Should 4th edition have been given more of a chance? Putting

>>55022859
>Should 4th edition have been given more of a chance?
No.

4e is absolutely the best version of D&D. The only valid argument is the claim that one might not like the focus on combat, in which case you really shouldn't be playing D&D at all. You never see that levied in a level headed way though; It's grognards and fucking morons all the way down. So yes, it's a shame that we got the regressive garbage that is 5th edition and that the huge steps forward that 4th made are lost.

It got a very substantial amount of content ultimately though. I'm more than content with everything that exists and just ignoring the essentials Heroes books. It definitely got it's "chance," but people just have bad taste, are adverse to change, and have generally misguided perceptions of what they want from tabletop games.

>>55022918
>It definitely got it's "chance,"
It only got a couple of years, half of which involved the awful Essentials line and Wizards assfucking their entire online platform.

>>55022945

Sure, and there were a lot of people, myself included, that loved it, but what can you do? When I say that I mean it got put out there, and got good exposure, and shit like Insider did fantastically. For whatever reason the more vocal aspect that had regressive ideas won out, Mike Mearl's stupid ass was put in charge and it all went to shit. It was a positive change that had both good and bad reception, and they stupidly decided to take the safer option and listen to the idiocy. It doesn't help that the D&D division of Wizards has become basically the fucking garbage can of the company to just dump their shittiest people into without full on firing them.

>>55022918
I honestly never got the hate for Essentials. Fighters using at-will stances to modify their basic attack not only made sense thematically, it also made my Warlord even better, so my opinion is pretty biased on the matter. Were the other classes just awful?

>>55022859
>Mechanically speaking, 4e wasn't what many 3.x players wanted, because what they wanted was simply a less fucked up version of 3.x

That literally is what 4e was though. With just slightly better presentation that's how it would have been seen.

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>>55022918
>but people just have bad taste, are adverse to change, and have generally misguided perceptions of what they want from tabletop games.

>My opinion is the only real opinion. Other people's idea's aren't just wrong, they are illusions. Hopefully someday they will reach enlightenment and realize they always secretly agreed with me.

Seriously, though: 4e is a fun game. It's just too much of a miniatures wargame for a lot of people, with too many baked-in assumptions about how games are supposed to go. Part of the reaction to it was because it was such a big change (tell people you're bringing them pizza and they'll be annoyed if you show up with gazpacho, even if it's good gazpacho,) but part of it really was because the system was too mechanically restrictive and balanced around steady combats.

I had some fun with it, but we moved on to other systems pretty quickly.

>>55022918
>4e is absolutely the best version of D&D
wrong

>>55022859

While it was the most obvious aspect, I honestly think the fanbase backlash is the least part of what killed 4e. WotC's fucked up marketing, shoddy release and the complete catastrophe of the online functionality crippled its ability to make a lasting impression.

Which IMO is fucking tragic. Despite generally being tired of D&D at this point, I'll still go back to 4e because of all the editions the rules actually fucking work to support a balanced, enjoyable cooperative fantasy narrative about heroes beating the crap out of monsters and taking their stuff.

And that's what I want D&D for. I have other editions for social intrigue and other bullshit, but 4e takes what D&D does, and does it best of any edition.

>>55022859
I think it boils down to the fact that if I wanted to play WoW, I'd play fucking WoW

>>55023110

Of course you would. 4e is nothing like WoW, that meme is bad and needs to die.

>>55023025
Essentials had some good ideas, but too many essentially classes were just worse versions of existing classes with less options. Which was considered a good thing because it'd be easier to play for newbies, but 4e isn't particularly hard to play anyway so that didn't mean anything.

>>55023060

The perception that you're presenting there is exactly the issue. It was D&D with more sound combat; Nothing was removed or restricted beyond that, but people acted like it was a totally different system. You'd hear stupid shit about it being "WoW" or a card game or whatever when it literally boiled down to combat being more balanced and engaging for everyone involved. You could easily tell that most people had never even touched it because it was all so trite and parroted. It was a mechanically refined progression of things. You could still do anything you wanted, and even focus on story or social shit if you felt like it. All it meant was that when combat popped off everyone had more fun than "I make a full round attack" or the wizard ending it with a wave of his hand.

>>55023060
>eriously, though: 4e is a fun game. It's just too much of a miniatures wargame for a lot of people, with too many baked-in assumptions about how games are supposed to go. Part of the reaction to it was because it was such a big change (tell people you're bringing them pizza and they'll be annoyed if you show up with gazpacho, even if it's good gazpacho,) but part of it really was because the system was too mechanically restrictive and balanced around steady combats.

None of this is more true than any other (modern) version of D&D. It's been all about discrete combat encounters on gridded battlemaps since AC started ascending.

4e's crime is apparently being up front about what it is, because the rules are certainly not more restrictive than other D&D's when it comes to the variety of characters you can make, actions you can perform in play, or stories you can tell.

>>55023110
Thank you for contributing to this thread by mindlessly repeating nonsensical information that you once saw someone else post in order to try and pretend you know what you're talking about.

>>55023077
>Despite generally being tired of D&D at this point, I'll still go back to 4e
Same here. I've moved on to different systems and generally wouldn't touch D&D with a 10' pole--especially as a GM--but if someone offered to run a 4e game or really really wanted me to GM it, I'd jump back on it without too much of an issue.

>>55022918
>"I'm going to use my utility exploit Get Over Here to pull my colleague to me from 10 feet away, because that's plausible. God I love the name of this exploit!"

>"I'm going to use my daily exploit Split The Tree to shoot two targets... damn, it did nothing.
This game is awesome!"

from anon's diary

>>55023152

I always say this. 4e is actually a lot like 3.5, except that it works. But the single biggest change, and biggest apparent problem, was layout and presentation. Being honest with players, not obfuscating and giving everything standard templates and formatting, IMO, makes it one of the best and easiest to use RPG books ever made... And apparently completely ruined the experience for some people, which I find so hard to understand.

>>55023184
>>55023152

>You could easily tell that most people had never even touched it

>>55023184
It's funny because even though you're doing your best to make it sound boring, it's still way more exciting than "I roll to attack with my sword. I roll to attack with my sword again. I roll to attack with my sword again."

>>55023212

It's also the continuous refusal to take the game on its own terms. That most powers exist as combat system abstractions and that the game gives you the freedom to fluff them however you like is a strength of the system, and yet you get endless whining from unimaginative assholes about how power x or y can't possibly make sense. It's like they're incapable of using their imagination without the system constantly telling them exactly how everything works.

>>55022859

I know it'd be a beast, but I would so dearly love a clone of 4e that condensed things down into one or two books and focused on the Heroic tier of play.

>>55023185
There's a certain kind of person who will always get mad that someone else doesn't have to deal with the same pointless struggle they did.

>>55023185
Some people prefer to get fooled into a sense of simulationism.

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>>55023152

Yes, the objections at the time were overwrought and silly. 4e doesn't have much in common with WoW (although the baked-in expectation that you'll all be steadily upgrading your gear is a fair objection.)

But that doesn't mean 4e is for everyone. Building everything around balanced combat is good for some games, but created some weird, immersion-breaking stuff. Just for instance:

>A swordmage can teleport, no limit on how many times
>But only if a marked enemy attacks an ally

What does that mean for my character? How does he experience that? Does he know how to teleport, but he's only willing to do so under certain circumstances? Can he teleport across a chasm to his friends if the rogue yells "haha, I betray you!" and waves his dagger at the wizard? It's something that makes sense within the game mechanics, but is pretty strange in the gameworld.

4e had a chance. Some people played it. Lots of people had fun with it for a while. But most people have moved on, and you can't actually claim they're wrong and dumb for not liking what you like.

>>55023262
4e's Gamma World spinoff does this, sort of, but steps pretty far away from pseudomedieval fantasy.
It's a lot easier to fluff into being other types of settings, but it'd be hard to represent D&D-style magic with it, or any setting that's supposed to have a big panoply of spells that single people can have access to.

>>55023378

Yeah, 7th edition Gamma World is still one of my favorite Gammas to play, but I want 4e D&D: BECMI style. Shame I'm so much of a brainlet or I'd try to do it myself.

>>55023396
Any reason Strike! doesn't do it for you?

Would attaching it to a d20 system help?

>>55023357
Well, that's how an Aegis works, so yes, actually, if he put his Aegis of assault on the rogue and he then the rogue attacked someone, he could teleport next to him (probably sword first, but I'm a lenient DM so I guess I'd allow him to intentionally miss with the attack).

>>55023445

You know, I don't know why Strike! doesn't do it for me. There's just this nebulous sense of "I don't like this." and I put it away. Not knocking it for the folks that do like it.

>>55023357

Easy enough to make a judgement call on what would plausibly work, and probably more so than the opposite end of the spectrum of using way too casual language. In that case you could glance at your powers and say hey, most of these are melee triggered, require a very close range initial mark or something similar, so you can teleport however you want within a couple squares but if you want to clear a large gap you've somehow got to lay some close range magic on something that is currently out of your reach so figure that out.

>>55023445
>>55023469

I just find Strike! a bit shallow in comparison. When building a 4e character, even for a class I've played before, there's so many options to explore and different ways of doing things, I know I'll enjoy the experience of figuring them out.

When looking at a Strike class, even with their ability to mix and match roles, it feels like I can see absolutely all of their options and intended playstyle right there on the page, which doesn't particularly make me want to play it.

I also think dividing classes and roles was a bad move. Having a specifically designed class to fill a role lets you have more interesting design than trying to keep everything so open.

>>55023378
>>55023396
Is there a PDF of all the cards?
Actually putting important game elements in booster packs was a major dick move.

>>55023357
It's ironic that for all the comparisons people make, 4e is actually the least suited to being a videogame. All other editions of D&D can be pretty much directly translated into a game and work fine, but 4e would be completely miserable to play given all the off turn actions characters have. It would be like those old gba Yugioh games where it stopped and gave you a prompt every single time priority was passed.

>>55023600

I could see it working as a tactics RPG, you'd just need an elegant system for noticing the triggers of out of turn actions and giving you a reasonable window to say yes or no before progressing the turn.

>>55022859
Too much book bloat.
No pdfs.
Killing off the giant third-party support that was in place and, with it, all of their good will.
Not to mention that the game falls the fuck apart if you make a simple mistake like having more then four players at a time.
A lot of things went into the failure.
>>55023119
Revisionist horseshit. People said it all the fucking time when the game came out, as a positive trait; it's only now, when mmos are a complete joke and the game's been left behind for a new edition, that people try to pretend otherwise.

>>55023661

They were still wrong. The '4e=WoW' meme is and has always been trash repeated by people with no actual understanding of the system.

>>55023581

Both PDF and full prints of the cards are on DrivethruRPG to the best of my knowledge.

>>55023661

>Not to mention that the game falls the fuck apart if you make a simple mistake like having more then four players at a time.

What? When the fuck was this a thing? 4e works fine with larger group sizes, the scaling rules are right there in the DMG.

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>>55023600

Man, I was really hoping for a 4e vidya. People made such cool shit out of Neverwinter Nights 2 back in the day, and I love turn-based grid combat like in FF tactics. Figure out a way to handle off-turn actions (maybe make them weaker, but automatic,) and you'd have something fun and modular and easy to build with.

4e wasn't my favorite game, but I thought it had real NN-style potential.

>>55023692

I desperately wanted a direct translation type of 4e game. I never understood why it didn't get done with the more modern D&D games, and tried so hard to like the pile of shit that was D&D Tactics because it was sort of that but holy fuck it was bad.

>>55023661
>Revisionist horseshit. People said it all the fucking time when the game came out, as a positive trait; it's only now, when mmos are a complete joke and the game's been left behind for a new edition, that people try to pretend otherwise.
I take it the first part of that is a description, not an accusation. Because that's some damn fine revisionist horseshit you're posting there.

>>55023469
Is it the book or the rules itself? The book is kinda terrible.

>>55023547
Yeah, the character building minigame isn't really there because everything is kinda obvious. I still think some Role+Class combinations have pretty cool interactions, but there really should be more to Roles.

I have been considering doing a grand homebrew project where I split/expand the roles and classes a bit + do something like Legends' 3 tracks where you get to pick Class+Role+Theme (basically power source), to make a character, but you could also pick Role+Role+Theme (for simple characters with not many powers), or Class+Class+Theme (for complex characters with lot of powers) and somehow make that work.

>>55023717
>>55023692
I wouldn't want a direct translation, I want a team based beat'em up that's a spiritual successor to Shadow Over Mystara, where you can slot your powers in like in God Hand.

>>55023686
You wouldn't happen to have seen a download of it somewhere? No way I'm going to pay extra for something that should have been included in the rulebook.

>>55023661
>the game falls the fuck apart if you make a simple mistake like having more then four players at a time.
I've been in a game with 8 players and you're wrong. Sure it slows down considerably, but the same is true for every turn-based game, especially with a strong tactical element like 4e has. Scaling itself is not a problem unless your DM is a noob.

The designers of 4e knew that anyone who didn't play with a grid was a gigantic faggot, so they made the rules around grids. It still annoys me that in 5e they went back to measuring in feet instead of 5 foot squares. Let the retards who think they can play without a grid do the conversion.

The only negative is that combat takes a long time because players have so many options. It's like everyone is playing a 20th level Wizard from 3.5 at level 10.

>>55022859
I liked and still like 4E, I only stopped because I got a new computer and I don't have the sick ass character builder anymore

>>55023988
Google search and you shall find.

>>55023988

The offline character builder is still floating around, look for a link in the next /4eg/, I don't keep it on hand sadly.

>>55023964

I've always been such a bad person at eyeballing distances, that one square and 5 ft means the same to me.

>>55023750

Sorry brotato chip, 7e PDFs are hard as balls to find.

>>55022859
The main issue was resource management. The AEDU system made every class play the same early on and it wasn't until near the end of the game's lifespan that it started to get sorted out. For a while only psionics stood out because they used a spell point system instead of a vancian one. Later martials got stances, at-wills that modified basic attacks and reliable encounter moves, primal classes either got a pet or an alternate form (literally for things like druids, mechanically for barbarian rage mode) and classes started to actually feel different to play.

The other big issue was the encounter maths getting wonky at high levels but GMs should be editing monsters to fit their campaign anyway. And anyone who thinks it turned D&D into a wargame of five foot squares and flanking clearly doesn't remember when 3.0 turned D&D into a wargame of five foot squares and flanking.

4e had some good ideas but the implementation was fucked from the start and the game was retired just as it was sorting itself out.

>>55022859
I'm not sure that I can call Essentials a "panic" move, given that they came out in late 2010, three years after 4e's 2007 release.

>where are my 4e video games?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons:_Daggerdale

Be careful what you wish for, OP - you just might get it.

> because within 5 years after launch

If within 5 years of launch, the system hadn't taken off, then it's a good sign that it's probably not going to. The final nail in the coffin - that is, the sign to Wizards of the Coast that 4e was a failure as compared to previous editions of D&D - was probably when Pathfinder outsold 4e. Yes, it was only for a single quarter, but the fact of the matter was that since its creation in 1975, Dungeons & Dragons had been the top-selling RPG on the market, with nothing else coming close. Even at the height of World of Darkness or Rogue Trader's or whatever's popularity, they never even touched the awesome power that was the brand name "Dungeons & Dragons".

Until Pathfinder, which was problematic for two reasons:
1) It's not owned by Wizards of the Cost; but more importantly
2) It uses the 3rd Edition D&D ruleset, or something close to it.

If a clone of your previous edition can outsell your current edition - or, Hell, even just seriously challenge it on the market - then it's a sign that there's something wrong with your current edition.

>>55022859
Gosh I will be glad when the last of you 4rries finally lose interest drift away from the hobby, nobody wants your flavourless skirmish minis wargame.

>>55024549

It was declared a failure by Hasbro, not WotC, because it failed to meet their impossible internal goal of elevating the D&D brand to an MtG level earner. Even without the disasters in the marketing and the murder/suicide ruining the online support, it would still have failed because what they were asking of it was impossible. It's why 5e is very much a budget effort.

>>55024549
>then it's a sign that there's something wrong with your current edition.

I want to take a moment to clarify this - I don't mean to suggest that there is necessarily something wrong with the rules system of 4e; that can be argued, perhaps, but it should be argued elsewhere, as this thread is more about 4e's ability to survive on the market, rather than its mechanics.

Rather, there is a deep problem with its appeal and marketability of a system that is outsold by its predecessor, or a clone of its predecessor.

Tellingly, while I believe 4e's PHB sales outsold the lifetime sales of the 3e PHB (as I believe the 3e did the 2e, and the 2e the 1e - WotC sticks to the claim that each edition's PHB has outsold the previous edition's PHB), sales of subsequent splatbooks were abysmal.

>>55023661
>Killing off the giant third-party support that was in place and, with it, all of their good will.
Third-party support was a mistake for day one. Most of 3.PF books are fucking garbage.

>>55023661
Nobody ever called it WoW positively.
Nobody.
It was always derogatory, every single time, always has been. There's no revisionism, it was always to paint it as being nothing but a video game ported to the table and thus inferior. People who played RPGs didn't like WoW back then any more than they do now.
It was accompanied by using MMO terminology to further deride it.
And, in all fairness, 3E was called Diablo Edition.

>>55024649

I don't know if you can say there's an issue with the marketability of the game so much as Wizards is just horrendous at it. D&D has incredible potential to be so much more than it is. It's essentially a household name and what people think of when they think tabletop roleplaying, but at the same time nobody gives a shit and it's still niche. Everyone knows what D&D is and they have such a powerful NAME, but aren't making any effort to get it into new hands regardless of edition.

>>55024633
While I'll readily admit that D&D being a Magic-level earner is impossible by its nature, that doesn't address the fundamental problem that 4e has the dishonor of being the ONLY edition of D&D that was EVER outsold by another RPG - and it has the double-dishonor of that other RPG being a clone of D&D 3e, the edition that 4e was intended to replace and be superior to (or at least that is how it was both marketed and presented during the playtest cycles and previews).

>>55024589
I know you are trolling, but this reminds me that 4e probably has the most amount of flavor packed in your average character thanks to PPs and EDs.

I understand why 5e dropped it, but it's still mising.

>>55023661
I'm gonna back up another poster. I was on the Wizards.com message boards when 4e was being developed. Right from the get-go, people were comparing it to World of Warcraft. Right from the get-go, no one meant it as a compliment.

The only thing I liked about it was Warlord.

>>55024731

I think that's more to do with the unique position 3.x had in the market than any particular traits of the systems.

>>55024649
That doesn't count online sales and insider though.

Pulling PDFs was stupid, but insider was a cash cow. Subsequent books didn't sell much, because insider removed the need for selling the books.

>>55023238
Don't forget the part where you don't budge an inch, because you so much as take a light jog then you're down to one attack.

>>55022859
It should have had a few more years, I agree. I'm still looking for a good 4e game to play in to (want to revive my Drow Rogue who focused his feats and powers on ones granted to him because he was a Drow such as levitation, darkness, and more).

>>55023141

Also, they tossed our errata removing things from the original classes to try and make the new essential ones suck less.

>>55023153
>4e's crime is apparently being up front about what it is

Thanks anon, you saved me figuring out how to shorten my wall of text. I've always thought that 4e's most unforgivable sin in its detractor's eyes was that it stripped away all the dressings and admitted it was a game.

>>55024695
>And, in all fairness, 3E was called Diablo Edition.
>more desperate revisionism

>>55024805
>>55023153
Not just "a game" but a game for human players. Not just for hardcore rules fetishists that came from 3.5/PF

>>55024824

...No? It literally was. Comparing new editions to videogames was a thing even back then, it was a criticism levelled against 3.x by the 2e grogs.

>>55024836
It's funny because AD&D has a Diablo supplement.

And 3e has a WoW supplement.

And 4e actually only has D&D supplements.

>>55024824
Um, no? It really was called that by a lot of people, myself included.

>>55024824
The only difference is that people stopped calling it Diablo Edition after a while and didn't keep calling it Diablo Edition well after it died.
Maybe we should call it Diablo Edition again.
Then we can call Pathfinder 'Diablo Knockoff Edition' and Starfinder 'Diablo Knockoff In Space Edition'

>>55024762
It's a unique position that Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro could have taken advantage of (by giving us 3.75 Edition themselves back in 2007), but didn't, and as a result Paizo outsold them with their own 3.75 Edition.

Again, I'm not trying to discuss whether or not 3e was GOOD, only whether or not it was still capable of turning a profit from 2007-2015 (during 4e's run). The answer is, obviously, "yes". Wizards and Hasbro probably spent a lot of time kicking themselves over wasting time, money, and energy developing a new edition of D&D when Paizo showed that the current edition was still capable of making them plenty of money.

Again, tellingly, 5e hews closer to 3e and 2e than to 4e, and all sales statements made by Wizards and Hasbro lead us to believe that it's selling EXCEEDINGLY well as a result.

The terrible fact of the matter is that even if 3e isn't a particularly good system from a design perspective, it still SELLS well, which is the most important thing for a product to do. It doesn't matter how good (or bad) something is, if no one is buying it. 3e may well be the "perfect" edition of D&D for that reason - it's the one people keep coming back to.

Not that no one bought 4e, it's just that it turns out that they could have made more money off of repackaging.

>>55024844
3e also has a Diablo supplement, called Diablo II: Diablerie.

>>55024844
>And 3e has a WoW supplement.
Everquest too.

>>55024731
>that doesn't address the fundamental problem that 4e has the dishonor of being the ONLY edition of D&D that was EVER outsold by another RPG

2 things to note here

>1.
D&D 4e was in the awkward position of having to to both match MTG's profit and unable to be lumped in with it. 3.x didn't make MTG sales either, but they could take the profits of both, put them together as one number, then present THAT to Hasbro. 4e was the first time D&D had to stand on it's own. Even by Mearls' admission, 4e sold more than 3.x, so this definetly isn't a problem of 4e not selling enough. In fact....

>2.
4e outsold Pathfinder. By quite a large margin. Pathfinder didn't even start catching up until 4e stopped making new material. And even then it took an entire year for Pathfinder to selling as much as 4e, even longer to actually pass it up.

>>55024875

One element to consider is the fairly dramatic transformation of the tabletop scene in the relatively short time period from 3.5's heyday to 5th's release. Tabletop stuff has seen a huge renaissance and card games and board games and RPGs are are vastly more popular and accepted and the consumer base has really been blown wide open. Even if Wizards are shit at capitalizing on their position and doing proper marketing, just by virtue of releasing a new D&D edition in this environment they were almost certain to have a hit regardless of what's written on the pages.

>>55024848
>myself included

>I, a 4rry, called it DIablo edition last week.
>That means everyone always called it DIablo edition

Wow, you sure showed me.

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>>55023743

>4e based beat-em-up with God Hand's ability system.

You. I like you.

3e sucks. 4e sucks. Try playing a version of D&D that encourages roleplaying rather than character building.

>>55022859
I think the biggest problem 4E had to surmount, and failed to, was that it was saddled with a lot of new ideas all at once, and not all of them held up to expectations. Insider was a mixed blessing, offering a great resource for anyone that paid for it, but as has been mentioned, cutting into sales of hardcopy books, while simultaneously putting a paywall between players and official content for nayone who was primarily interested in hardcover books.

4E also had a glut of content that clearly wasn't to everyone's tastes, given 5E's comparatively anemic release schedule.

finally, the digital tabletop, and digital tie-ins that were dead in the water when the lead programmer (i think, I've heard a lot of heresay but no specific news) killed himself. For some reason one guy's absence killed the whole project, which was supposed to be a major selling point. WotC's digital department is a known mess, and 4E really strongly hitched itself to that success.

All of that is above and beyond the actual changes to the system 4E brought. The edition wars and angry grognards might've been ignorable, but not in the face of every other business decision going against 4E's popularity and sales. Essentials was pretty clearly an attempt to rope in some of that lost audience, but only piled on more poor decisions.

4E got its chance, got a lot of chances all at once, and couldn't deliver on all of them. In a lot of ways 5E is a return to form and a conservative approach, which makes sense. Maybe sixth will have some more of 4E's innovations without getting dragged down by business mistakes.

>>55024940

I literally saw the gamer guys in high school deriding it as such back when I was a freshman and had no idea wtf they were talking about for a good 4 yours. I've met several other people with loads of 2e->3e butthurt.

>>55024979
They also massively fucked with the lore to fit the mechanics.
>Everyone's new to this game now, fuck being familiar enough to lure in old players

>>55024979

You can actually find news reports on the story, the lead developer murdered his estranged wife and them himself in a murder suicide.

>>55024940
Let's keep this civil please.

I'm not implying that everyone did, but a fair number of people did just as many but not most people called 4e "Warcraft Edition". Surprisingly I have not seen 5e being referred to by a video game moniker...

>>55025038
>Let's keep this civil please.
Sorry 4rry, you pick a fight, you see it through. You don't throw the first punch, then start crying because I threw back.

>>55024971
3e was the birth of the "character build" though, anon, 4e just made most of the classes level on the playing field (mostly. There are still hiccups here and there but by and large the classes are equal in power).

>>55025063
How did I throw a punch? I simply stated I called 3e "Diablo Edition" as did others and then you try to saddle me with a clearly derogatory term. Do I like 4e? Yes. However, my preferred system is 2e, not 4e.

>>55025038

To be fair, everybody from 4e was already gone at that point. And everybody from 3.5 is playing pathfinder.

>>55024923
>And even then it took an entire year for Pathfinder to selling as much as 4e, even longer to actually pass it up.

It still remains the only edition of D&D that this has happened to. AD&D 2nd Edition was never outsold by World of Darkness. Or in perhaps a better analogy, it was never outsold by any of Gygax's post-D&D works.

It doesn't look good on the resumé, is the point.

>>55024928
Possibly, though the popularity of Pathfinder, the fact that it did outsell 4e if only for a short time, and the extensive playtesting of 5e revealing that playtesters seemed to prefer a more 3e to 4e playstyle certainly lends credence to the idea that 3e is the more marketable system, regardless of which one is "better" (frankly, probably 4e, even if I personally prefer 3e).

>>55024979
In all honesty I'm of the opinion that new editions should cease entirely, at least in the vein that they have been coming out. Instead I think that 6th Edition should be focused on refining the existing 5e corpus, taking into account things like errata and playtesting. New art and layout to make it look different, re-releases of the PHB and stuff, but fundamentally the game game. Skip the "edition wars" bullshit entirely and just try and refine 5e into the best form it can possibly be.

>>55025073
>3e was the birth of the "character build" though, anon, 4e just made most of the classes level on the playing field (mostly. There are still hiccups here and there but by and large the classes are equal in power).

3e shat the bed. 4e smeared the shit around evenly so everyone got an equal share of feces. Congratulations. Both 3e and 4e are bad systems. 3e's overall damage to the roleplaying community cannot be overstated, but 4e made no attempt to rectify this. 5e keeps chugging along with the same problems, but at least it made some design improvements along the way. (A lot of design failures, too.)

>>55025154

Actually, the playtests for 5e involved a lot of 4e-esque mechanics which were very popular.

Unfortunately they kept removing or editing polls and stripping out shit for grog appeal. It's a fucking travesty.

>>55025073
Actually, AD&D started throwing character options at players like candy.

>>55025038
5e could probably be termed "Infinity Engine" edition, given that its entire goal has been to be as D&D as possible, and for a lot of people Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale, and especially Baldur's Gate are the epitome of the D&D experience, at least where video games of it are concerned.

>>55025162

Fuck you. That it doesn't suit your playstyle doesn't mean it's inherently bad. It's the exact same logic as D&Dfags who dismiss all other RPGs.

>>55025116
Starting shit and making up false criticisms about 3.x just to make your precious, and need I remind you dead, 4e look less shit.

>b-b-but I like 2e
Sure you do kid

Ya'll need to just give up and go to the best version of D&D ever put to print: the Rules Cyclopedia.

>>55023077
The online thing is only half their fault. Sure they were cheap bastards and only paid one guy to work on it but they had no control over him murder suiciding his wife.

>>55025176
I'm still angry about the vancian casting poll fiasco

>>55025176
I'd love to see proof that they messed with polls. And also I'd love for you to explain why, having polled the customer base to see what most people wanted, they'd then edit those polls to appeal to only a small subsection of those people.

>"The polls say 75% of people what THAC0 back"
>>"Well, we COULD do that...or we could try and tell people that the polls say that 75% of people prefer mounting AC!"
>"Genius! ...wait, why?"
>>"So that the 25% of people who prefer mounting AC will buy our game!"
>"...but won't that mean that the 75% of people who want THAC0 will *not* buy our game?"
>>"Ah, I see you, too, understand the brilliance!"

>>55025194
Wow, you are projecting hard, anon. Calling an edition "VIDEO GAME" edition does not mean I thought ill of the system. And need I remind you that technically speaking 3e is dead too. And yes, I do like 2e. First edition I played and the one I've had the most fun in.

>>55025235
Everyone recognizes that THAC0 had a fatal flaw in negative numbers though.

>>55025194
Dude, 3e when it first came out was called "Diablo Edition" as a derogatory statement, but it fell off over time for whatever reason, probably becasue in 2000 widespread Internet usage by D&D's target demographic was still relatively new and young and so memes just didn't stick around as long because not as many people were exposed to it.

4e was called "Warcraft Edition" as a derogatory statement, and it stuck for whatever reason, probably because by 2007 a more robust Internet community among D&D's target demographic existed, so memes could stick around.

These are true facts.

>>55025191
>Fuck you. That it doesn't suit your playstyle doesn't mean it's inherently bad. It's the exact same logic as D&Dfags who dismiss all other RPGs.
D&D is a system that was designed to handle dungeon crawls. It was designed to be a highly lethal wargame/treasure retrieval system. It shifted from 1e to 2e, but it was still usable as such. When 3e hit the scene, it was in full high fantasy epic adventures mode with MtG deckbuilding and a side of "rules protect the players from bad DMs."

Trying to play the game outside of a dungeon or wilderness hexcrawl is what causes problems in D&D. Smashing other genres into the system causes problems. The game "not suiting my playstyle" is akin to nailing a board with a screwdriver and wondering why you're having a bad time.

>>55025239
And also I'd love for you to explain why, having polled the customer base to see what most people wanted, they'd then edit those polls to appeal to only a small subsection of those people.

Mearls was the lead developer

>>55025235

Because nobody in WotC who cares about money cares about D&D. Its profits are laughable. As long as it pays for itself and occupies the brand, they don't care about anything else.

5e was made to be a very down to basic, hardcore fans vision of what they always imagined D&D to be. And for that, it worked. But we're seeing increasing dissatisfaction with the slow release rate and people realising just how limited a product it really is.

I didn't like how enemies had either 1 hp or 2000, and the lack of customization on your character made it feel like you had very few choices. Most classes had at will/encounter abilities that where you either had to choose middling damage or low damage + vaguely pointless mechanic like sliding.
It was also unclear how your class abilities worked. Were you allowed to use these abilities outside of combat? How did they work in that case?
As you obviously notice I didn't play it more than maybe 5 sessions, but all of those sessions felt..underwhelming to me.

>>55025297

Well, I have a great time playing 4e. It's a legitimately well designed system for high fantasy action focused heroics.

>>55025301
>Mearls was the lead developer
Ok, that makes sense then.

>>55025272
That was a bit of reductio ad absurdum on my part, it wasn't meant to be taken as something that literally happened.

>>55025302
That has nothing to do with my request for a) proof of poll editing; or b) an explanation for why it would be beneficial for WotC to manipulate polls.

>>55025297
>Trying to play the game outside of a dungeon or wilderness hexcrawl is what causes problems in D&D.

Not even once, in my experience.

>>55025347

Google for the first, and for the latter it's not about benefiting WotC, it's about benefiting the insular development team.

>>55022859
Ran it for a while and played a few games.
>Abilities had absolutely every non-combat use removed
>Classes felt almost cookie cutter with their attacks
>Combat tended to drag on as players had more options to choose from at higher levels
>Theater of the mind is basically impossible because of all the minute interactions of powers
>Monsters were bloated walls of HP that players threw themselves against forever
>Due to how AC scaled with enemies it was easy for a character to miss a lot if they did not have the appropriate +x weapon by Y level
>The game actually pushed for optimization and it attracted a lot of min maxing assholes.
I could think of more but I really dont care enough to.

>>55025302
>Because nobody in WotC who cares about money cares about D&D. Its profits are laughable. As long as it pays for itself and occupies the brand, they don't care about anything else.
The D&D team cares a lot, because they have to sell Hasbro on their plan or have the IP shelved until Hasbro decides it's ready for a big revival and marketing push.

Yes, the D&D team can easily cover their low costs doing jack shit, but Hasbro is looking at those numbers and thinking they could be making more money by putting that capital into another division.

>>55025404

It's worth more to Hasbro to let them operate so they continue to occupy the license. Going too long without a product called 'D&D' would risk losing brand awareness or even losing it entirely. They just need to occupy the space while the actual money comes from tie ins and merchandise.

>>55025324
As someone who was there, let me break down exactly what happened.

>poll on favorite casting system goes up on site
>after somewhere in the ballpark of 600 votes vancian is dead last
>behind even power points and AEDU
>poll disappears from main page, comes back up hours later
>less votes because a lot of people didn't notice it was a repeat
>vancian still dead last, slightly closer margins
>about 7 hours after out went up, vancian suddenly gets about 500 votes in the span of about 2 minutes, then the poll is closed very quickly after
>Mearls makes a post on the results, expressing his happy he is that the fanbase likes his favorite casting system
>people get angry
>forums go down for maintenance the next day
>all posts about the poll are gone and a number of the people complaining about it have their accounts mysteriously deleted from the site

The whole shitshow was enough to completely turn me off 5e

>>55025386
>wants to play theater of the mind
>optimization is bad
>not understanding item scaling

Go play some world of darkness, this game is not for you.

>>55025435
The odds of D&D losing brand awareness entirely is approximately zero, it's too big to fail in that regard. Hasbro is also very good at pulling old franchises back into the spotlight, like they did with Transformers. They're looking to do it with GI Joe right now.

>>55025558
All discarding people's opinions out of hand does, is dig trenches between players of different games editions.

He didn't get the game. You know this, I know this, he knows this, there's really no need to get upset about it.

>>55023357
His aegis teleport is based on him using his SWORD because he's a SWORD MAGE.

>>55022859
Eh, it was a reasonably fine game, I suppose.
It was a terrible idea to market it as D&D to D&D players, since most of those seem to have wanted a better balanced and more simulationist system as D&D (Just look at when 3eboos argue amonst themselves over "abstract hp" or barbarian rage limits). They were not looking for a system where the simulationist aspects were dropped entirely. They didn't know their existing audience well enough.

The 4e monster rules are fantastic. The offline character builder was fantastic so long as you didn't want/need to tun the game with any significant houserules to mechanics to do something different with the game.

Personally it was a little too "big damn heroes" for me (I want level 1 characters to be more chumpy than the average city guard, which 4e can do with some effort but is not the default).

>>55023060
>Tell people you're bringing them pizza and they'll be annoyed if you show up with gazpacho, even if it's good gazpacho
Yeah, pretty much.

>>55023185
I keep hearing this meme, but never from someone who actually disliked the system. From people who disliked the system I mostly hear complaints about the power structure, AEDU, and Compels.

The one time I saw someone bitch about the templating, it was because they had a shit DM who wouldn't let them use some fire power to set things on fire because that wasn't in the rules.

>>55023247
D&D players wanted D&D to be more like GURPS, not more like FATE.

>>55025628
I made a character for a joke game once. He was a shadar-kai that took the racial feat that let them treat a spiked chain as a light blade. He was a swordless sword mage.

>>55025655
>(I want level 1 characters to be more chumpy than the average city guard, which 4e can do with some effort but is not the default).

Level 0 rules?

>Compels

What?

>>55025655
>Compels.

Compels? That's FATE.

>>55025655

It's not that people criticise the templating, it's that their critiques are often based on assumptions made from just looking at how the game is structured rather than actually reading the content, like the ludicrous idea that all powers are boring and work the same way.

>>55025009
Yeah, that didn't help.

Fans of Forgotten Realms or Planescape don't want to jump through hoops refluffing and houseruling the whole damn system in order to run it.

If they have to put in that kind of effort, they would rather do it in GURPS or something (A lot of people advocated for that on the Forgotten Realms forums). They're generally more interested in the simulation and the exploration aspects than they are in a combat minigame anyways.

So when 4e came out and you had to refluff everything to run FR, and it was all about an extensive combat minigame most of them didn't give a shit about, they stuck with 3.x (in some cases converting FR stuff to Pathfinder), went back to 2e, and back converted stuff to that, or switched to a different system entirely for their campaigns, like GURPS.

>>55023262
>down into one or two books and focused on the Heroic tier of play.

That was coming. It got cancelled for Essentials. Much like how there is no actual Points of Light specific book as Essentials killed it too.

>>55023727

Six of one, half dozen the other. I think the book might be a bigger part of it, though.

>>55025776
Planescape works perfectly well.

FR doesn't, but it's not like FR in the novels or any other media other than the games themselves follow D&D rules either, so it's kind of a wash.

>>55023750
>>55024070
I've got pretty much everything on my desktop, in middling quality. I'll dump a zip of it all when I get back home.

>>55023743

>Swordmage combo.
>Whirling blade ranged attack into aegis of assault teleportslash into sword burst AOE.

I would play the shit out of that.

>>55025776
I feel like the FR situation was basically no-win: it's an iconic setting with entirely too much written about it, and the fans are going to get mad no matter how you handle it. The time skip was the best way they could have handled it and people still get mad because it messed with their homebrew campaign history or whatever.

A big issue for 4e is that people were taught that what distinguishes martials from casters is how their progression in the PHB is presented.
So while wizards still do wizard things and fighters still do fighter things, since they are PRESENTED the same way people just saw them as being the same.

Big 3.5 pathfinder shill here. I liked 4e a lot for what it is and I enjoy playing games in it.

Personally id have preferred if they just made 4e its own thing and kept 3.5 going or skipped to 5e.

The combat in 4e is fun but because of its short run and balancing issues there is too much dominant strategy and optimal builds. Not that this doesn't happen in 3.5 or pf.

4e did limit your like, stylistic choices in my opinion because of how combat works. Hard to put it in words but theres so much more variety and flavor in 3.5 and pf, granted its not balanced well but gm fiat fixes that. Though to be fair a lot of that is down to short lifespan

>>55025716
I mean, I could run level 0 rules, but I basically want that low powered stuff in relation to the rest of the world to be like the first quarter to first third of a campaign. As mentioned, 4e can do it, I just need to stat out my basic guards as like, level 6 soldiers or the like. I'm just saying it's far from the base assumptions to run the game that way, and I'm not likely to encounter another DM running it on that kind of power curve if I am a player.

>>55025699
I don't remember what they're called in 4e, I haven't played it since like 2011. The complaints were about anything that dictates enemy actions but isn't expressly called out as mind control.

>>55025941
>balancing issues
>4e

I'm gonna need some elaboration here.

>>55025961
>The complaints were about anything that dictates enemy actions but isn't expressly called out as mind control.

4e was generally pretty short on those. Defenders used Marks, which penalised attacking other people but didn't force actions.

>>55025875

The ironic thing that unifying the presentation is what brought me into, as a young Diablo 2 playing teen.

Diablo 1 might have just had spells that everyone used, but Diablo 2 gave all classes different options, and the most fightery class had a teleport.

>>55024968
>>55025850
No joke, I've spent many sleepless nights fantasizing about it. Got all kinds of systems and a "DM" mode thought up, now I just need to learn Unity or something.

>>55025500
while this sounds both hilarious and believable, do you have any proof?

B>>55025965
feat taxes that are basically mandatory, some feats that do everything another feat does and more. Power choices that are just flat out worse. Classes that just do things worse than other classes (looking at you seeker, monk and vampire) early monster manual monsters being way too weak. Basically general dnd stuff that would have been ironed out with a longer life span

>>55022859
>Should 4th edition have been given more of a chance?
So it's fan base could have time to get even more cancerous?

>>55026018
Don't get me wrong, Seeker and Vampire are shit, but what does what a monk does better?

>>55026018

Monk is a really good 4e class (The other two ARE junk however). It's not quite the single target monster most other strikers are but it does AOE very well and some nasty control for a striker.

>>55026018
>seeker, monk, vampire
>monk
>monk on the same level as seeker and vampire

Anyway, your other complaints are true, but when your competition is 3.5 and 5e, 4e looks like the pinnacle of balance.

Especially feats, there's maybe like, 2 must have feats, that you can just hand out for free and everything works.

>>55026028
Cancerous implies it spreads and is unkillable. These fit a different edition.

>>55022873
this
you cant pigeonhole an archetype or profession the way it has
5e is guilty of this too but through reverting to older multiclassing rules, you can still make those gritty imperfect characters with just the right mix of traits that 4e wouldnt allow

>>55025836
Much appreciated.

>>55026067
Make an example of a character you can do in 5e but not in 4e.

The one exception that I'm just going to go ahead and admit 5e has a leg up on, is game breaking minionmancer necromancers.

>>55022918
factually innacurate

>>55025500
'Surely nobody will notice any of this! I am a genius!'

>>55026043
I suppose, in my experience it was better to just have high direct targeted damage but that could be down to the gms I played with.

Im currently playing a level 5 fey hexblade with a ranger in my party and its just not fair to the monsters

>>55026064
I was putting monk down based on personal experience but yes it isnt as bad as the other two. Eh I think it has the same balance problems that every dnd edition has. I mean most classes have...i guess the word is specs that are just worse than the others along with powers

>>55023184
Jeez, why not just play an MMO? Is it because they don't have squares on the ground, does that confuse them? Tell me more about how this is a "roleplaying" game.

>>55026067

What? 4e is the most flexible edition in terms of including traits in characters.

Between Themes, Multiclasses and little things like backgrounds, it was very possible to include a lot of different elements in your character, mechanically and thematically from the very first level of the game. And unlike 3.x, doing so wouldn't very likely cripple your character unless you were adhering to a very specific combination. While 4e has a huge optimisation ceiling, non-optimised characters can still participate in and enjoy the game in the same way. Basically every campaign of 4e I've been in has been low-op, as it lets us explore the breadth of content in the system freely while still enjoying the strong mechanics of the game.

>>55025856
The appeal of FR is it's like setting your campaign in a real world place, and being able to find a ton of information about that place like in the real world.

If I want to set my game in New Orleans, I have a lot of history and maps and information to draw from.

So when you do a 100 year timeskip, blow up half the continent (among other steps) to invalidate any older material people might want to work, and give fuck all for details of what happened during the 100 year timeskip and leave it bland as all fuck, you kill any reason to play the setting.

>>55025820
Everything that exists in the FR novels at least actually exists in 3.x though, even if skills are more useful and spell slots less prevalent. For the people who play D&D as "The FR RPG", 3.x is overwhelmingly the best choice, because any other edition requires a ton of homebrew, and for most FR fans, they don't want to have to do any homebrewing, they want to run a game in an existing world with existing mechanics, and just have to design the campaign elements for it.

These days I DM 5e for convenience or pre-written adventures, with *far* more homebrew and DM's Guild purchased Homebrew than most people use in 5e; and I run GURPS or Unisystem for everything else, and prefer using both of those systems to using 5e, but not yet enough to be worth converting all the D&D IP I would want over to GURPS. Though someday I might, and if I do I will print out my shiny "GURPS D&D" Homebrew Supplement and stick it on my shelf with my other GURPS books.

>>55026064
>Cancerous implies it spreads and is unkillable. These fit a different edition.
The unbelievable levels of my-way-or-highway autism appear to have made the jump between editionfag populations just fine. Looks like metastasis to me.

>>55023110
wow used to be more open ended too, like you were absolutely saturated in abilities, some existed just for flavor

>>55026146
I just found it amusing anyone would call 4e cancerous when it's at worst a benign tumor.

My biggest problems with 4e were a lack of non-combat utility for a lot of characters and a extremely few ways to deal with encounters aside from hitting the monster until it runs out of hp. It felt like a completely different type of game from older editions.
I think 4e would have been a lot more successful in the long run if it was marketed differently, for example, instead of calling it 4th edition they could have called it D&D Tactics or something

>>55026124

>I suppose, in my experience it was better to just have high direct targeted damage but that could be down to the gms I played with.

I think a lot of it depends on if the GM likes minions. No one munches through a horde of minions like a monk.You can build them single target (Desert Wind is best for that since they can use Blistering Flourish to add +Cha to all damage for a turn.)

Flurry of Blows + Rain of Hammers = No ifs or buts, every single minion in melee with me is dead.

They ARE a striker, just not quite the same sort as the others.

>>55026176
4e is fine. I'm calling it's fan base toxic trash.

>>55026221

By that metric, 3.PF fans would be hazardous nuclear waste?

>>55026190

>were a lack of non-combat utility for a lot of characters and a extremely few ways to deal with encounters aside from hitting the monster until it runs out of hp.

4e didn't have any less there unless you were a spellcaster. The lack of 'non-HP take out' was also a deliberate design decision as HP is supposed to be 'Your ability to keep fighting' rather than purely how tough you are. Hence why a lot of bard 'I will intimidate the shit out of you' did psychic damage (As that's morale as well as Killing You With Mind Bullets)

>>55026221
I don't think it's any more toxic than any other community, most notably because I don't even know of a 4e community, despite being a fan of the game itself.

All /tg/ has on that front is some guys who are sick of regurgitated memes.

>>55026238
I didn't want to go there, but that too.

>>55025961
>>55025977
I'm guessing what is meant is like that one rogue power everyone bitched about that had the enemy smack himself?

>>55026205
thats probably it, my dm hated minions in their base form and if he did use them he would give them like 40+hp depends on the level so they could survive 1

other than that lots of magic classes felt slashed down for utility. Yes wizard are op in dnd I am aware of this but 4e made it difficult to feel like a master of magic when all you have is a couple utility powers

>>55026145
>The appeal of FR is it's like setting your campaign in a real world place, and being able to find a ton of information about that place like in the real world.
>If I want to set my game in New Orleans, I have a lot of history and maps and information to draw from.
>So when you do a 100 year timeskip, blow up half the continent (among other steps) to invalidate any older material people might want to work, and give fuck all for details of what happened during the 100 year timeskip and leave it bland as all fuck, you kill any reason to play the setting.
How does a time-skip and cataclysm invalidate any of that old info though? If you're using FR because it has history, that history is still there and you can extrapolate what happened in the intervening period. I don't get mad that all the old tourist guides to New Orleans are now invalidated because Katrina wiped half the area off the map, I look at the old guides and think about how those areas would have changed if they were rebuilt.

What the fans wanted was a preservation of the status quo, and that couldn't happen with Vancian magic was deeply rooted into the setting.

>>55026238
If their autism birthed your own, then almost certainly.

>>55026288
Rituals too. And skill powers.

Yeah, 4e wizards don't get to be AS gamebreaking, but Arcana focused skill-wizards had absolutely bonkers level of utility, especially if they twinked out rituals on the side.

I started playing 2e when I was 12, I played until I was 18 (didn't play for 10 years and now I am have been playing 5e for a few months).

I started in 2e because I got as a gift a bunch of 2e books even though 3e has been around for a year at that moment.

When I read about the hate for 4e it reminds me how much I hated 3e, the same things I read about 4e (even though I never played it) is what I used to say about 3e.

Seriously I can't think how bad 4e is if even 3e players (which is the worst edition I have ever played, PF is the closest thing to polishing a turd that you can do... but hey it is still a turd) think it is shit. In reality it is probably cry babies who are adverse to change like I was (but I am right though).

>>55026145
And when I do run 5e, the 70% of the time I run FR, I'm running it pre-1381 (the 4e FR apocalypse took place in 1385, and almost all of the 2e and 3e books flesh out 1340-1382).

But 4e was completely unusable for that purpose, so they lost basically the entire FR fanbase.

Fracturing your customerbase and driving many of them off doesn't help your brand or help you sell them your products.

>>55026288

Well, most of the Master of Magic part came from automatically getting the Ritual Caster spell for your big non-combat effects.

And yeah, that is the opposite of how minions are supposed to be used. They HAVE some built in survival in that they don't take damage from missed attacks (Meaning they can survive stuff that's half damage on a miss)

>>55026329

I think a lot of the logic behind 4e FR was 'Fuck it, Forgotten Realms has a world shaking apocalypse when editions change'. Like the Time of Troubles. However, the Time of Troubles had tie in books that showed it happening rather than just timeskipping over it.

>>55026326
>Rituals
What a shitty economy those things were slaved to. I hated that. It's cool my fighter can cast shit for the party but it'd be nice if we didn't have to go broke over it.

>>55026329
>FR fanbase
That exists?

What the hell? I thought FR was the shitty whitebread that nobody actually likes but everyone sort of tolerates, saving their actual preferences for interesting settings.

>>55025500
5e doesn't even use Vancian casting, it uses a spell-point-like system.

>>55026329
Why couldn't you continue to run pre-1381 FR in 4e? Were you unable to quietly handwave the differences in magic?

>>55026140
Judging by
>gritty imperfect characters
I'd say that it is the fact that you can't completely gimp yourself in 4e that this anon is complaining about.

>>55023262
That seems to have been where later material was going. The second Monster Vault had no monsters over level 20, and the Neverwinter book was pretty much level 1-10 only.

>>55026359
>However, the Time of Troubles had tie in books that showed it happening rather than just timeskipping over it.
Wasn't there a book that had Mystra die which was what caused the spellplague?

>>55025500
Today in "things I just made up in order to win an Internet argument"

>>55026372
You are supposed to recoup ritual components over the levels. There's also feats that let you cast without spending money, and rituals that take surges as a baseline.

>>55026329
Okay, so the designers had two choice:
- Update the game mechanics, and then need to adjust FR
- Don't update the game mechanics and FR runs as is

I'm happy as fuck they went with choice 1.

Actually... what exactly makes 4e incapable of running FR at that time?

>>55026407
More likely he's complaining that in 4e a level 1 character is exceptional, instead of ordinary

Which is a totally valid complaint, it does bring a very different tone to the game

File: Rituals Redone.pdf (395KB, 1x1px) Image search: [Google]

395KB, 1x1px

>>55026372

Yeah, the design behind rituals was REALLY badly tied into 'Well, in 3.5 there were expensive material components to big spells' and 4e NOT slaying a sacred cow hurt it there.

I'm (Slowly, only recently started) playing about with trying to tie it almost entirely into healing surges and focuses (Since focuses are a permanent investment). That and widening the skills used.

>>55026434
What feats exactly?

>>55026451
>>55026407
There are level 0 rules for all your rusty dagger shanktown needs.

>>55026429

During the 5e testing they did tons of dumb shit like that. They consistently ignored meaningful criticism if it came close to touching any of Mearls's personal sacred cows and asked loaded questions and shit

>>55026498
Tnhe penny arcade podcast with Mearls is very telling in that regard

>>55026318
>They could have just made up the intervening 100 year period and filled it in themselves.
They could have. But they like playing in a widespread shared setting, and most of them dislike having to homebrew for it (some of them do though).
Interestingly, the FR forums have recently started a homebrew lore canon coordinated project to be layered on top of the official stuff and to fill in those gaps. It just started like a month ago though.

>Preservation of the status quo
Not quite, they wanted gradual change built atop gradual change ad infinitem. They enjoyed the roughly 1 year real time = 1 year canon time progress of new events layering atop old events, and most of them have always widely hated what is called RSEs or Realms-Shattering-Events that make large changes to the setting.
Given the blowback WotC and TSR got over the Time of Troubles, it's no surprise that the Spellplague, "Returned Abeir", and a hundred year timeskip went over incredibly poorly, especially delivered all at once.

>Vancian Magic
They could have gotten away with ditching Vancian magic - if the change to magic was the only major change they made.
But instead they had to jump ahead a hundred years killing off anyone alive who wasn't one of the big name titled heroes that never show up in campaigns anyways, or an elf.
And they dropped another world on top of faerun wiping out several countries.
And they retconned a bunch of other setting fluff.
And they killed off half of the gods.
AND now there's a ton of tieflings (who are now something completely different than what tieflings were prior to 4e) running around.

Any one of these changes would have been poorly received. All at once? It effectively killed the setting.

>>55026465
http://funin.space/index.php?search=ritual+without+expending+components&folders%5B%5D=associate&folders%5B%5D=backgrounds&folders%5B%5D=class&folders%5B%5D=deity&folders%5B%5D=disease&folders%5B%5D=epicdestiny&folders%5B%5D=feat&folders%5B%5D=glossary&folders%5B%5D=item&folders%5B%5D=monster&folders%5B%5D=paragonpath&folders%5B%5D=poison&folders%5B%5D=power&folders%5B%5D=race&folders%5B%5D=ritual&folders%5B%5D=terrain&folders%5B%5D=theme&folders%5B%5D=traps&checkAll=on

...

desu I thought there were more.

>>55026515

That podcast is the most amazing shit ever in hearing him try to desperately sell the regressiveness of the system after them opening the show saying how much they loved how 4e moved things forward and made all combat so fun and engaging for martials and healers

>>55022859
Yes, 4E is best edition

>>55026572
But I don't understand

Why on earth do you give a fuck? It's just FR, it's not like they ruined an actually good setting

>>55026574
Why am I not surprised that 4e had very few exceptions to the tax that was supposed to balance magical utility shit.

>>55026575
I can't find the podcast. Are you sure it is penny arcade?

>>55026359
Those "Realm Shaking Events" between settings get shit on every time they happen. The one in 4e was just too much.

>>55026391
Yes it exists. There's a very active facebook group, the novels were very often NYT best sellers (I've heard the FR novels for a long time were significantly more profitable than all the actual D&D books), and there's a forum for them that's active and has been around for two decades.

>>55026404
Too much other shit to change. I'd need a totally different assortment of races, for starters. The other things about 4e were not well received enough for anybody to bother converting over all the shit it was missing.

>>55026421
Yeah, it happened at the end of the trilogy. But only Mystra's death was covered. Everything following her death was glossed over in the 4e FRCG.

>>55026434
They could have easily decided to change the magic, keep FR Races separate from PHB Races, keep the timeline marching forward year by year, and re-sell all the FR content players already had for 3e. There would have been minimal grumbling and people would have gotten over it.

>>55022859
4e was just okay. every class felt too samey and it felt too rigid in it's rules and the way enemies were designed was very un-immersive. It did a lot of things right though. I wish we had an edition that was a mix of how 4e was and how 5e is. The well crafted enemy-player balance and tight combat of 4e with the chassis and (some) of the character creation elements of 5e.

>>55026457

... Eh, having big spells ... Not be trivial to cast makes sense, and lord knows I have played enough games (not just D&D) where the "gotta stop the ritual"

>>55026624
Plenty of 2nd ed oldies were heavily into FR because it had a ton of novels, and for many Drizzt was their hero.

They grudgingly updates to 3e, disliked the Time of Troubles but got things had to change.

But then the Spell Plague and another, bigger, edition shift pissed all over the setting ans characters they loved.

>>55026574
The phrasing isn't standardized enough for that kind of search to cover everything. Your best bet is to search 'component' and filter out the duds, otherwise you'll miss things like Divination Mastery, River Born Ritualist, etc.

>>55023025
The essentials classes were really good.

The Slayer was probably my favourite offical class in any edition of Dnd I've played.

The knight was the best lockdown ever, the Mage had more flexibility than the standard 4e wizard and felt more like wizards in older editions while still fitting the gameplay of 4e well.

Essentials was just good all round, what was bad about it was that it wasn't 4.5, which in retrospect maybe it should have been.

If you play a game using just the rules from the essentials books you get tight, fast combat with simple mechanics that flow well. But when you mix standard 4e and essentials you get bogged down in the same problems the base game had, while also adding the issue of powercreep.

4e essentials characters simply did more than their basegame counterparts, largely because the early releases kinda fucked up monster HP and make combat slow as balls.

>>55026667

Looks like Wizards nixed it because the link 404s now

https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2012/08/13/dd-next-poddcast

>>55026574
There are, you're just not finding them with that search.
http://funin.space/index.php?search=ritual+component%2Bcost&folders%5B%5D=feat

>>55026372
Rituals are nearly free to use in the first place, though? The way wealth scales, you can use rituals that are a few levels below you whenever convenient without it hurting anything, and utterly spam lower level ones with abandon.

>>55026698
>4e essentials characters simply did less than their basegame counterparts

I think this is what you meant to type, because it is objectively true for every Essentials class save the mage

>>55026679

Yeah but I don't think it needs to come out of the same resources you use to get new gear. As asking people 'Do you want a temporary shiny or to save up for new gear' isn't going to go the Rituals way basically ever.

>>55023025
I'm playing the shit out of a Hexblade right now and it's legitimately fun as fuck. I designed the character from the ground up to be as simple as possible--teleport, then charge--and it's still got way more options on any given turn than my Barbarian does in 5e. 4e isn't perfect by a long shot but honestly the sense of progression in 5e is basically nonexistent in comparison.

>>55026730
>Rituals are nearly free to use in the first place, though? The way wealth scales, you can use rituals that are a few levels below you whenever convenient without it hurting anything, and utterly spam lower level ones with abandon.
That depends entirely on your dm not being stingy with the treasure.

>>55023357
>What does that mean for my character? How does he experience that? Does he know how to teleport, but he's only willing to do so under certain circumstances? Can he teleport across a chasm to his friends if the rogue yells "haha, I betray you!" and waves his dagger at the wizard? It's something that makes sense within the game mechanics, but is pretty strange in the gameworld.

As he watched the great hulking brute charge towards his beloved cleric of Mystra he utter his arcane chant, magic flowing through his hand and into his blade. His blade was no mere bar of iron however, but rather it was Kinsguard, blade of the defender, and in its metal heart flickered a tiny part of his soul.

As the blade bound to him heard his edict, DEFEND HER, the weave obliged. Bending space around him, he transported himself in the way of the beast's axe, deftly striking at him while the ogre was off balance, readying a deadly blow for his ally.
It's not hard, m8.

>>55026742
I am of the firm opinion that new higher level gear should be found/looted/granted as rewards, not picked up at the store, so that's just not a problem for me.

Though I also don't like the treadmill, so I prefer inherent bonuses anyway.

>>55026739
The slayer outputs a ludicrous amount of damage.

The Knight is one of the best if not the best defender class.

The Mage gains better skills and the wizard, and has more flexibility than the wizard.

I don't remember the others.

>>55026792
I've always just fluffed it as a reaction to the aegis

The aegis is an arcane mark placed on the target that has the effect of letting you teleport to it when the conditions are met (if you're an assault swordmage), that seems believable enough in a world of magic

>>55026792
Well, also he already needed to have put the aegis spell on the enemy before it attacked, too.

>>55026782
DM ignoring system assumptions does cause things to break down. The books DO spell them out for the DM, though, so that's entirely on them.

>>55026572
>Not quite, they wanted gradual change built atop gradual change ad infinitem. They enjoyed the roughly 1 year real time = 1 year canon time progress of new events layering atop old events, and most of them have always widely hated what is called RSEs or Realms-Shattering-Events that make large changes to the setting.
That's basically preserving the status quo though. No big changes unless you spend literal years building up to it, and even then you're not allowed to make the changes too big.

>>55026670
>They could have easily decided to change the magic, keep FR Races separate from PHB Races, keep the timeline marching forward year by year, and re-sell all the FR content players already had for 3e. There would have been minimal grumbling and people would have gotten over it.
Yeah, this is why the FR setting is a no-win scenario for WotC. Either you rebuild your game for one special snowflake setting (we just rebuilt it, man) or you adapt the setting to your new game and piss everyone off.

>>55026624
>>55026691
I actually Like FR, and enjoy most of the novels (I don't much like Drizzt or Elminster, but there were enough other great novels that I could easily just ignore those ones). 4e didn't come with a quality setting to replace FR, with another setting that had a heavily detailed world and history, either. You know what did though? Golarion for Pathfinder. So despite its flaws, thats what I saw most played between 2009 and 2014, and thats what the people I knew wanted to play most in that time period.

In short:
>if I'm running D&D, it's for FR, Planescape, or Spelljammer (I haven't tried Eberron, but I might soon).
>If I'm running PF, it's for Golarion (Though I don't much like running PF, and next time I run a Golarion campaign it will probably involve 5e+conversions).
>If I'm homebrewing a setting, I want to be able to quickly stat up mechanics to match, which tends to mean classless point buy systems like GURPS. But, I also tend towards more simulationism, and faster combat than 4e provides.

>>55026841
>As he watched the great hulking brute charge towards his beloved cleric of Mystra he utter his arcane chant, magic flowing through his hand and into his blade

>>55026818
The slayer does damage via individual attack without extra things added on and still does less damage than a ranger

The knight suffers greatly from a lack of true defender options, meaning that as levels go up it gets worse as it has a harder and harder time keeping up with the shit monsters can pull, not to mention that being a str/con class gets worse and worse as your levels go up.

But more importantly, regardless of effectiveness, they explicitly do less stuff, they have less powers and their attack powers are just "hit harder"

>>55026810

Well, in that situation it might work. I'm more an Ebberon fan where 'Commission a guy to make you a magic item' is not only a thing but the job of one of the major houses so it makes the economy fall apart a bit for me.

>>55026818
Slayer only gets good damage if it makes use of pre-essentials material, Knight is most definitely inferior to Fighters and Paladins as a defender, and Mage/Wizard depends on what you're building for. Mage has better all-around and blasting, Wizard is better at lock-down and summoning.

Thief starts out really strong but drops off (it's like a stronger Slayer). Same thing with Scout. Hunter is never really strong, but it has more things to do than the others at least.

>>55026874
It's interesting that Eberron was explicitly made to make sense in 3.5, and yet still works better in 4e

>>55025063
4rry is such a gay insult

>>55026818
>The Knight is one of the best if not the best defender class
The only way to make knight even compete is to make a bizarro swordmage out of it with that eladrin teleporting feat

>>55026841
>DM ignoring system assumptions does cause things to break down. The books DO spell them out for the DM, though, so that's entirely on them.
The books have the numbers but it also kinda cramps the DM's style when they gotta figure out how to insert the loot into the encounters. Why's a mine infested with spiders got a half dozen magic items just lying around? Guess it was an ill-fated adventuring party just like the last several times eh?

Inherent bonuses eases it but the treadmill could have been toned back significantly in the first place.

>>55026852
>(we just rebuilt it, man)
And that rebuild was the problem.
They could have kept the ER races from the outset, but retconning them to match the new PoL races was never going to go over well.
As for blowing up half the continent and the timeskip, that was for no reason other than to invalidate the existing books and start fresh without requiring new authors to know the source material. As a result there's a massive disconnect there, and to FR fans it wasn't "more content in the setting we love" it was "a new setting built atop the corpse of the setting we loved". The disconnect was large enough that nothing new had any relevance to people who liked FR before 4e.

The smart play would have been to retcon the magic to match 4e and keep the existing FR races, and keep the timeline marching forward at a steady pace.

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>>55026894
>Mark 1, or at most 2 targets per round

or

>an aura of marks always on.

Sure sounds bad

>>55026874
I'd still suggest going with inherent bonuses for that, and enjoying commissioning all kinds of wondrous items and weapons specifically designed for the mission at hand.
In short, get a toolbox.

>>55026922
Anon. no no no.

Spiderguts are just incredibly valuable components in magic item crafting. You go back to town and sell the guts, and use the guts to buy items.

Done and done.

>>55026901
It was built for the weirdness of 3e that 4e widely kept, and that 2e and most 3e FR player's hated in 3e.

>>55026926
>Mark that works regardless of how far away the target is

or

>aura that gets turned off the moment they get more than 1 square away

>>55026922
It also tells you to put them elsewhere if they don't make sense. Loot isn't supposed to be spread out evenly across events or even adventures.

>>55026922

My ideal situation would have been to keep magic items (I AM an Ebberon fan) decently plentiful but have more of them be of the 'Gives you a daily power/gives you a new trick' sort. With raw +s being handled by inherent items.

So magic items are more there for extra stuff rather than core functionality. Flaming swords to swap your damage type or boots that let you fall without damage. Fun things with character rather than combat numbers.

>>55026937

Yeah, I was JUST typing about this.

>>55026901

5e Ebberon (If they ever actually do it) is likely to be a hell of a shitshow because it's relationship with magic items entirely changed.

>>55026901
4e was 3.5 overhauled to do everything 3.5 was trying to do but failed at. In their preview books they make it pretty clear that was their thought process, and arguable exactly what they succeeded at. That 3.5 fans hated the final result is one of the greatest ironies of the hobby.

>>55026956
if only the vast majority of fights in dnd didn't take place in small dungeon rooms, then you would actually have a point.

>>55026853
>If I'm homebrewing a setting, I want to be able to quickly stat up mechanics to match
Which was one of 4e's bigger strengths, the ease with which a DM can refluff monsters and tweak the numbers using the monster math guidelines. Though if it's not the combat style you're looking for that's a moot point.

>>55026970
>My ideal situation would have been to keep magic items (I AM an Ebberon fan) decently plentiful but have more of them be of the 'Gives you a daily power/gives you a new trick' sort. With raw +s being handled by inherent items.

There's a metric fuckton of those. Hell, wands work entirely on that principle and you can make one out of any encounter or at-will power IIRC.

Artificer is even based around amnipulating them.

>>55026970

>inherent items.

Derp. Inherent Bonuses.

>>55027013

>There's a metric fuckton of those. Hell, wands work entirely on that principle and you can make one out of any encounter or at-will power IIRC.

Oh yeah and I very much like those (Though I feel they'd be better if they let you have a little more choice used stats/introduced some non-arcane versions so more people can get use out of them.). I'd just sorta like to see those sort of things be the default rather than 'My sword is +1 and by cloak is +2. I need a better sword'.

>>55026926
>Mark entire groups of enemies for several rounds while shitting out striker level damage

or

>Mark the entire fight for several rounds, raining holy lasers on everything that dares object

or

>Kind-of-mark several enemies at once, if they're so kind as to not walk off, cry because your damage AND condition inflicting abilities are worse than those of the real classes, too

>>55027000
Very few fights take place in a place where it's impossible to move away

Also it consumes your opportunity action, which means there's no reason for any enemy to ever actually suffer the -2 to hit penalty when moving away and attacking without the penalty gets punished in exactly the same way

>>55026894
>and summoning
Wizards being better at the shittiest mechanic in the game is a good thing?

>>55027042
Oh yeah, definitely! And you are right, that's where the inherent bonuses really helped out.

IIRC, Heinsoo said that magic items and rituals were the last things added to the game, and they didn't care much for magic items at all.

>>55027052
This.

If you just look at class features, Knight is really good, but thing is, it gets basically no powers, and powers for defenders in general tend to be really good. It sucks, Eladrin Knight is absolutely my jam.

>>55027042
They...were? Every magic item had an attached power or property beyond +1's. There's hundreds of them. I don't really understand what you're trying to say.

>>55026924
If they had kept FR races they might as well have marketed it as Faerun: The Game instead of a 4e supplement. Once again, no-win scenario.

There's no way they could retcon "magic was never Vancian" and not get screamed at for it, FR fans are too invested in the setting to let that slide. If you're going to get screamed at for changes you might as well make changes that accommodates new players too.

>>55027002
When I say stat up mechanics to match, I'm talking about player mechanics. Magic abilities, races, base equipment, vehicles, powers, that sort of thing.

"This demon race has the ability to summon a demon half your level that acts independently - it's worth more points than human, and you will simply have correspondingly less points for character abilities and skills." etc.

Agreed 4e is great for monsters. And yeah, 4e's combat style, IMO, typically has too many bodies moving around, and just takes too long in real time before it's over.

But when I want to homebrew I want more flex, and I'm not nearly as interested in the lengthy skirmish combat. Often I also may want a much smaller power-scale, in terms of numbers.

>>55026962
Which doesn't detract from the point that it's cramping the DM's style. Players are going to feel like the DM is being stingy if they aren't seeing any rewards, even if the DM has a plan for when it shows up. And it doesn't let you use a ritual when you're broke since your loot parcel hasn't shown up yet.

>>55027068
Late-4e summoning spells are actually really good. Summon Succubus in particular.

>>55026190
Why does everyone think they're the one who came up with the idea of calling 4e something else? And yet every single one suggests "D&D Tactics"? It's worse than the WoW bullshit.

>>55027106
The end of 3e killed the god of magic. You could rule that magic is now much different and get away with it. People would have grumbled and gotten over it.

But once you discard all the FR Races and most of the countries and most of the factions, it's no longer recognizably the same setting.

It would not have been so terrible to have a "4eFR the game", with FR's like, 8 races with 4-6 subraces a pop, including it's human subraces/offshoots, like how Halruaan humans can almost all cast a handful of wizard-like spells, because of their statewide Wizard-Eugenics program.

Once you add the races you've covered the biggest thing 4e is lacking to handle the setting adequately.

Shit like Jordaini Viziers and Incantatrixes and Guild Wizards and Bear-shifting Berserker Barbarians can easily be added in a later supplement.

>>55027151
Why would you ever go completely broke, though? Unless all your shit gets stolen, beyond like level 2 the leftover pocket change of D&D characters is plenty to cover anything that isn't serious business magic items or real estate.
I'm not saying your DM couldn't be screwing you over to that point, but if they give you no loot and only expenses for several levels, you can't blame the rules for you being unable to afford anything.

I only started playing D&D during 5e and everything I've seen of 4e makes me upset that it got thrown out to spare the tummyfeels of neckbeards. I want to play it and probably never will get to.

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>>55022918

>>55024746
Would these be the PPs and EDs you only get after an extensive amount of play? Because if you're flavourless for a full third of the level progression that's kind of a huge problem.

>>55027336
You got about the base amount of flavor inherent to most D&D classes + themes. A few nice tidbits for some odd race/class combinations too.

I thought that was adequate. I can't think of any D&D that has more aside from one-offs like Binder maybe.

>>55023581
One of the expansion PDFs is bloated as hell so I had to pack them all separately to avoid a filesize limit. Each set has a few cards, the base set has a lot of cards, and then there's the rar that's just booster pack cards.
snip dot li
/hwT

>>55027336
Powers, archetypes, themes, backgrounds, etc

>>55022918
4e is the worst version of D&D, and arguably the worst mainstream RPG. Its combat-system is an overly complex padded sumo mess even with the several math fixes required to make it even function, its non-combat systems are practically nonexistent as useful as they are, it plays like an RPG/Board Game hybrid where combat is totally distinct from noncombat in terms of play, and its character progression is abyssal.

The only good parts of the game are Encounter Powers as a concept and much of the lore is interesting [especially everything Psionic, especially Battleminds who are amazing in their shtick of 'Being so arrogant the universal literally bends to your will to make your ego match up with reality']

>>55027377
Thanks a lot!

>>55027437

You could just go with 'It isn't suited for my playstyle'.

It's a perfectly fine game. Just not one, clearly, for you.

When it comes to fantasy tactical combat in an RPG, though, there's not much better.

>>55027437

See problem is this isn't particularly clever because you're literally just telling lies and using dumbass hearsay

>>55027377
Great! Thanks.

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>>55027465
My typical response in these kinds of threads is to continue shitting on 4e, which I really do think unironically is an awful RPG even taken by its own concept, but all that results in is unproductive flaming. So instead lets talk about the only thing about it I like, its lore.

What do you guys think of Battleminds? Their concept is basically that they are very hard to kill melee fighters whose power comes from a subconscious psionic ability, which acts to bridge the gap between their [likely exaggerated] self-perception, and the reality around them.

Lends itself well to romantic hero types, as well as shonen or JRPG protaganist style "Farmer's son becomes a badass"

>>55027501
>Angry 4rry in its natural habitat
>Calling all supposed flaws in his game lies and wildly contesting them.

>>55027566

4e has flaws. The weak non-combat side is a legitimate one, although it's just as true when it comes to other editions of D&D outside of magic. The rest is mostly exaggeration and hyperbole. Yeah, the combat was slow at first, but it still functioned than better than 3.x's ever dude with its godawful basic combat maneuvers and broken CR system. Once they fixed the math, it became far, far better.

From RPG/Board game hybrid onward you basically just express your opinion as if it's an absolute fact, when you're really just stating your preferred playstyle.

>>55024746
On Twitter Mearls has said they're tentatively developing a take on PPs for 5e. Or at least kicking around the idea.
If you ask me it's more a matter of whether it'd be tied into the Backgrounds or Classes or Subclasses.

I've just today started working on a take that uses prerequisites across the three. For instance, you could become a "Divine Champion" by being a Cleric, Paladin, or having the Acolyte background and the Extra Attack feature from any source (that one's off the top of my head, but you get what I mean).

>>55027446
>>55027528
No prob!

>>55026040
Really the vampire isn't even bad, out just doesn't have much in the way of options, and the healing surge gimmick is a bit iffy.

>>55027551
The expansion of the idea of psionics in the way Arcane power was expanded into Bards/Warlocks/Sorcerers is good and gets a power source more integrated into a setting when there's more than one way to dig at it.

4e combat sucked, and it felt shitty as he'll when you had all these "options" but there was a baseline assumption of a level of some minmaxing, otherwise the monsters would outpace you and you'd get them badfeels when everyone was doing cooler shit than you. Bah why am I even bothering with this shit. The same shit gets said in every thread and no one is ever going to change their position on it.

4e is a GAME with perfectly serviceable mechanics, but it puts the GAME aspect first and allows you to roleplay within that system. 5e is a ROLEPLAYING game. It takes some notes from 4e but I very much get a different feeling about how the mechanics aren't really that important, they are just putting out this system and saying "here, see what you can do inside here". It might me attributed but Gygax once said "the secret we must never let our players know is that they don't need any rules"

>>55027260
It was a good game marketed to the wrong audience, that also got the flak of being the reason the games that audience liked were no longer in production.

>>55027659

What makes 5e better at roleplaying than 4e?

>>55027566

I mean I can go in deeper if you'd like I guess

>overly complex sumo mess
Simple conceptual stuff that just requires you to engage with it slightly. Everything is laid out clearly and in a functional manner. There are more moving parts but if any of them confuse you or cause you to struggle to pay attention then you have greater problems than the D&D edition you're playing

>required several math fixes to make it even function
This one's just a lie. The later fixes that came along/monster math on a business card was of course a positive, but early iterations of the math was literally just "stuff doesn't hit quite as hard as it should and maybe has a few more HP than necessary." Claiming it's nonfuctional is absolutely a fabrication

>non-combat systems are practically nonexistent
Another flat out lie. Nothing in the slightest was removed in terms of social interactions and other non-combat situations. The skill list was good and added cool shit like dungeoneering. They even tried to take it a step further with skill challenges. Those may not have been a positive in some people's eyes, but they're perhaps the most optional and easily ignored concept of the whole system if so.

>progression is abysmal
Lie. I guess consistently getting new more interesting and unique powers alongside cooler and better equipment could be defined as "abysmal" by some but only if you kind of have a poor grasp of what English words actually mean

>>55027659

4e is no more an RPG than 5e.

And I'm not sure what you mean by there being a minimum level of minmaxing in 4e. Unless you're being a complete idiot and not lining up your main stats with your powers, it's honestly hard to go wrong. I almost always play in low optimisation games, just picking things that seem cool, but I still have a functional character. If I did the same thing in 3.x I'd have more than a decent chance of ending up with barely functional trash.

>>55027620
I'd be interested in 5e mythic levels based in the idea pathfinder had. Something that layers on top of classes and doesn't level up with xp.

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>>55027631
The psionic classes, in theme and lore, was probably the best part of 4e. The idea that its either the world's immune system reacting against the Far Realm, or a corruption from the Far Realm, is cool, and pretty much every psionic class has its unique feel and ties into the lore of the setting.

Like the priestess who becomes one and founds one of the earliest orders of psions. The Monks are really cool in their whole "Self-mastery and uniting the three parts of the self" routine, especially the little sidenote about Devas [who I wish were in other editions of the game] discussing heavenly monkish concepts that later became the basis for the class among other races.

But Battleminds remain my favorite, just because they're a class entirely driven by what is arguably delusion that is only justified after the fact.

You can be an arrogant warrior whose arrogance manifests as power.

You can be a hopeless romantic who never could have become a hero without it, literally using CHIVALRY and STORYBOOKS to power your ascent to glory.

You can be an over-the-top shonen hero who drinks spiral power like kool-aid.

You can even be a loser who is effectively given a Solar Exaltation.

And once you find out you're gaining power from psionics [since Battleminds sometimes don't know at first], do you view it as delusion? As somehow cheapening your accomplishments? Or do you embrace the concept, and run with the idea that your own will can be emblazed across the cosmos, sharp as any blade?

>>55026698
>The knight was the best lockdown ever,
This is only true if you ignored that the fighter existed.

I fucking dare you to defend the Cavalier, because out sure as shit can't defend anything.

>>55027708
>Anti-simulationist mechanics.
>A shortage of "utility powers".
Basically just that is what people are talking about when they say 4e is less amenable to roleplaying

>>55027727
Having played 4e for years, you're full of shit.

1/2. Combat DOES take far longer then in other editions, due to higher HP totals, and people spending far longer figuring out their actions, to say nothing of the actual act of setting up the gameboard for combat. Fights in Pathfinder generally take my group about 30 minutes. Fights in 4e can take upwards of an hour and a half. The business card math is not just a positive, its basically required to make the game even barely function unless you want the whole session to be duking it out with goblins. And while I"m sure there's fixes that help alleviate this [using more minions, throwing in more magic weapons, halving enemy HP] none of this should be required to play the game, but it is.

2. As has been noted above, the magic system was effectively the only source of meaningful out of combat abilities in other versions of D&D, and in 4e its completely gutted. Rituals take too long to cast and cost too much money, and Utility Powers are more often focused on combat uses then actual Utility. You have to look for things like Skill Powers in PH3, or rare magic items that give constant-use effects, or the neutered Wizard or Monk Dailies or Encounters to find useful utility.

Otherwise, the characters are exactly the same at level 30 as they are at level 1, just with bigger numbers and more combat skill. Which granted is something of the case in 3.X, the difference being that magic items can let you at least pretend to be better through things like growing larger, upping your carrying capacity and movement speed, wands, scrolls, or just being a T3 or higher class in general really.

So no, on both the combat and noncombat side the game fails as concept.

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>>55027566
They can't help it. They're brain damaged.

>>55027898

I ran a game of 4e last week. My group resolved a level+2 combat encounter in 30 minutes, including prep. You're full of shit, or your group are fucking incompetent.

4e fights can go longer, sure. And that's a feature, because a fuckoff great boss fight that takes two hours to resolve is something I love to pull out every now and then as the climax for an arc.

Non-combat could be improved, I don't think anyone is disagreeing, but rituals and skill powers do help a lot.

Although, fuck you. Are you just ignoring Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies? Because even outside of the depth and variety within each classes internal progression, there's a fuckton of cool stuff you get to add to your character thematically and mechanically.

>>55025382
How about you google it and post it since all I see are people with the same credibility as you crying the same way you are with no evidence

>>55027932
Of all the completely legit complaints to make about 4e, your pic has some of the most asinine.

Being heroic and badass isn't the problem with 4e, the problem is its pants on head retarded game mechanics. If badass shit like that was possible in other versions of D&D, without the fucking baggage that would be a plus.

>>55027932

>I don't understand mechanical abstraction

>>55026190
>non-combat utility
Just because you grew up with 3.x, the edition that had rules for every inane thing under the sun, doesn't mean that all systems need rules for every inane thing under the sun.

>>55027999
1. I'm not talking about the lore or thematics, which I've noted before there are a number of things I like. I'm saying that in terms of actual non-combat abilities, specific individual new things you can do, 4e is very very lacking.

In 5e, the difference between my wizard at level 1 and level 5 is profound. I'm not just hitting harder, I'm flying or turning invisible or all kinds of stuff. Which admittably is a bit TOO much, but even other classes like Warlock or Paladin, at level 1 I'm hitting stuff. At level 5 I'm shapeshifting or summoning a horse or a bunch of COOL things that generally aren't in 4e unless you use Rituals, very specific Encounter powers, or very specific magic items.

2. I'm not full of shit, one of the biggest complaints ever mentioned about 4e is that combat takes too long. Its in every thread. Also in every thread is some guy claiming that his group has no problems.

Well let me tell you what, I BELIEVE your group has no problems. And I believe your group has no problems because your players are very competent, organized people who know what all their powers do and when they would want to use them, and you've become very efficient at setting shit up.

But its a fact of life that most casual groups are NOT that competent. In Pathfinder games, which I've been playing for years now, I still have people asking what dice to roll for damage. Its like Jason for fuck's sake its been like 3 years, you should know what all the weapons do by now.

And you can say "Well thats a problem with the group not the game", and I don't entirely agree with you, because the game itself is so very cluttered and complicated, that in combination with the HP bloat shit takes a very long time.

But I can imagine that with all the math fixes, decent use of minions, and very orgnaized players you could get reasonable combat times out of 4e, its just way too much work for what it is.

>>55027866
Frankly they just need to stop trying to make mount-based anything in D&D because it has never worked even once.

>>55027708
It had a decent skill system for one.

>>55026190
You know, it's funny, I'm playing a 5e game right now and as a Barbarian I'm utterly worthless outside of combat. I've played a wide variety of characters in 4e, from martial to spellcaster, and there has *always* been something I could do out of combat.

>>55028112

Honestly, I don't really care if casual groups can't cope with 4e. It isn't a system for everyone, and I'd never say it was. I play a lot of different RPG's, and I go to 4e when I want fantasy tactical combat alongside heroic storytelling. And for that, it does great.

I'm honestly not sure what you're talking about in terms of progression, either. In 3.x I know exactly what you mean because that's how it always feels to play martial classes, but in 4e everyone gets to experience those awesome growths of competence and ability and the game is full of really interesting and awesome effects in your powers. Playing a Warlord through heroic goes from being a basic battlefield officer to a heroic leader of men, able to inspire and encourage them to greater heights than they could ever achieve alone, and it only gets better from there. 4e's progression is awesome.

>>55028143

I'm actually playing a mounted fighter in a 4e game at the moment, and it's not bad. Using a lance for an extra [W] one very charge is great.

>>55028158
You mean 4e's skill system but worse?

>>55028112

I'm playing a 5e campaign and it's weird because we're at level 7 and the wizard is now basically a god and is indeed flying around and turning invisible and shit, but oddly enough I as as a paladin and our barbarian as well are still just hitting shit. Combat is fucking miserable and out of combat we don't have cool shit. Summoning a mount like you mentioned is easily the most dramatic, and is useless 90% of the time because it's a game about dungeon crawling. Outside of maybe laying down a zone of truth or something I can do fuck all other than piss-weak heals or say "full round attack I guess."

>>55027551
I think that's a solid concept but I can't get past its retarded name. So I guess the battlemind kind of encapsulates my feelings about 4e as a whole.

>>55028201
Don't get me wrong, you can build a class and give it extra cool shit with a mount. For example, as a mounted fighter, you are a full class by yourself, but also riding a mount. But then they try to make these classes built around mounts and it's always awful.

>>55028183
>>55028221
Which is really the thing. In 5e, out of combat powers for full casters are great, half-casters are okay, and martials are still pretty bad.

In 4e, out of combat powers for EVERYONE are bad.

In 5e there's at least shit like Zone of Truth or summoning a mount that a character can learn over time that says "I'm better now at level 6 then I was at level 2!" even if the concept completely breaks down in the double digit levels.

In 4e is in every tier of the game. Your "Heroic leader of men" is only distinguishable from your battlefield officer because he's better at fighting and leading. He hasn't developed in any other meaningful way.

He doesn't lift more. He doesn't run faster. He hasn't developed any supernatural powers. He's just better at fighting and buffing and debuffing.

Which is cool, but its still shit. And while I know 5e and 3.X aren't that great in these departments either, they're still much better.

>not that D&D is my go-to system in the first place, its not.

>>55028143
cavalier is garbage even without the mount. I'd argue the mount actually makes them worse, since no matter how big the mount is, the aura is still only around the one square out the mount the cavalier himself is on. The mount didn't make the aura any bigger.

Add that the damage was as low as the Paladins mark punishment without any of the feat support, and that it was only melee range, and cavalier is hands down the most garbage defender in the game.

>>55028297

What the fuck are you even talking about?

How is any of that true, or different from other editions? If you're talking about tangible expressions, yes you fucking do get cool stuff. My Dragonborns sword is now permanently covered with their breath weapon after picking up the Honorable Blade PP, which is fucking awesome. I've taken utility powers related to their ability to inspire and lead others, I've got feats which give me additional bonuses that apply in and out of combat.

And I honestly think I've experienced more of this in 4e than I was ever able to in 3.x outside of the magic system. Magic users get less, but there's still the same amount, just spread around more fairly.

>>55028158

It's 'Trained Skills' system comes FROM 4e. Except people never get any better at untrained skills so a level 20 fighter knows fuck all about anything and a level 20 wizard can't endure a hike.

>>55028209
Yeah, I loved skill challenges too! Now I have to roll 7 times to convince the king that the army of orcs outside his walls are going to attack instead of one.

>>55028349

>I have no idea what I'm talking about

>>55028297
I feel the exact opposite, actually. I feel like I am always progressing in 4e whereas in 5e I feel like the exact same character only a few numbers have gone up because I don't use magic.

>>55028361

Ok, explain how the 5e skill system is better than the 4e one when ti's a toned down 4e skill system?

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>>55028346
ALL OF THAT IS COMBAT SHIT.

In 5e, casters and half-casters, and in 3.X basically every Tier 3 or higher class, learns and develops new out of combat abilities or powers that they didn't have at level 1.

The Aegis for instance at level 1 is a guy in a suit of magic armor. At level 5 he's basically Iron Man, and can fly, breath underwater, climb sheer surfaces, see in the dark, or a half-dozen other COOL shit depending on how he's built.

A Psychic Warrior or a Magus can develop abilities like growing larger or smaller, shapeshifting, growing wings, or so on.

In 5e, a Warlock can gain the power to Disguise Self at-will, or turn invisible, or fly.

4e is awful out of combat because instead of bringing martials up to the levels of casters or at least half-casters in terms of utility, it drags everyone down to the level of martials.

In 4e EVERYONE is a fighter in terms of out of combat ability, barring a few specific powers or specific builds. And ironically the only arguable exception to this is the fucking Wizard, who has a number of his old utility spells, as utility dailies.

>>55028441

And in 5e what does the fighter get to do as he levels out of combat?

>>55028359
Skill challenges were an optional system in 4e, and the base skill system in 5e is objectively worse.

>Increased number of skills, splitting some in two for no reason
>Drastically reduced the availability of additional skill proficiencies for all but a few classes or archetypes
>Bounded accuracy means that most characters will only get marginally better at the skills they're proficient in and gain no new proficiencies throughout their entire adventuring career, 1-20

>>55028454
Unless he's an Eldritch, basically nothing. Read my post, I said in 5e that casters and half-casters had good utility, I never claimed pure martials did.

>>55028441

But that's bullshit. Rituals and Martial practices cover a lot of that, which are much more evenly distributed, and while there could be more skill powers the ones that exist are awesome and are well worth taking.

Are you just building pure combat characters and complaining the system doesn't give you stuff? While I agree a dedicated non-combat power category would be good, I don't think the systems progression is awful for lacking it.

Also

>always able to wreathe a weapon in the element
>only an in combat power

lol

>>55028441
>I need the rules to hold my hand on what I can and can't do out of combat.

>>55028478

So you'd prefer 'Some people have utility, some people do not' over 'Everyone has equal access to the same skill system'?

4e's skill system is supposed to scale with you/be your main way of interacting with the world as everyone has equal access to it rather than spells replacing it.

>>55028499
>Player: "I jump into the air and fly because I'm a wizard"
>DM: "I'm sorry Bill you can't do that."

Don't pretend to be retarded on the internet, there's enough actual retards to last us a while.
>>55028485
Rituals take like 10 minutes to cast, cost money, and still don't do remotely the same as the abilities available to T3+ or half caster+ characters in other editions of D&D.

Skill powers I mentioned in a post above, they aren't that great and aren't comparable to the shit in the other editions.

>>55028013
>I don't understand not everyone likes that much mechanical abstraction.

>>55028524
Yes. I'm not a fucking communist, so I'd prefer that some people have and others don't, over no one gets to have.

I'd much prefer "Everyone has" which is why D&D isn't my main system, but if the question is weighing "Some people get to have utility" vs "Almost no one gets utility" I'd much prefer fun over balance.

>>55028550

You don't get to defend someone presenting an opinion as fact by pointing out my criticism is also an opinion. That doesn't make any sense.

>>55028569

But everyone DOES get Utility. It's the fucking core skill system and rituals.

>>55028547

And it's good they removed those powerful spells because they broke the fucking game in 3.x, and it was awful for roleplaying. So many situations that could just be instantly solved by casting a spell, instead of them being actually interesting tools to help without just being 'I win' buttons.

That rituals were weaker was part of the point and was a feature, not a bug.

>>55028547
Then make a skill check. Roll Arcana to do cool things like you're supposed to.

>>55028547
>still don't do remotely the same as the abilities available to T3+ or half caster+ characters in other editions of D&D.

How would you propose giving such abilities to martial characters then?

>>55028550
I don't know why you're playing D&D if you get bootybothered by abstract mechanics.

>>55028595
>>55028592
You might have a point, if 4e was a gritty realistic system, but its explicitly an over the top heroic fantasy game. It even gives up on 'simulationist' elements from earlier editions just to make things more heroic [looking at you Minions].

Making the combat glorious and fantastical but the noncombat arduous and near-nonexistent does not result in a coherent system.

If 4th edition was so great, how come everyone hates it and nobody plays it?

checkmate, f4ggots

>>55028632

But it's not arduous, people can do impressive things in non-combat as well as combat. You use the skill system to do so. I've been involved in sherlock holmes-style investigations and dramatic chases across moving lightning rails without moving outside the skill system.

What can't you do, using either rituals or skills?

>>55028620
I'm the one who said the only reason to d&d is convenient prebuilt IP for FR/Golarion/Planescape/Spelljammer, and if 5ewasn't "just barely good enough" I'd just convert shit to GURPS and call it a day.

>>55028632

What are you even fucking talking about?

Removing 3.x's bullshit I win spells in no way makes the out of combat systems arduous. Unless you count 'actually having to think' as too much effort to invest in non-combat.

>>55028656

I enjoy it and play it regularly. Given that you made an absolute statement, a single contrasting piece of evidence proves it untrue.

>>55028632
You keep operating under the assumption that noncombat needs a ruleset as robust as combat. It doesn't, it just needs a DM that's not a faggot to be able to go 'ok you want to do thing? Pick a skill that fits and roll it.' Which is more or less how things went back before 3.x barfed rules all over everything.

>>55028323
I'll freely admit I have no idea how good Cavalier is or isn't. It has Mount features, so I avoided it, just like I avoid all mount classes because they're all trash.

>>55028656
I enjoy it a great deal and play it every Saturday.

>>55028685
>>55028676
>>55028681
>>55028618
Unless you are going to claim that I can use the skill system to just make up new powers to give my character, on the line of

"I want to see in the dark"

Or

"I want to fly"

Or

"I want to breath underwater and swim fast"

Then you have no case for saying that 4e's Skill System is an adequate replacement for the spells and other abilities developed by characters in 3.X and 5e.

You can only claim I'm wrong for wanting to have them. You can't pretend the non-combat system is robust when the characters are almost exactly the same at the level cap as they were at level 1.

>>55028747
>are almost exactly the same at the level cap
That's factually wrong and actually more accurate for 5e than 4e.

>>55028747

All of those are pretty easily available rituals or just default abilities.

>>55028747

>almost exactly the same at the level cap as they were at level 1.

No, they are really not. They are succeeding at much, much more impressive things. That's why the numbers scale.

>>55028747

That last one is just covered by 'Roll Athletics to swim'. There is also a ritual for breathing underwater.

>>55028781
>At level 1 you can sneak, at level 30 you can sneak
>At level 1 you can talk, at level 30 you can talk
>At level 1 you can run, at level 30 you can run the same speed you ran at level 1 unless you houserule that athletics lets you ignore the actual rules for movement speed or lifting objects.
>>55028771
>>55028775
Blatant lies, with the exception that *some* of the abilities I want to be in the game are available as Rituals, which I've noted before is a shitty system for numerous reasons.

>>55028817

Also?

Just levelling up lets you see in the dark better. Since your score will outstrip the penalty.

>>55028817
>At level 1 you can sneak, at level 30 you can sneak
>At level 1 you can talk, at level 30 you can talk

Yes but what you can do with those skills changes. At level 1, you can sneak past a town guard. At level 30, you can sneak past the gods themselves.

>>55028817

http://funin.space/compendium/ritual/Eagles-Flight.html
http://funin.space/compendium/ritual/Overland-Flight.html
http://funin.space/compendium/ritual/Phantom-Steed.html

http://funin.space/compendium/ritual/Water-Breathing.html
http://funin.space/compendium/ritual/Waterborn.html
http://funin.space/compendium/ritual/Waters-Gift.html

>>55028844
>>55028841
Even if we assume, which is by no means granted, that you can use Skills at the highest modifiers to perform the blatantly impossible

Which is to say we important the Epic Level Skill Rules from 3.X, that still just turns the system into Exalted Lite.

If I wanted to play a game where the primary out-of-combat utility was mundane abilities turned up to 11, I'd just play actual Exalted.

>>55028747
>I want to see in the dark
The Light cantrip exists.
>I want to fly
Make an Arcana check. If you whiff your improvised spellcraft shorts out halfway and you take some falling damage. If you do well you can get up to that ledge without climbing.
>I want to breathe underwater and swim fast
Endurance check to hold your breath and Athletics to get through the tunnel faster. Oh, you took a feat that lets you roll Arcana instead of Endurance? Nice, go for it.

>>55028881

>If I wanted to play a game where the primary out-of-combat utility was mundane abilities turned up to 11, I'd just play actual Exalted.

Then what do you propose martials actually DO? How do you propose non-spellcasters not get outstripped by spellcasters?

>>55028689
Paladin used to have the mounts, but Mearls had them removed to force people to play the cavalier instead. They worked alright on Paladin. Honestly, the mounts are by far the least shit thing about them.