe bet for a long time.

That doesn't mean they're right, it's just why they do it

How do we know it wasn't an angry 4rry falseflagger, since we're all so comfortable making accusations of sabotage here?

I misunderstood you then. I apologise.

Because that's exactly what he was trying to suggest?

His whole method was pretending to be a shitty 4e fan and then using his own shitposts as evidence for 4e fans being cancerous

You can also be a fan of something without feeling the need to shitpost in threads about other games.
And, guess what, most people do. At this point, I believe, it's just shitposting for the sake of shitposting, because trolls know that we 4rries have a bunch of easy triggers, and they go through the same motions in every thread.

>It's so deconstructionist that they think it's okay to have completely unusable skill check mechanics.

These two things aren't really related. With the 2d6 variant it' basically a lightweight generic version of PbtA... which is a system that thrives on being specific, so yeah, it's not great, but it's not bad because of the reductiveness.

Personally I had no interest in tabletop games before 4e. 4e was a breath of fresh air to me because it was willing to slay some sacred cows and focus on gameplay. Coming from any other artform or industry, that's enough to attract some attention.

I came into D&D having no preferences, and ended up being extremely disappointed by a "worse is better" mentality. Game balance is a bad thing. Good layouts are a bad thing. Streamlining is bad. etc. These concepts were completely alien to me then, and after spending years lurking Veeky Forums, they are still incomprehensible to me. Even problems I ran into, like slogfest encounters had easy solutions based on how transparent the math is.

I don't consider myself a 4e player. 4e is just the only system I know of that looked like it was trying to be good outside of the confines of the mentality of D&D. I don't particularly love it, I just feel like a school teacher grading papers, and the only student that tried to answer the questions and not just write dicks on the paper only got a C-. Yea, he isn't great, but even if he only got one question right out of 50, he is still a better student than the rest.

I wish I was aware of other P&P games that would give a similar feeling. My $00.02

Because the guy was already falseflagging as a 4rry. See 3aboos are genuine scum. Never tolerate them.

I can sympathize with that much. Would love to have a 13th Age thread once in a while, but eventually the touhoufag balance analysis gets posted and everything turns into a shitfest.

>but eventually the touhoufag balance analysis gets posted and everything turns into a shitfest
It's totally right though.

Honestly I believe that nowadays hardcore 3aboos aren't found on Veeky Forums. They either are at home playing, turned into Pathfags, or moved on to something else.
The fuckers who keep shitting up 4e threads are doing it just for the lulz, they don't really what the rules of 3.5 or 4e are. It's just parroting memes and reveling in the butthutrt they infallibly create.

>Personally I had no interest in tabletop games before 4e. 4e was a breath of fresh air to me because it was willing to slay some sacred cows and focus on gameplay.

I know a lot of people like this. They all got into D&D with 4e and when 5e came around, they took one long at it and decided that basically every step it took toward 3.5 was a detriment to the system.

Hopefully Wizards can get D&D back on track toward being good now that Pathfinder has leeched away all the rabid 3.5 worshipers. It's sad that 4e had to die to get rid of them, but I feel like in future Wizards will slowly 4eify the game again, but more subtly and gradually, so that people don't get spooked like they did before.

I haven't gone through and analyzed the entire thing with a magnifying glass. Even if it is mathematically sound (and it very well could be, for all I know), I can't agree with the assertion that it proves 13th Age is shit or somesuch.

I wish that wasn't the case. I just want to talk about the cool parts of 3.5 and tell people who are interesting in it what to avoid without some fucking faggot destroying the thread with shitty advice, durr codzilla dont exits, popularity = quality, and subjectivism therefore nothing matters arguments.

The simplest way is to acknowledge the flaws

Just start by admitting that you know 3.5 is not a good game, you just happen to enjoy it anyway

I feel the same way. I love the crazy levels of optimization you can do, especially as classes that are overall subpar (even if I do find it annoying that pretty much every melee character NEEDS one level in barbarian)

I'll play ball with that. What are some of the better aspects of 3.5? I tried PF but didn't get far past character generation, so kind of blank slate there.

Just remember

4th edition died for your sins.

Later classes in both 3.5 and PF are much more interesting than the shitty core classes, excepting Bards(who were doing it right to begin with) and Druids(who are flat out overloaded with features) and more balanced to boot. A reasonably built party that consists of a Factotum, a Dread Necro, a Warblade, and a Totemist are all roughly on par power-wise while being completely different from each other mechanically.

>a Factotum, a Dread Necro, a Warblade, and a Totemist
These sound interesting but I have no idea what any of them are.

Yeah fair enough.

I just want warden in 5e is that too much to ask

I wanna turn into the form of the Autumn Reaper.

A factotum is sort of like a rogue. You've got loads of skill points and 3/4BAB, and every single skill is a class skill for you. You also get spells as spell-like abilities and several combat features, it is explicitly designed to be the "jack of all trades" class

Dread Necromancers are sort of like wizards with a very limited spell list, mostly focused on, obviously enough, necromancy

Warblades are basically fighters but better, they're a full BAB class with a d12 hit dice that gets ToB maneuvers. They're also my personal favourite class in 3.5

I don't lknow what a totemist is myself

Factotum is the ultimate jack of trades that has every skill in the game and can pull spells and class features straight from other classes on the fly, Dread Necro is a necromancer that uses nothing but necromancy but they get real class features to help them do their job instead of them being a worse Wizard, Warblade is a proto-4E Fighter and Warlord, and Totemist is complicated to explain because you need to know the subsystem they use to really understand what they do beyond ganking things with a dozen attacks a round.

You're deluding yourself. We all know after the way babbies cried so hard over 4e WoTC will never again risk doing something new and daring. 6th edition will just be 5.5.

Totemist comes from one of the least appreciated books in 3.5, bretty interesting stuff.Long story shory short, you had these classes that could, instead of spells, "shape" a number of pseudo magic items per day, plus they had a couple of different ways to control the power settings on these pseudo-items. Totemist was all about replicating the traits of monster manual critters, by getting natural attacks and special abilities. The other two were a sort of cleric and paladin with the same principle.
It was interesting and also a mess to play.

I'm part of another Veeky Forums adjacent go at a 4e rework. We're currently in the process of trying to tear apart the skill system and put it back together so every stat has a roughly equal number of skills associated with it, and every skill has a roughly similar scope and breadth, to make each possible choice rewarding and not pigeonhole characters too much.

Since this is roughly the right place for it, any thoughts on what people would want to see in a rework, or questions about how we're doing things?

There is zero reason to discuss 4e.

If you're interested in it, you've got all of the content you need and you can go and play it. There's no reason to discuss a finished, completed and solved product that will be seeing no further revision.

If you like it, go play it. If you don't, do. You've got no reason to talk about it here though.

One big thing that was mentioned, and for me at least was a big deal -
3.5E had their stuff readily available on d20srd.org so it was trivially easy to look up the rules. Pathfinder too has a great deal of their stuff online.

5E is pirated and shows up all over the place on searches, and the shadowrun books are easily downloadable from the big troves that they have.

4e has.... much more difficult resources to get to. It's just another barrier to entry that makes things more difficult.

This is something I've been pondering for a while. Whether a game being imbalanced and broken can actually be a good thing, since attempting to fix it will drive endless discussion, as long as you've got enough fun seeming content to make people want to make it work.