4e

Just because there aren't complex rules governing every social interaction doesn't mean there was no social interaction. Point me to the passage in any 4e material that specifically discourages the DM from including non-combat content or encouraging players from using social solutions.

You're right, but there's no point in trying to convince the grognards years afterwards.

We had this argument years ago and it was found that the majority of 4e criticisms were outright lies from threeaboos who willfully misinterpreted the rules to make it look bad. The biggest criticism of HP inflation was greatly mitigated with monster vault and a conversion method to make other books compatible to a degree was also released.

Also the fact that such rules didn't exist in 2e either shows that 3e was seriously dumbed down.

4e had rules for non combat encounters like chases etc, and they worked for social situations too. Something like you need x successes before y failures to pass the challenge. Could easily apply to diplomacy.

Are you saying the system was shitposted to death?

Yes.

>Just because there aren't complex rules governing every social interaction doesn't mean there was no social interaction.
That's absolutely true, but 4e didn't just lack rules, it also lacked simple guidelines for social interaction. Most of the rulebooks were about combat. Now, as an OSR guy I am in complete agreement that there's no need to simulate things that we can all do at the table (i.e. lie, argue or simply talk) in incredible detail. However, you have to agree that the presentation of the books sets a particular kind of expectations for how a game is going to be run, and if combat is a topic they focus on to near exclusion of everything else, the players are naturally going to assume that this is what the game is about. Coupled with the dissociation between the fiction and the game's mechanics (encounter powers, healing surges etc.) meant that a large part of the playerbase approached 4e mostly as a combat game.

>it also lacked simple guidelines for social interaction
I'm sorry, you didn't read the book that well.

>it also lacked simple guidelines for social interaction.
You are wrong.

What I wanted was a book about hexcrawling like the old days.

So did 4e have ultra-detailed rules for roleplaying like says or did it completely lack a framework for social encounters according to ? It can't be both, so which complaint is closer to the truth?

fpbp

Hell, there was no point when it released either

yep

The other editions never had those things either. People were literally making shit up to shit on 4e.

>if combat is a topic they focus on to near exclusion of everything else
You mean like every edition of d&d?

Are 4rries the most pathetic people on the board?

Even if 4e had a few paragraphs saying "this is how you roleplay" that doesn't change the fact that most people playing it were really just playing a tactical miniatures game.

yesand?

>tactical miniatures
>roleplaying

what the fuck do you think D&D started out as you fucking noob?

Honestly both sides in these arguments are fucking retarded. His side forgets that D&D was basically an adaption from full on wargaming, but your side forgets the importance that the reason it isn't wargaming is that it emphasizes the roleplaying. Even the largescale wargaming had roleplaying elements which inspired the more intimate style of tactical roleplaying in D&D

So basically 4e was d&d dropping the pretense that it was ever anything more than a combat simulator to use within your Roleplaying game?

>4e was d&d dropping the pretense that it was ever anything more
Yes. 3aboos like to think D&D is some sort of deep simulationistic (but with magic and dragon) system about the life of a fantasy murderhobo, when in reality it is a game with focus on (dealing with or avoiding) combat.

That triggered them too much.

>After nearly a decade, 4rries still hold on to their persecution complex
see a therapist.

You can't reason people out o positions they didn't reason themselves into.

is an april fools joke

It had some guidelines, but not too much.

>it was found that the majority of 4e criticisms were outright lies from threeaboos
lolno

4e was a garbage game that dumped all the cool and interesting parts of D&D in favor of miniatures combat. The heart of D&D is strange environments, encountering weird monsters, investigating ruins, and looting dungeons. The heart of 4e is rolling initiative in preparation for an hour-long combat as the players whittle down their opponents' hit points.

For whatever reason, the 4e designers looked at everything wrong with 3e and emphasize it. There was never a moment when they thought, "Hmm, maybe we SHOULDN'T enshrine character building in the rules," or "Maybe stripping longterm consequences from the rules ISN'T the greatest thing." The system revolves around the balanced encounter meme, so much so that a deviation in monster level royally fucks the PCs, especially those not optimized with an 18 in their primary ability score. For something playtested and mathematically balanced with the stated goal of eliminating the magic item Christmas tree, the developers failed. Hard. Monster math was borked until MM3, and characters were severely weakened without their +6 items and the various feat taxes.

The system simply and unequivocally failed on its design goals.

Interesting combat? No. Math that "just works"? No. Reduce magic item dependency? No. Not being a shitty MMO on paper? No. Resemble D&D? No.

Sorry, 4e was a shitturd. It was a less interesting 3e, with all the failure that entails.

Going too hard mate(s?).

I know you want to keep 4e alive in the consciousness of Veeky Forums, but a little more subtlety would go a long way.

Holy hell, that's on point.

Also, I'm really curious who came up with the dumb idea to include all those dissociated mechanics.

Meanwhile in 3rd Edition an infinite wand of cure light wounds is legal and affordable.

???

>4e was a garbage game that dumped all the cool and interesting parts of D&D in favor of miniatures combat.
>The heart of D&D is strange environments, encountering weird monsters, investigating ruins, and looting dungeons.
If 4e didn't have any of those for you, that's an issue you need to take up with your shitty DM, not with the game itself.

Nothing wrong with it user. But you should be able to understand why that helped create a perception that it was more of a tactical miniatures game than an RPG.

I always thought that was a poor criticism of 4e myself. That it wasn't an RPG. And I'm not a fan of the system by any means.

In my opinion, if 4e had been released under a different name (perhaps by a different company) then it likely would have been a successful game system that is still used today. Even offered as 'play this instead of stupid D&D' in those 'anything but D&D' threads.

It just strayed from and removed too many things that too many of the player base identify as 'D&D' for it to be accepted as D&D.

>Even offered as 'play this instead of stupid D&D' in those 'anything but D&D' threads
yes
>it likely would have been a successful game system
No

I'll let you in on a secret: Nobody gives a fuck about games like 4e. It literally only got the exposure it got because of the D&D brand, and all that exposure did was make more people hate it.
If 4e really had been a good system that was shitposted to death, its community would have bounced back by now.
Instead it's dead and rotting, like all the other RPGs that also try to be tactical modular wargames.

>same old vague non-arguments

There's more 4e players (according to virtual tabletop sites) than 99% of other (non-D&D) games.

Just saying. By that metric, all those games are even worse pieces of shit.

>The heart of D&D is strange environments, encountering weird monsters, investigating ruins, and looting dungeons
And 4e actively encouraged DMs to throw them at you by offering standardized skill checks for all level of environment.

Say, did 4e have super broken shit like 3e that wasn't errata'd into the ground? It's been years, but I remember Tohoufag's threads, and he had to fucking reach, unlike say Pun-pun or Trunamers.

But most of what you've posted is provably incorrect. Even the point about encounter balance- A 4e party is expected to deal with encounters of a level range from -2 to +4, a pretty broad scope, with even higher being possible and the system working just fine with it. And all the things you list as problems are things the system fixed. I mean, it's fair to say they sucked, but they solved them.

I think the continuous actions of a group who utterly despise the system and continue to spread misinformation about it years after the systems 'death' is also a factor. Any mention of people enjoying 4e and they come out of the woodwork to scream and moan about how awful it is. It seems oddly desperate for a group who won, arguing against a 'dead' game.

There's some pretty broken shit in high optimisation 4e, but nothing close to what you could achieve in 3.PF.

4e had some broken shit and some of the most obscure ones was not errata-ed.

Most "broken" shit in 4e however was either non-functional player mechanics written by Mike "I'm so tired of having to be balanced" Mearls, or the "we're not allowed to do a 4.5, so here's some feat taxes" shit

>all the other RPGs that also try to be tactical modular wargames
>dead
I go out to get tea and D&D is already dead now?

No, there was also the terrible marketing, and Mike Mearls' office war that gave us gems like:
>Essentials classes
>Item rarity rules
>Numenera, 13th Age and good MtG updates

>not realizing that 4e's true failure was a sterilized presentation combined with lore changes to cherished settings that ultimately made them worse, all because newly-in-charge game designers wanted to leave a mark on the D&D world and had no respect for D&D's history
There's a reason Rob Heinsoo was laid off just a year after 4e was released.

This might be part of the disconnect between people who love it and hate it, at least in some cases.

I adored how 4e presented information. After so many RPG books that are fucking useless as a game reference manual, having things which gave me all the information I needed in a really easy to use way was far, far better for my experience of running the game than jamming in loads of fluff or a more 'immersive' layout and styling.

Meanwhile I'd never really given a fuck about D&D settings before or since, so the changes had no relevance to me. I always homebrew a setting anyway.

But 4e had a far more evocative text than the blandness of 2e (for example).

And the default setting was far superior for any kind of game, from pure dungeoncrawlan to legendary travels to complex geopolitics.

The most "broken" thing I can think in 4e was the Arcana Abuser Wizard, who, by combining typeless bonuses to his arcana check, and substitution utility powers had to roll a 1 to even have a chance at failing ANY skill check. Combined with some rituals and other ritual focused feats/PPs/EDs, it was very versatile and had an out of combat solution to anything, almost as much as a 3.5 wizard.

Tightly controlled system things like action economy hold it back from truly breaking the game, but it makes everyone else's skills and utilities redundant, to say the least.

4e's presentation (and lore) was literally the best D&D ever had.

It had shit adventures and marketting, especially the first year.
I started as a 4e hater myself because of WOTC's shit.

You can blame a lot of the games issues on WotC's godawful launch, yeah. They had a great product they had no idea what to do with and only really figured out just before it went retarded again with Essentials.

And that isn't even getting started on the murder/suicide crippling what was intended to be a core feature of the game.

I'm not sure 4e started that great.
Sure, it was better than 3e and 2e, and was much better at handling OD&D style games, but it was pretty rough still:
>MAD classes
>monsters in MM1 that do not follow the proper math
>wonky math in DMG
>Skill challenges never got a proper explanation

It wasn't until PHB3 era that it felt actually great. Before that, it was some excellent ideas crippled by some mediocre execution and terrible marketing.

>falling for bait this obvious

4E when it came out was a horrible slog where people were missing half the fucking time with an 18 in their primary stat and leaders had to hope their attack buffs connected if they wanted to solve the issue. I was not happy with that at all.

Thankfully by the time I played it again a year later WotC fixed all of my problems with the game, something I can't say about any other edition of the game, ever.

Still beats anything Monte "I treat RPGs like collectable card games" Cook ever had a hand in.

But 4e has Bluff, Diplomacy, Insight (Sense Motive), Intimidate, and Streetwise, so does it really lack social skills?

You're assuming the people who bitch about it actually read the books.

I figured out how to get indefinite damage with a Bugbear Artificer - not infinite, but certainly indefinite. Bugbears were the only guys who could use oversized weapons after the Minotaur update. I got an oversized carrikal, a Dark Sun weapon with the Brutal 2 quality, meaning any damage die roll of 2 or lower is rerolled. When a carrikal is oversized, the damage dice goes from 1d8 to 2d4, meaning that an level 1, 18 STR Bugbear's minimum damage with a melee basic attack was 10, with a maximum damage of 12. A Battle Engineer (paragon path for Artificer) gets an encounter power to give a weapon the Brutal property, or to increase a preexisting Brutal property by 1. At the start of every fight, the carrikal's minimum damage becomes it's maximum damage.

...Once you get into the realm of +6 enchantments, you gain access to the Vorpal enchantment. This lets you roll an extra damage die every time you roll maximum damage on a damage dice indefinitely, and an oversized carrikal with Brutal 3 can only roll max damage. So long as you choose to continue rolling additional damage dice, your damage on any attack may continue to increase indefinitely, and may only cease when you choose to stop rolling. Hence, indefinite damage.

If your DM does not allow races from the Monster Manual in their game, one of the Fighter Epic Destinies from Martial Power will allow you to wield oversized weapons, too.

I see your Arcana Abuser Wizard, and raise you by One Punch Man.