What killed D&D 4e?

What killed D&D 4e?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_and_Melissa_Batten
twitter.com/AnonBabble

It changed too much in too little time and scared a bunch of people off. Also for some reason, changing the system makes all the D&D players forget how to roleplay.

A combination of Essentials being an absolute disaster that failed to bring in the grognards AND pissed off the actaual 4rries, Essentials becoming the new norm, lackluster choices in final books (relegating Shadow & Elemental power sources to secondary, for example), cancelling the ready-to-print Nentir Vale Gazetteers, and the bad pre-release press it got.

nothing. It's a good game. WotC just stopped supporting it when 5e came out, like they stopped supporting 3.5 when 4 came out.

the murder-suicide probably didn't help.

D&D 5e

Terrible marketing and PR around its release, further sunk by the murder suicide of a developer for what would have been a very ambitious computer aide.

A combination of these. Game was dying because of a combination of reasons, 5e was WotC putting the mess they'd turned 4e into out of its misery.

The murder-suicide of the lead e-tools dev and his family and WotC being so stupid as to leave 100% of a project in the hands of a single individual.

3.5fags bitching and moaning, putting off potential newcomers

Amateur-level game designers wanted to leave their impact on the game and thus missed the entire point of it, creating a system that, while "balanced" in the strictest sense, was incredible sterile in most regards while in all other regards changed lore for the worse. It's like it was designed by people who never actually played D&D in a white room with no external input. There's a reason the lead dev was laid off just a year after its released while 5e's lead devs, god knows they have problems, are still working on it and even being promoted 3 years in (not counting the 2 years of playtesting).

WotC stopped supporting it two full years before 5e,.

What? who? context?

The sad thing is that they listened too much to people that actually knew 3.5.

The guy doing the D&D online tools killed his wife and then himself.

World of Warcraft Cataclysm expansion (aka the worst expansion)

So, when 4e came out, WotC had this huge plan to create an online toolset for 4e - sort of across between an online database of all the game content and Roll20. Problem is, they had only one developer working on that, and he came home and found his wife was cheating on him, so he shot her and then blew his brains out and then WotC had nobody who could decipher his notes and continue coding the online toolset, so they had to scrap it.

Yeah, it's actually got a wikipedia article (If a very short one)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_and_Melissa_Batten

He was the guy working on the very ambitious 4e online game system. A roll20 sorta thing with full integration to all the other online tools WOTC wanted to make (Like the character creator, so you could just link a character sheet to a game) as well as tablet/phone support.

Mike mearls and a murder-suicide. I just wish the former wad part of theatter

All women are whores

Could be worse. Could be like the Curse of Kamelion for Dr Who.

>Both Terence Dudley and Peter Grimwade, who scripted the robot companion's appearances, have died. So too have Kamelion's human alter egos, Gerald Flood and Dallas Adams, who played his 'Howard Foster' form for most of 'Planet of Fire'. To say nothing of Kamelion's software designer, Mike Power, who was killed shortly after the decision was taken to include the robot in the series. Missing Adventure scribe Craig Hinton, who wrote Kamelion stories, died early too.

What did Mike Mearls do wrong?

Because he stalked and killed his estranged wife, who'd taken out restraining orders on him?

The smear campaign.

Spearheaded Essentials in a desperate attempt to bring back the crowd lost to Pathfinder.

3eaboos

>overspecialization
4e's based on doing one thing really well - tactical pulpy high fantasy adventures with high chance of death. This means that it is very, very difficult to run anything outside of that scope. This gets worse when you consider how many people don't really wanna run that.
>bad press release
The game had a genuine math issue which made combat drag out, and the early reception was a major wound to it. Plus, the change to a far clearer style with minimal obfuscation and the creation of Points of Light meant that the old settings felt disregard for. Also, Forgotten Realms. It was very unlikely to get to a huge stage then.
>misplaced expectations
Hasbro thought they could make D&D this huge flagship thing. 4e's reports were good, but never to the level which was desired, which is why support started to dwindle.
>the death of OGL
4e's lock of OGL was a sour note, which is why there's so little homebrew for it. Ultimately that cut off a lot of support for the edition that would've come from outside.
>Essentials fiasco
Already covered above.

Started Essentials, which proved to be mediocre to awful, culled loads of support for normal 4e work, and then cancelled things when his plan didn't go right.

Basically this; Essentials, and all the rubbish ideas that tied into that - like completely dropping the ready-to-print Nentir Vale Gazetteers, the first ever setting sourcebook devoted to 4e's "assumed setting" - were all Mearls' ideas.

And he's the guy in charge of 5e, which has taken a hard attempt to shuck off everything special 4e tried.

If my memory doesn't fail me, he took total contral of 5e during late stages of development, which is why 5e and Next are so different, with Next having far more interesting ideas and execution.

He went to pretty extreme lengths to kill off anything that might have made 5e interesting to play instead of just copying the worst parts of 3.5

Wouldn't surprise me if that is the case. I mean, goddamn, I don't even have Next for comparison, but how do you go from the strong PC racial rules of 4e to the shitty unstable ones of 5e?

Release was fine. It was the fastest and highest selling DND until 5e. Afterwords however it just got weird. It felt like they were changing some core element if the game every couple of months.

>tfw bitchy grognards got all of 4e's good ideas removed from 5e and have tainted them forever
>Fighters will never be fun again
>the Warlord is gone forever

I'm so fucking mad.

Me. I did it.
IT WAS ME BARRY

Because his wife catalyzed it by cheating on him

I think he'd already been fired before the murder suicide.

Indeed, his real crime was doing a shitty job annotating his code so no one else could understand what the fuck he was doing

The thing is though, he was inadequate for the job.

The 4e tools sounded amazing, but that was the problem. They didn't have the talent to make the ideas work how they wanted.

People get cheated on all the time and don't murder people. The murder is on him, not her, no matter how much of a dick move it was on her part to cheat.

They really needed to hire more than one guy for it.

How exactly did they "miss the point"? How is it "sterile"?

Page 42

Probably essentials, they kept changing core mechanics or classes and it became impossible to keep up with books alone

3 things.
1, it felt that crucial bit more murderhobo centralized over previous editions.
2, things were, and I feel horrible for saying this, too balanced, and balanced around optimization. There was little way to get ahead, and if you were a weird class/race combo who didn't burn their first feat for that +1, the character was absolute garbage with little way to adjust for it.
3, it left too little to interpretation. It established lengthy and ridiculous rules for things it could have just bullshitted, and the rules given for these things sometimes make no sense.

The three of these, combined with Pathfinder providing a less different alternative killed interest by a lot of D&D veterans, so it never got the "crazy stories" draw for normies that 3.5 did.

Acshually, Mearls got demoted to community manager for 5e, so...

Underrated.

Every single discussion about the system turned into this.

Okay, real talk. Divorcee here, sometimes a marriage falls apart. Sometimes someone pushes someone away. Sometimes someone wants something else. Sometimes people aren’t who you or they think they are.

The fact that he went stalker killed on his ex who cheated on him is a deeper indictment of his character flaws than her betrayal by lust or emotiomal need. You and I don’t fucking know what their lives and relationship was like before, nor do we know who they were as people. And if women are whores what about the men who cheat?

Just listening to your pigenholing of this situation almost pisses me off as much as one of the greatest failings of 4E in my opinion.

In the two development & preview books for the edition, which my exwife had me hemmirage when we downsized a few years before the breakup because we weren’t playing 4e anyway, they mentioned a Warlord Power called Feather Me Yon Oaf, allowing allies en masse to lahnched basic ranged attacks at a target. To my knowledge this name didn't make it into the game. That is why 4E failed, it tried to take itself as seriously as I’m taking the putz who thinks someone getting murdered is proof all women are whores.

I have never seen point 3 made as an argument against 4e. Usually that's reserved for points against 3.5

Most people i knew switched to pathfinders at that time.

I don’t know who to be more mad at.

Thawne for doing it, or Barry for being the lightning rod at the center of it...

No, I know in my heart who to be mad at. Damn it, Barry.

"feather me yon oaf"?

It's a silly name to be sure, but what the fuck is it supposed to mean?

What all did Essentials change?

This was a pretty major blow that not many people know about, surprisingly.

AEDU, which often meant interesting design for every level, and an overreliance on basic attacks.

Also there was supposed to be another book released that would've re released the PHB1 classes with full errata. It would have been the perfect intro to 4e, but Mearls cancelled it.

I'm still better about that.

It's actually pretty direct, given archaic terms.

"Yon Oaf" means "that jackass."

And to "feather" was a not entirely unique way to say "shot with an arrow." (Because the feathered end sticks out of them.)

So it's the same as someone saying "Light his ass up" to a modern squad of soldiers.

Well, lets consider that to festher something can mean to cut it short, or perhaps the feather fletching on the arrows sticking out of whomever has been so attacked by a large number of arrow!?

It made sense for a power name. More so than “Villain’s Nightmare” which was a martial power with no alignment component or thematic sense to its name other than sounding like a tryhard signature move.

You, i like you and your break down. Far more concise than my own frustrsted ramblings of explanation.

3.5 had it too, especially for spell descriptions and rollcharts, but 4e definitely had it, beyond cherrypicked examples like Bloody Path. It's tough to place, but there's a certain atmosphere to it that feels really constricting as you run it.
I'll give it my best, but I'm not sure I have it in the words I'd like. It's like, 3.5 gave you examples of rules to follow, while 4e gave you rules to follow, if that makes sense. 3.5 gave you examples of basic tools you could shuffle around as supplements to your plans, while 4e had more intricate models of things that were difficult to properly unpack and use as you wanted to, so you had to build stuff around it.

How does number 2 even make sense?

All you really need in 4e is +4 mod to your main stay at least. 4e is much more forgiving to wacky racial class combos than 5e (especially when all races get a choice to where to put their bonuses to).

Oh

Yeah that fits with the general naming theme of warlord powers, with things like "on my mark" "vengeance is mine" and "hold that thought". Just powers where their names are basically what your warlord shouts when using it

Murder Suicide and Mearls.

I definitely feel this.At least for in-combat stuff, even though 3.5 had rules for everything there were pretty much no consequences to ignoring whatever RAW was and substituting something you made up on the spot. 4e's combat was too tight mechanically to fuck around with very much.

>All you really need in 4e is +4 mod to your main stay at least
And if you pick a race that doesn't have a +2 to your main stat, you have 6 points to spread around over the other 5 stats. If you want to be even vaguely competent at anything outside your class' main or secondary stat you're pretty much screwed. That's not a good place to be.

Kike Mearls is basically the J. Allen Brack of tabletop gaming, isn't he?

Most 4e classes were designed around the AEDU system, as notes.

This system tied class abilities to sets of powers, that could be used
A - At Will
E - once per Encounter
or
D - Daily.

You would also get
U - Utility powers: powers with reduced in-combat effect, or their combat effect was limited to defenses/movement.

Your at-will powers were the fundamental base abilities of the class, that tended to alter in some way your basic attacks. Rogues could get one that let their attacks target Reflex instead of AC, for example, or let them add their Charisma modfier to damage. Fighters could get one where, if they missed, they still dealt half-damage, more if they were wielding a two-handed weapon, or another one that let them push enemies around the battlefield, essentially giving free 1 square bull-rushes.

Your encounter powers dealt more damage, and had flashier effects.

Your DAILY powers were even more powerful/flashier, and could often have long-lasting effects. ("Until the end of the encounter, you gain +2 AC" sort of things.)

This system, while it allowed a great deal of specialization and distinction of classes, made them all LOOK very similar: everyone has the same number of powers, the powers come in boxes that look the same.

This is root of the "WoW-clone" insults, and the "but it was all the same" cry: without some system knowledge, many powers looked like almost straight up copies, and it was easy to overlook certain details. Rangers, for instance, got an attack power that looked entirely like a normal attack...except it was a minor action, meaning it could be used in addition to movement and normal attacking.

The visceral sensual shock of the system put many people off of it, despite it being not entirely distinct from previous editions. (A cleric has X Turn Undead attempts a day, the Barb has X rages, etc.)

(cont)

Your views of 4e remind me of how my DM views 3.5 from the perspective of a 2e grognard

Yeah, I still have no idea what you're talking about and never had the issue where 4E was too restrictive, either in combat or out. It honestly worked better than most other big RPGs I've played as far as streamlining out-of-combat stuff and making skill checks and skill challenges work organically and intuitively. I much prefer it to what 5E went back to, and I vastly prefer it over the fourteen pages of climbing modifers that 3.5 got bogged down in.

D&D 4e is my favorite RPG of all time. Keep that in mind with my following criticisms.

D&D 4e was a system that needed a lot of digital support in order to appeal to the masses, and the digital tools were ok, just not good enough.

4e was poorly marketed . They attempted to brand themselves as a WoW-killer and succeeded so well that it destroyed their own image. This was particularly damning because it couldn't even attract WoW players because it had nothing in common with MMOs. They basically alienated both enfranchised players, and PC gamers.

The internal development of 4e was warped by overly optimistic playtests and assumptions. Using the character builder and a printer is a world of a difference in gameplay from trying to write down every single attack. Not enough focus was spent on memory issues and ease of a whole party playing out of one book.

There were basically no modules for 4e due to a bad licensing scheme.

4e never got a proper 4.5, which it really needed. The difference in gameplay quality between release 4e and end-of-life 4e is night and day.

Of course the number one thing that killed 4e was time. 4e was never supposed to last forever. It lived its life and some books were better than others, just like 3e. What certainly hurt it's long-term retention was a lack of an OGL and modules. To this day, your options for running a boxed 4e campaign are shit, and the license for 4e means no company will ever be able to truly revive it.

Yeah, the "Dailies don't make sense for this class" shit always irritated me when you have shit like a Barbarian in 3.5 or 5E who can only get mad for so long in a 24 hour period.

...

Oh God, I forgot about the errata. My 4e PHB1 is like half errata stuck between the pages at this point.

Encounter powers I rarely see criticized as much as martial dailies. When again, a barbarian has a strict number of minutes and seconds available to be angry in the editions where his rage is explicitly not a magical effect.

That's another thing I really loved in 4E. The Four Power Sources. Shit was neat and worked nicely to help PoLand feel more wild simply by the fact that there were a full compliment of classes to those empowered by the hods that were simply given the boons of potent spirits from before the time of the gods.

...

>And if you pick a race that doesn't have a +2 to your main stat, you have 6 points to spread around over the other 5 stats. If you want to be even vaguely competent at anything outside your class' main or secondary stat you're pretty much screwed. That's not a good place to be.

Having poor tertiary stats does not screw a character. Your defenses are only influenced by three scores, and skill training is enough to succeed checks often.

Frankly, asking a system that defines races by ability scores to give off-class combinations good tertiary scores is unnecessary. It wouldn't be a bad thing, but its absence is a nitpick at best.

Not as bad as Monte Cuck was

Yes, the Player's Option series was a terrible mistake.

It's worth noting and remembering that, at EVERY level where you gained a new power, (and at every level except the ones divisible by 4, you got a new power) you had, in the base game, at least 3 options to choose from. Options that only expanded as more books added more powers. That will be important later.

Hasbro eventually decided to change up the system, because 4e wasn't matching their expectations. I believe, though I cannot provide proof to this claim, so certainly treat it as flimsy, this was less justified than it could have been. My understanding is that 4e sold well enough (for an RPG) basically until Essentials. Pathfinder sold, to my understanding, a little under it during 4e's printing, spiking up in any time period where 4 did not release new content. It was Hasbro's lack of context for these numbers, and the constant pressure of Pathfinder's success, that drove them to release Essentials, in an effort to get back lost '3aboos'.

This system de-cluttered things by, well, cutting most of them out. Fighters, for example, lost all daily powers, and had their Encounter powers cut to ONE that they got more uses out of as they level. They had some choice in Utility powers, but the result was that, instead of a 10th level fighter having ELEVEN powers to choose from in combat, they had...nine. which wouldn't be that big a loss... if 4 of those powers weren't literally "and you gain power X, with no choice in the matter" And most powers were simply riders placed on basic attacks.

Instead of gaining powers every level, now you had levels where your whole level was "Hey, you get a +2 to damage with weapons!" or "+2 Initiative."

It was, in a word, bland. It DID address the combat math issues, so it wasn't an entire waste, but your variability within your "class archetype" had plummeted.

Thus, it pleased no one, and sales fell further.

He's not the community manager, he's the franchise creative director. He's in charge of hiring new developers to work on the game and has the most say over what future products get put out.

No worries. I wasted my education getting a Theatre degree, and really like Shakespeare, so that kind of shit is easy for me to parse.

My favorite parallel is the Dragon magazine, where 3e is coming out, and some dude is bashing it as just "Diablo for the tabletop" and "descrating what made D&D great", and then watching 7 years later as people called 4e "WoW edition".

It's like poetry.

The difference is that "tabletop Diablo" is at least a somewhat accurate description of 3E while "4E = WoW" isn't. 3E is absolutely a game about character building and magic item Christmas trees.

Not saying you are wrong but I am curious. You mention the pressure of Pathfinder's success yet I rarely see pathfinder being discussed on the internet beyond when someone is comparing systems. I also recall mostly 4e and 3.5 games at three gamestores in my area in Texas. I moved recently to Oregon an the story is similar here with most games at the two stores I've been to being 3.5 and 5th Ed. Am I just ending up in the wrong areas or is the game just mostly played in private groups? I just don't ever personally see the presence people keep claiming it has

MECHANICALLY it doesn't screw a character. And I'll readily admit that any race/class combination in 4e is completely viable in combat. But if you want your Dwarf Monk to have a bit of book smarts, just for flavor reasons, you're kind of stuck. You can invest in specific skills, but general "intelligence" is off the table.

Having typed this out I'm realizing this is probably more a criticism of ability scores in general than 4e in particular.

This is the closest thing we have to a measure of the popularity of different RPG systems.

I think there are ways to play with 4e combat without pulling the proverbial keystone; it just takes time to know what the system can do, and what is advisable by players.
Also I find it difficult to believe a race in 3.5 or 5e that gets no bonuses to strength constitution (or god forbid a small pc) would be a great barbarian, regardless of how RP heavy you went. A gnome swings a smaller weapon, and thus their race impacts their class effectiveness just as it does in 4e.

Ah I see. I didn't even think about online gaming but it seems obvious now. Thanks

>people don't realize that 4e is even worse about the Christmas tree bullshit
God that bloated math is hilariously bad. Don't even get started on that economy. Woo, I can't wait to afford my +6 holy symbol for 60,000,000 gold! Hope the DM drops one for me!

Nobody on Veeky Forums actually plays the games they circlejerk about, so it's pretty likely that 4rries don't know about the absolutely horrendous design 4e falls into at higher levels.

By Paragon-tier, the game is essentially unplayable.

Sure you can, play a dwarf wis/int avenger and call yourself a "monk"

I mean, at that point you've your Epic Destiny. You're basically a fucking demigod.

And this disproves my point how? Fuck off with the whataboutism.

[citation needed]

>I think there are ways to play with 4e combat without pulling the proverbial keystone; it just takes time to know what the system can do, and what is advisable by players.
I agree completely. The thing is, in my experience, messing with 3.5 combat takes much less sunk time before you feel like you're able to do it without breaking the system. This probably stems from the fact that balance is so fucked to begin with that it feels almost impossible to accidentally make things worse, but that perceived level of accessibility can still go quite a ways to turn people of a system that seems lacking in that area.

Paragon was 11-20 right? That was the area my group had the most fun. I felt epic was when things got out of hand

The pressure of Paizo, in my experience, is much less strongly felt these days, but it could easily be a matter of locality and group privacy as well. You also have to understand the full context of what I meant by "pressure" to Hasbro.

Pathfinder EXISTS because 4e pissed off Grognards, and Wizards fired Paizo. Paizo had run Dungeon AND Dragon magazine for roughly 5 years when Wizards announced 4e and took back the licenses to the magazines.

Seeing the public outcry, Paizo looked over, and noticed that 3.5 was made on the OGL: anyone could use the fundamental rules of the system, and make their own. So they said 'Hey, if you guys don't like what D&D is doing, we can make a game just like the one you already know, and fix all the issues with it, rather than throwing it all away, like THOSE assholes!"

And, for many years, it was the second best selling RPG line under 4e, and even beat 4e at various times.

Now, again, Hasbro had no idea what RPG sales are SUPPOSED to look like. I've heard that they tried to compare D&D's sales numbers to Magic's sales numbers, as their vague baseline. And, of course, it turns out that "cardboard crack" makes a BUNCH MORE MONEY. (Which, really, makes sense. The costs in card production are less than books, for one thing.)

And you also have to remember just how big the IDEA of D&D is. It's the de facto RPG. It's been the biggest name on the marketplace for, what, 20 years at that point? You would kind of expect that you're supposed to sell fucking gangbusters with a new edition of D&D, since, in your head, every D&D player is going to want it!

Turns out, with the proliferation of systems and evolution of the RPG market from the 90's to the 2000's, that D&D is, well, "normie" fodder.

So to Hasbro, D&D wasn't selling as well as it thought, was selling worse than the only real thing it had to compare against, and their market share was being undercut by guys using, in essence, their own rules and fans against them.

Were you playing later on in the release cycle? I hear they tried to fix a lot of the problems with Paragon-tier play later on.

Most of my 4E games were within the first year and a half of release. With just the PHB1, DMG, and MM, the encounters being suggested, the loot you're getting, and the powers you receive are all totally out of whack. Combat encounters can take hours to resolve.

It still baffles me that Paizo could spend 5 years working on 3.5 and still repeat all the same mistakes when they made Pathfinder

I'm more baffled by the fact that I fell for their lies and actually bought the fucking core rulebook for Pathfinder, the stupid thing still sits on my shelf like a mark of shame

The game, like most editions of DnD, begins to break down as you go higher in level. I wouldn't call it 'unplayable' but I can definitely see what he's getting at. I'd also argue that Epic was more the problem than Paragon, but that's another argument.

By the time you hit 11th level, you have 9 different powers to worry about using each round of combat, plus whatever in-combat utility powers you've picked up and your racial power, not to mention 7 feats and any features you have from your class and paragon path adding riders and modifiers to keep track off. The number of powers decreases as the day goes on, but even for experienced players it can slow down fights something fierce.

I'd never heard of the curse before. I'm amazed that someone else on this board knows about that companion at all. Thank you.