Quote from: Omega on June 20, 2021, 11:33:23 AM
Board gamers absolutely love 4e because it is predominantly a skirmish wargame pretending to be an RPG.

If 4e came out in a big box set with a bunch of minis and dungeon tiles like a modern day version of Warhammer Quest, I might have loved it.  As a pure rpg, it was an abomination. 

My impression of 4e is that it is a well-designed game. However, it's not the game I'm looking for when I want to play D&D.

What's left to say? I liked 4th edition as a game, but it didn't scratch my D&D itch, so I moved on.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on June 20, 2021, 08:09:44 PM
What's left to say?

That 4E was the version of D&D that convinced me not to spend any more money on WotC products.

I remember the 4vengers flooding this board back in the day.  We were all wrong and they were going to prove it!...except the game was tossed out 4 years later.  Possibly my favorite moment in 4e fanboyism though was when Goons were crying, freaking the fuck out, and one of them said he couldn't believe WotC would overhaul what was "objectively" the best version of D&D ever.  God that was sweet.

I ran a successful 4E campaign for the better part of 18 months.  Despite the flaws of the system.  We rarely used minis.  There was a lot of role playing.  From my perspective, almost all of the typical criticisms of 4E completely miss the mark. Quite a few of the typical criticisms are sheer laziness on the part of the critic.  Some of the most vocal 3.5 fans were the worst in this respect.  It's true that the 4E fans at the launch of 5E were no better, but they were certainly no worse.  (That's damning with faint praise, I know.)  It's an RPG and you can run some (but not all) very D&D type games with it.

4E plays nothing like a MMO--of which I've also played a few for considerable time.  There is a lot of tactical focus in the rules.  No one who has seriously played both 4E and any MMO would make the, "Is an MMO" criticism stick, and if honest wouldn't even try it.

However, the biggest problem with the typical criticisms of 4E is not that the they are incorrect but that they crowded out the more legit criticism.  Not least because some of these criticisms applied more or less equally to things that came before or after.  There is the noted lack of imagination from WotC--the "design by committee" aspect.  Even when they had a good idea (e.g. some of the reworking of the default cosmology), they managed to half-ass the implementation.

There is the excessive drive to put rules into place as a way to fill page count. By any measurement, 4E is by far the most bloated WotC edition, but this is merely an extension of what is an institutional problem there.  Never mind the general drive to let marketing concerns get into the way of good design.  The various 4E "powers" are of course the shining example of the problem.  (With 5E they "solved" this problem by getting better at hiding it and often shunting it out to other locations.  Which is why the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide has almost nothing but bloat in it.)

There is the repeated failure to understand how their own design is supposed to work (also a pinnacle in 4E), failure to communicate that design to the rest of the team, failure to explain that design in the various advice articles supporting it, and in some cases, writing advice that is directly contrary to running a good game with the rules. 

It's funny, because of all the silly Forge theory stuff and how often it has been wrong, 4E managed to provide a great example of one of the classic Forge bits, "the impossible thing before breakfast"--when it tried to be both a Forge narrative game and not a Forge narrative game at the same time.  In exactly the way that Edwards explains the concept while dinging White Wolf.  So one of his "stopped clock is right twice a day" moments was illustrated most clearly in a game that tried to listen to him.  Of course, one of the reasons that 4E can be made to work to play D&D is that all the "Narrative" bits don't actually do anything because they are all in advice written that is contrary to how the mechanics actually work.  With the possible exception of the "Skill Challenge" rules that may or may not have worked in some cases but were impossible for anyone at WotC to explain to your average GM--or apparently even each other.

From a "It's not D&D" focus, the biggest sin of 4E is to completely throw the "operational" aspect of the game away.  Given that 3E and 5E pay a lot of lip service to "operational" play without supporting it very well in truth, this is not as big a sin as others would have you believe, however.  It is, perhaps, far enough across the line that it is more notable--which tells me that quite a few people don't actually play any WotC in operational mode, but like to pretend to themselves that they do.  In that same vein, it was a considerably more difficult for a GM to fudge and pretend that the players didn't know, which is probably related.  That is, 4E stepped across several lines that caused people who had been playing quite blissfully ignoring the man behind the curtain to suddenly see the shabby "wizard" for what he was.  This is the legit aspect of the criticism that the game would have succeeded better without the baggage of D&D.  It's not merely that it stepped across the lines and that made itself suspect and that the marketing was a fiasco. Though those are true.  It also cast suspicion on what had been "D&D" right before it. (This is not unlike how the Episodes 1 -3 of Star Wars not only suck, but also for some people make Episodes 4 - 6 not as enjoyable as they were previously.)

You might gather that I don't play 4E now.  To me, it's a a highly ambitious, gem of a design with a few key flaws, that couldn't climb out from under the greed, incompetence, incoherence, and sheer fuzzy-headed silliness of its implementation, direction, and support.  Any GM worth their salt that doesn't mind the sacrifice of operational play can run a great game with it--but you could do the same with other systems with less work.

Please define what "operational" play is.

What do you mean by "impossible thing before breakfast"?

Quote from: Hakdov on June 20, 2021, 06:15:22 PM

Quote from: Omega on June 20, 2021, 11:33:23 AM
Board gamers absolutely love 4e because it is predominantly a skirmish wargame pretending to be an RPG.

If 4e came out in a big box set with a bunch of minis and dungeon tiles like a modern day version of Warhammer Quest, I might have loved it.  As a pure rpg, it was an abomination.

They did come out with Castle Ravenloft boardgames and sequels.

There's nothing wrong with 4e you couldn't fix with a gallon of kerosene and a match.

I'm not going to claim other people can't and haven't done awesome things with 4e. But I ran a campaign for 12 - 18 months, and ended up giving up because the whole thing just felt hollow to me.

The strength of the system was the excellent tactical combat system, but I found myself designing sessions to make the most of that system, which mean a series of set-piece battles. The way wealth was so closely tied into PC power was incredibly limiting; spending cash on anything other than the expected upgrades put you behind the curve, getting amounts of wealth outside the expected range also upset this.

I had far more horrid failures than successes trying to use the skill challenge system.

It could just be my own failures as a 4e DM influencing the group experience, but most of my players ended up feeling the same way about it as I did.

Again, I'm not going to argue with anyone whose experience was different. But, for me, it was an utter diappointment.

It's also worth noting that I went into the campaign really excited about its potential. I'd experienced some DM burnout about 6 months earlier, and it was 4e that helped get me excited about the idea of DMing again.

On the up side, it was people claiming you could run old school D&D with 4e that got me interested in OSR-type stuff, which led to a really awesome 1E AD&D game after we ditched 4e.

I'm not a fan of 4E at all.  As a disclaimer, I read the books but never got to actually play it - I've been told that it played a lot better than it read.  My biggest immediate turn off was that all of the classes looked very similar and bland.  It got a bit better once I read the specific powers but it was hard to overcome that initial impression.  Also, as someone who played WoW for years, there really were a lot of elements that looked like they came from MMOs.  The character types of "striker," "defender," etc are a standout example.  I kind of struggled to define what it was that I disliked so much about it for quite a while, but then I read the Alexandrian's essay on "disassociated mechanics" (https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17231/roleplaying-games/dissociated-mechanics-a-brief-primer) and that was it.  4E's full of them.  Bottom line, 4E is a nice game in many ways and there are specific things I like about it quite a lot, but it doesn't provide what I consider to be a D&D experience.

...

Quote from: Omega on June 20, 2021, 12:24:28 PM
The other thing board gamers tout about 4e is how Balanced it is.

But how balanced is it really? Anyone actually played it extensively know?

Ehhh, balance wise it's ok.  It's not that great really, an optimised PC will clearly be more effective and there were some big flaws that were never addressed.  The biggest one was multi-attacks which proved to be far more effective than what they were supposed to be.  The biggest issue was the Ranger with Twin Strike.  But generally anyone who knew to go for options which gave them extra attacks was going to be more effective.

The usual reply to this kind of criticism was that it was more balanced than 3e, which is true, but for fucks sake that's nothing to crow about.

The biggest thing that 4e has going for it balance wise is the 4 roles.  This means that if someone is already playing a Striker than you play a Defender and pretend you're job is locking people down rather than damage (which is, I think, tactically a bit of sleight of hand; you feel so effective at doing the thing the game tells you is your job that you may not notice that what you're doing isn't usually all that important tactically, when you could just be playing another Ranger and then the thing you're locking down would just be dead).

The board game aspect of it can be fun, but it's neither as perfectly balanced or as deep tactically as is often claimed.

Quote from: jeff37923 on June 20, 2021, 10:41:11 PM
Please define what "operational" play is.

I'm not the OP, but I think they're referring to the strategic/logistic aspects (cumulative attrition-based combat, counting arrows/torches/rations, strict encumbrance, specific spells prepared pre-adventure as a strategic resource vs. the 3e Sorcerer/Bard approach of a fixed list of spells known that are cast without preparation, henchmen/hireling and domain management, etc.) that were a core part of TSR-era D&D, but fell further and further to the wayside as 3e matured, played little role in 4E and got enough lip service to pretend they were restored somewhat in 5e.

4E was definitely more focused on the tactical level with limited resources in a single battle, but the majority of which would be regained before the next battle. This last bit was also easy to exacerbate if the GM opted for fewer big battles over the attritional effect of multiple smaller battles (4E is actually THE most restrictive in terms of hit point attrition as even healing potions and magic consumed the finite daily resource of healing surges... a cache of a million healing potions won't help you if you have no surges left... but unless the GM was hitting the party with enough encounters between rests to burn through the majority of their surges, it would feel like "unlimited" healing).

The solution is the same one many 5e DMs have with short and long rests; change the timeframe for recovery so a long rest is a week or the 13th Age approach of regaining recoveries only after X number of encounters no matter how many days it's been.

As to the 4E is an MMO argument; it's cardinal sin seems to be the decision to use technical writing standards instead of natural language which makes rule interpretations clearer, but also pulls back the curtain and makes it plain you're playing a game and not telling a story.

The use of technical language also created a sense of sameness in that the focus on clarity led to every class ability being laid out in the same format and with the same keyword jargon (thus, instead of the 5e Fighter's Second Wind "class ability" and the 5e Cleric's "healing spell" both were labeled as "powers" in 4E).

Similarly, they opted for using layout choices focused on clear interpretation vs. looking more like an archaic encyclopedia. A prime example being the use of color headlines to indicate at-will, encounter and daily abilities instead of via saying "once per day" as part of the ability's description. The colors added clarity at a glance, but robbed from the organic feel.

In terms of roles; they were mostly attempting to codify what was already a thing in the iconic party being a cleric (buffer/healer), fighter (damage sponge, locks down opponents), thief (big damage and mobility) and wizard (battlefield control/AoE) and using those aspects as guidelines for other classes to keep disasters like the 3e Monk (who had tons of thematic abilities, but whose core features clashed with basic 3e game mechanics and so had no good role within a party).

Basically, it was establishing performance benchmarks for class design. If you're designing a Striker then it needs tools for dealing extra damage (the rogue has sneak attacks, the warlock has curses, the monk has flurry of blows, the avenger has increased accuracy for higher damage over time) and mobility.

That said, they weren't all identical. One of the things they designed towards was each power source (ex. martial, arcane, divine, primal) having certain specialties that bled into the primary roles.

The martial classes for example all did exceptional damage for their class; the Fighter, nominally a Martial Defender, with the right ability choices could dish out almost as much damage as a Striker from one of the other power sources.

Similarly the arcane classes all had above par battlefield control options that bled into their other abilities (the warlocks didn't just deal damage with their curses they also inflicted harmful conditions) and the divine classes had better healing/buffing (the Paladin is a Divine Defender, so in theory kin to the Fighter in role, but their party buffs and lay on hands made them quite different in practice from the Fighter who was adding more damage to the mix).

The result was that the classes were more a "primary/secondary" focus with a few (those whose role and power source focus aligned) being exceptionally good at their primary with almost no secondary focus.

Another element that contributed to the MMO feel I suspect was that the majority of the rules were focused on combat while leaving non-combat aspects to largely free from roleplaying. This was a stark contrast to 3e's "everything has a rule" approach, but was actually fairly in keeping with earlier iterations of D&D where the majority of non-combat elements were handled ad hoc by the DM and were tacked onto the more robust war gaming rules D&D grew out of (which is why I've seen certain grognards feel that 4E, particularly Essentials that really stripped back options and made an effort to have classes built on different frameworks, felt more like early D&D than 3e ever did).

A final point on 4E and a huge part of its appeal to the people in my circles after 3e, was that it put a much greater emphasis on your character vs. the magic item Christmas Tree they were carrying. A Fighter in 4E was defined by their combat style and the maneuvers they knew, not the magic items they carried. The need for magic items was first reduced to just needing three items (weapon/implement, armor and non-armor defense booster) to meet the mechanical benchmarks and then removed entirely with the addition of the inherent bonuses options (and I don't know a 4E group who didn't use that option).

Frankly, by the time Essentials was released two years in, 4E had largely fixed the majority of its issues, but unlike 3e which had time to get through those growing pains without serious competition, the existence of Pathfinder gave an alternate to waiting that out.

Ironically, WotC's own greed in pulling Dragon and Dungeon magazines away from Paizo and the switch to the GSL instead of continuing the OGL is perhaps the biggest cause of its failure as Golaron and the Pathfinder setting were originally designed to be Paizo's entry into the 4E market as the official campaign world used in Dragon and Dungeon magazines. Instead WotC basically created their own competition and the rest is history.