With some years of hindsight now...what has been the lasting effect of 4e on D&D, the hobby, the industry, game design, etc? Did it effectively provide a necessary fallow period and thus pave the way for the massive sales of 5e? Or was its best effect merely that its rabid proponents provided a convenient rubric to populate your ignore list?

Quote from: The_Shadow;1050825With some years of hindsight now...what has been the lasting effect of 4e on D&D, the hobby, the industry, game design, etc? Did it effectively provide a necessary fallow period and thus pave the way for the massive sales of 5e? Or was its best effect merely that its rabid proponents provided a convenient rubric to populate your ignore list?

I guess both of those?
I use a few things from 4e, like "3 successes before 3 fails" style skill checks derived from 4e 'skill challenges', and some of the campaign atmospherics.

Also 4e strongly restated the old pre-3e idea that monsters should not be built like PCs, and can have interesting & appropriate ad hoc abilities. This definitely influenced 5e monster & NPC presentation. You see it with NPCs in OD&D and a little in early 1e AD&D (eg 1e DMG Sages, Thugs) but later 1e moved towards "NPC Classes", which by 3e had metastasised into the cancerous "build everything like a PC" notion. 4e was a welcome step back from that, although they then massively overdid it with a "What is this NPC's role in the scene?" approach; 5e goes back to a more naturalistic vibe which IME hits the right balance.

It served as a cautionary tale against edition treadmilling going too far, too different and just how devastating that fallout can be.
Also a good example of why Forge and GNS theory was such a failure.
Also a good example of how NOT to market your game. Insulting your fanbase is just begging trouble.

The legacy of 4e is Paizo/Pathfinder.

Quote from: Omega;1050835It served as a cautionary tale against edition treadmilling going too far, too different and just how devastating that fallout can be.

Yep. 4e was the end of the industry model of putting +1 edition on a core book and expecting the base to buy in no matter what has been done to the rules.

Failure.

Quote from: moonsweeper;1050837The legacy of 4e is Paizo/Pathfinder.

In a very different way, Pathfinder 2 looks like it might be an even better example of 4e's legacy.

I think the big lesson was "Don't shit on your old customers and tell them they've been doing it all wrong all those years"

Quote from: The_Shadow;1050825With some years of hindsight now...what has been the lasting effect of 4e on D&D, the hobby, the industry, game design, etc? Did it effectively provide a necessary fallow period and thus pave the way for the massive sales of 5e? Or was its best effect merely that its rabid proponents provided a convenient rubric to populate your ignore list?

Current effects: About 60% of 5th Edition mechanics and concepts are derived, in some part or wholly, from 4th Edition. I could go on an extensive list, but it's exhausting.

Lasting effects: Deviate too much from source, despite that source often being a giant black hole of shitty game design, and you lose those who love love love warts and all. 4E tried to capitalize on a number of then exciting and new aspects that were emerging from the Video game industry. I won't say 4E was designed with VG mechanics, because about everything you could do in 4E you could also do to some degree or more in previous editions, but the notion of a on-screen board where you could play with 3 guys at the table and your friend overseas in Iraq and your long lost 4th grade best friend in Oklahoma at the same time was a noble idea. Unfortunately due to a shit ton of bad luck and tragedy it never came to fruition.

5th Edition gets massive sales because it is a pretty tightly created game. People who've ventured from 4th to 5th or from Pathfinder to 5th have often stated that its now far less about number crunching, treadmill magic items, and christmas tree effects that drive character depth and play-ability. They've done, at least from my perspective, of taking elements that still make it "feel" (whatever the fuck that means) like D&D and retain some of the more modern RPG design. By modern, I mean you have more hard-wired widgets that say "you can do this" instead of saying "Hey DM, I want to do this" and the DM pulling some ass-hat numbers you have to beat just cuz'.

I say this as a huge fan of 4th Edition (mechanics, lore, and all) that it showed players the edge of the abyss. 4th Edition was an answer to a lot of griping and bitching and complaining about the previous edition's issues BUT not wanting to go back further as a source to "fix" said issues. People wanted to play Wizards, but not take 5 fucking rounds saying "i'm still casting..." but also didn't want to be able to completely win every battle simply by saying "I cast X.....we win". People were pissed at how shitty some of the classes were (like the 3e Fighter) but didn't want to go back to saying to the DM: I want to try this with my sword or this maneuver with a shield or this attack or what check to I need to pass to knock someone over.

In the end, 4E is a very tight system that allows for a WIDE range of play styles in terms of character concepts and mechanics yet still retains incredible balance for a group to adventure with, not to mention that it's fairly simple to DM if you take half decent notes.

Quote from: danskmacabre;1050853I think the big lesson was "Don't shit on your old customers and tell them they've been doing it all wrong all those years"

  Alternatively, "Design the new edition based on the game as it is, rather than the game as it was sold to you in the 80s by art, lies, and empty promises."

Lessons learned:

1) Stop trying to chase trends by making tabletop RPGs like other entertainment mediums. Tabletop RPGs have their own strengths and appeal, so it's counterproductive to chase the MMORPG, CCG, or videogame RPG market.

2) The audience for theatre-of-the-mind roleplay is larger than the audience for tabletop tactical miniatures. The greater the barrier of entry to play in terms of game components and aids, the narrower the game's appeal.

3) Gamers are a very conservative bunch. Many regard change as a personal attack on their identity. So tread lightly.

Mechanically, a surprising amount of 4E made its way into 5E, including short and long recovery times, tactical monster design, and save-every-round effect and spell durations rather than randomly determined durations that need to be tracked.

I think once the emotions have abated, 4E will become a highly-regarded niche game. An anomaly in the D&D family, no doubt, but a fun and well-designed option for people who want something different.

The clearest thing you can learn from 4ed is to clearly explain what a default adventure is for your game and make sure it's fun. 4ed has a lot of good things going for it but to make 4ed fun you can't run a standard D&D adventure in which the PCs are slowly ground down by attrition across several scirmishes as that would be an unpleasant grindfest, you have to have one or two big smashy action movie style fights per session or the game doesn't work well.

The problem with that is that their intro adventure was a horrible grindfest that didn't highlight how to play 4ed in a fun way and that making a system that makes you have to change your playstyle to have fun is probably a bad idea when it's marketed as a new edition of an old system.

4E was highly experimental design coupled with some fairly rigorous development on a terribly narrow architectural framework.  I suspect that part of the narrowness of the architecture was because it was scaled back when the rigorous development found holes. And that was because of a design window that didn't leave enough room for intermediate failures to be resolved.  So as they found fault lines, they had to cut out things or patch around them.    

One of the biggest legacies of 4E was teaching WotC that even mild innovation requires times and play testing.  It also taught them that some good ideas don't end up working out in a game, and sometimes you need to cut your losses.  5E is a much better game than the first few drafts of the "Next" play test.

There is no 5E of anywhere near the quality that we have without the failure of 4E first.

The legacy of 4E is that D&D players take themselves too seriously and don't know good design when they see it but you can sell them bad design if you're nice about it. By extension, open playtesting is a con.

Make sure you understand how your customers are actually using your product before you attempt an ambitious redesign.

I recall a number of statements from WotC at the time that 4e was really just making it easier for players to focus on what everyone had always wanted to focus on in the first place. Maybe this was just marketing, but I got the sense that the designers really had drunk the "15 minutes of fun packed into 4 hours" koolaid and were convinced that for all these years players had been spending much of the game simply enduring boredom while they waited for the big boss fight to arrive.

Turned out that their knowledge of what "everyone" considered to be the fun parts of the game wasn't as accurate as they thought.