I have maintained for years that most of the "innovations" that have been made to 5e, especially by 3rd parties, since launch have their DNA in 4e. I think he most common ways people "improve" their 5e games brings them closer to 4e. If someone released a new TTRPG tomorrow that was exactly the same as 4e but with a different name and different names for the powers, but all the mechanics were the same, I think it would pass $1m on kickstarter without breaking a sweat. 4e also has IMO the best DMG of any edition, regardless of what edition you play. It actually introduces the concept of the dungeon master to someone who has never done it before and is full of practical advice you can apply no matter the system.

I faithfully adapted the 4e Player's Handbook classes, Paragon Paths, Epic Destinies, and Magic Items to 5th Edition. And I do mean "faithfully." They're as close to the originals as I could get. The Powers, the levels you get them at, the Paragon Paths, everything except the races. Epic Destinies slotted into the Guild/Piety framework pretty perfectly, so that's where they went due to 5e's level cap of 20. They're in my book on the DM's Guild. It's called Player's Guide to Powers.

I DM'd a 4th ed. campaign for over a year & played in one for just over a year. When I moved to the town I currently live in I knew no one, so I beelined to a game store to look for 'my people'. I was happy to hear the clatter of dice from the back of the store. I went to take a look & saw 4th ed. character sheets. I turned around & walked away without saying a word. I will play solo PF1 before I play 4th ed. again.

We played 4e from its release until well into the life of 5e. We finally swapped only because our only laptop that still had the old character builder finally died. I find it much easier to DM than other editions. The rules have an internal consistency once you learn the basics that's just incredibly hard to find in other editions and games. 5e in particular is a mess of ill defined interactions and edge cases. My biggest critique of 4e is that it's even more combat centric than other editions, and the exploration and social pillars are a little anemic without a good DM to compensate and massage the rules as necessary (allowing creative out of combat power usage). Skill challenges in particular were presented clumsily in the original release as well, which didn't help. Sidenote: I still weep for the loss of streetwise from the skill list in 5e

By the time of this edition I was deep into playing miniatures and trading card games. I played a lot of the WotC D&D minis game and still have a few of those minis. They were pretty cool. I didn't even realized that the combat in that game was pretty much D&D4e's combat. I might have really enjoyed 4e.

I loved 4E. Especially when they implemented a "Endless cantrip" for magic users so that at the early (and even later levels) We weren't useless when we ran out of slots.

I love 4e, it's my favorite edition actually!

love the vid buddy, thx for sharing!

I didn't hate 4th, bought a lot of books for 4th. But I made one mistake with 4th, I forgot my mistake with 2nd. I bought a lot of books from 2nd. Fool me twice eh. I never bought 3rd because of buying so much of 2nd. But I forgot my mistake with 2nd. I learned though. I have almost every single pdf in existence for 5th, so I got to see what it actually was like. Not worth the cash. But in the end, 4th was just about selling books. Just like 2nd and 3rd and 5th was. I frankly couldn't care less about shareholders and Hasbro. I went with the nostalgia bid, I bought some brand new 1st edition AD&D pod hardcovers. Actual real genuine original D&D. Not the bloated sell sell sell disaster that has been the case since. I likely will not even waste time hunting the pdfs for 2024. No one really needs it. Remember, rolegaming began as a wargame, and thus, 4th was closer to its origins than ever since. I think the hate was fabricated to make room for 5th.

This was my first introduction to D&D. My first DM was the standard that I measured all other DMs. I believe a great DM can make any edition good. He understood the rules are there as a guide. The biggest and most important rule of them all is the rule of cool. He made the game a blast. The adventures were character driven. If we did something that ruined his story he would adjust it. When the 5e dropped I jumped on it. I did become the perma-DM but I didn't mind. I didn't hate 4e but it was a different beast. I tried using campaigns from other editions and it did not work. 5e made it easier to convert campaigns. 4e is a point and click game. It locked you in a box. As a DM it makes thing easier if you know what everyone is capable of doing but, for the players it mentally blocks you from the possible things you could do.

The short answer is that no one knew how shit Wizards was going to make 5e.

I went through several cycles. Didn't like it on first release. Learned to like it doing Organized Play. Went to other games (5e) then got nostalgic for 4e. Now I've been running 4e weekly for the past 9 months for players mostly used to 5e. I'm hating it. Players are constantly forgetting bonuses, not fulfilling their class roles, making basic attacks instead of using At-Wills, etc. And the combats are long, even at low levels. (We've reached 4th level after playing weekly for 9 months.) I can add roleplaying and story, but the game already moves at a snails pace. Most combats shouldn't have the epic scope required by the system - just move past it! Powers, magic items, etc, are scattered between a half dozen books and everything needs to be on power cards to reduce the page flipping. So players are only studying their sheets for hours. We have no meaningful interactions between the characters or NPCs. It's not good for me in 2024.

It had a lot of merits, and a lot of faults. I have read that, allegedly, much of the design direction preceded World of Warcraft-however, MMORPGs preceded WoW by quite a while. WoW invented almost none of its mechanics, either-it but streamlined the subsystems from other MMORPGs to make the game more accessible to court a more casual audience. Regardless, the comparison holds more water than defenders often give it credit for. The cry often comes from what often boils down to players who sought a higher level of simulationism than the comparatively more abstract game mechanics (and presentation) divorced from diagetics not only in presentation but often in experience/engagement and narrative justification. Somewhat in 2e and _especially_ in 3e/3.5e, D&D drastically reduced the nondiegetic restrictions on what PCs could do (or attempt) and the narrowness of party roles as defined by especially the singular choice of class through feats, prestige classes, spells, etc. There was a much wider breadth of role specialization and granular customization to the point that rigidly codified roles were not hard-baked into the system, regardless that optimized play (and a sizeable chunk of casual play) veered in that direction. Players going in that direction was a commonly-selected _option,_ though, rather than a restriction or obligation. That is drastically different from: powers with diagetically arbitrary cooldowns (a standard feature largely associated with mmorpgs at the time, due to the weaker internet making online multiplayer games action games more or less untenable at the time); rigid and narrow explicitly-defined roles attached to classes that did not support or outright conflicted with/opposed the player's fantasy (eg a DPS nonmagical frontline straight warrior, ie, Fighter, rather than being forced into the role of a tank or commander); the horrible implementation of skill challenges (largely reducing the lateral thinking that defined the _entire appeal of ttrpgs as compared to linear video games_ to a large portion of players) in allowing basically only two arbitarily pre-selected skills to be relevant and a flat progression system (three successes); hard-baking in a frequency of magical items that massively undercut the fantasy and worldbuilding of most settings in the overall franchise to-date along the reward schedule comparable to the incremental bonuses standard to video game linear progression systems; non-diagetic presentation and mechanics and powers sometimes being directly _anti-diagetic_ to player fantasies; and a lot of smaller things. 4e was designed, from the ground up, to play via a never-completed VTTRPG platform that tracked and automated powers, cooldowns, HP, status effects, bonuses/penalties, spaces, and a lot more. It is not really a metaphor; 4e was intended to be half-ttrpg, half-video game, and the system suffered for the abject failure to deliver on the video game portion along with fundamentally misunderstanding multiple core pillars of the appeal of ttrpgs in an open-ended, dynamic and responsive world which is inherently harder to achieve with such rigid role restrictions and the inflexible limitations of computer systems compared to what a human DM can do. While the comparisons to video games were and are often overstated and unjustly derisive, much of the comparison is fundamentally valid. It is not a fundamentally bad system, but an _extremely_ specialized one, and not necessarily well-executed on its own premises in some areas. It is on the crunchier end _with_ modern ttrpg tools and it requires an immense amount of player buy-in to extremely narrow definitions of character motivation, class, power, progression, and adventure concepts. Given that ttrpgs are a niche activity to begin with (somewhere around 40 million players globally, and that is likely a significant overestimate, with likely loosely around half that active players, distributed across all ttrpg systems), that sort of hyper-specialized, high-investment play was realistically never going to achieve anywhere near the sort of broad appeal and commercial success it needed for the level of investment WotC and Hasbro put into it, or really do very well with ttrpg players at all. Notice that most of its success in more recent homebrew, alternative systems, and 5e, are loosely copying _elements_ onto the core of a different system rather than adopting it wholesale or taking elements from other systems onto the core 4e system. 4e is not for most people. It is okay that it works for those that it does, and it is okay that it does not work for the most players that it does not.

If 4e was not a D&D version it would have been better received. It is a great system and the game plays very well. As for being a D&D product, the artwork supasses just about any version and something a bit lacking in 5e. The monster stat blocks are so well laid out together with the encounter building design and the 4e Dungeon Master Guide 2 has to be one of the best DM companion books out there. Would love to see a show about 4th if you do one. Great show.

I’ve always said, if 4th would have come out with any other name than DnD it would’ve been a loved. The DnD community wasn’t ready for it.

4E is my favorite followed by B/X. B/X is like the easy most fundamental D&D you need to know. All the other editions just feel like a bunch of convoluted jank and needless rules piled on top of B/X, like someone's fanfiction. Where 4E feels like the first and only time they actually changed the chassis and not just the paint. I think 4E is the definitive WotC product and literally the only reason to go with a WotC product. If you wanna play the authentic B/X D&D then definitely just go with Necrotic Gnome... otherwise play any indie game over D&D :') Shadowdark, ICRPG, Dragonbane, EZD6, Dungeon Crawl Classics... they're just vastly superior to WotC imo.

I did! I fucking LOATHED 4th edition. It felt like a computer game in card format, popping a power on cool down. There was no soul, just roll. Like playing an MMO and calling it an RPG. Like Diablo 3, bunch of fucking numbers with nothing to bind it together. It was the basis of a computer game, not one to have characters. The classes, despite the "options," didn't feel like classes. Your warrior didn't cleave with a greatsword, he used the X ability to Y. Be sure to add the numbers as they go! None of the characters felt like they offered variance or choice or flavor. Oh, I get that it walked so 5th could run, that 4th Ed in fact innovated some great ideas that were refined later on, but I did not enjoy playing it at all.

Went all-in on D&D 4e. Thought everyone online was being knee-jerky with their negativity on it at the start. A few years into playing it our group realized it just wasn't fun to play. The new players in my group who hadn't played 2e or 3e would just tap their power cards and roll dice in silence waiting for combat to be over. Their eyes lit up for the first time when we switched to PF1 and they felt like they could tell the stories they wanted to tell. There's so much rose-tinted reminiscing on 4e these days it feels like a massive overcorrection. For a lot of people who gave it an honest try, it just wasn't fun.

i dont play with minis...

the hate for 4E at the time was as real and viral as it was nonsensical. i think a significant culprit had nothing at all to do with D&D - World of Warcraft had just come out and TTRPG purists saw it as something that was invading 'their' space and stealing away their players. 4E had mechanics that, for those purists, was too 'videogamey' and represented part of that perceived invasion. the fact that 4E was so clear and concise in its rules was, for them, a drawback - a sign the hobby was changing 4E is and always probably will be the finest editions of D&D ever made. great and clear rules, excellent clarity for newcomers to the game about most if not all concepts and stuff for every single class to do it all came crashing down because WotC put a psycho in charge of the digital development of the game, which is what they bet everything on business-wise, and then that psycho went and murdered the ex-wife he'd be stalking and killed himself so all support for 4E basically just froze right then and there, and the product instantly died in terms of support

4th edition made me hate combat. Every other session was combat, it seemed. It was long and un-enjoyable. It was the dark age of D&D.