Mike Mearls twitter thread twitter.com/mikemearls/status/1039023845145894913

I've only played 5e but I have a whole load of 4e books that I inherited. The 4e books are far more interesting to me; it provides a _lot_ of flavour and has suggested strategies for enemies, and is just better at helping you with worldbuilding and scene setting. 5e is extremely pared down by comparison.

That was THE slickest plug for something that I didn't know I really wanted.

Have always had a good laugh at people saying the 4e rules (or any ruleset) has some determination on how you can role play.

About FR i remember that in interviews back in the day developers mentioned how they didn't see a central theme in Forgotten Realms. They had a lot of pressure from players to release an update of the setting but the whole setting didn't fit with their design philosophy for settings resulting on what was almost a reboot of the whole thing. In my opinion the big problem was an inability to understand the draw of sandbox settings and a focus on settings with a central theme and a concept that separated them further from classical fantasy. Dark Sun, Eberron and the Nantir Vale (the sorta official setting for 4e) all fit into this design philosophy while FR did not. To make matters worse the decision to soft reboot setting was very badly received by the original creator Ed Greenwood and by arguably the best selling author of D&D novels R. A. Salvatore. Salvatore would stop working for Wizards entirely during that time and was understandably enraged at the company for killing 90% of the cast of characters from his books and completely changing the setting. In the end the new version of FR was badly received by fans of the setting and was only moderately successful with the minority of players that subscribed to Wizards design philosophy. Needless to say, when both 4e and it's FR reboot undersold heavily and they changed their design philosophy for 5e the first thing they did was calling Greenwood and Salvatore back to lead the return of the setting to the older sandbox philosophy.

Definitely understand the concept of having spent a lot of money on 3.5 and feeling gut-punched when 4 came out. I had something like 30 books. Mostly 3.5 DnD, but a handful of compatible peripherals like Dragonmech.

I started playing with 4e, and I had a good time with it... for a while. After a few adventures (all of which I DM'd) I stopped playing. A few years later, I joined a new group that played 5e, and I was a player for the first time. In my experience, It doesn't really matter what game you are playing as long as you have the right group. I do want to revisit 4e with a better group, and more experienced players. My biggest problem with 4e was my group. No matter what game you are playing it's no fun if half of your group doen't want to be there and you end up in an unhealthy relationship with one of your players.

As a person who's played since 2e, I think the big reason for hate on 4e was how different the shift was between the editions compared to the 2e to 3e shift. The 2e to 3e shift was so much more about bringing the 2e players along for the ride. For those of you who weren't around, the original printing of the 3e core books were super super cheap so as to soften the blow of the new system. There also was a really cheap pamphlet for sale that was designed to help you convert over 2e characters to 3e rules. It also helped that they were strongly committed to respecting all that had come before lore wise. Yeah new things were introduced to the core of the game such as Sorcerers and Half-Orcs becoming a core book race. But those things were treated as they had always been there and folded naturally into the Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms the two most popular settings. While 3e did cut down significantly on the campaign settings that Wizards directly supported(2e was the hey day of campaign settings for D&D) the Open Gaming License caused a whole slew of 3rd party Settings to appear( some excellent examples of 3rd party 3e settings include Midnight by Fantasy Flight, Kalamar by Sword and Sorcery, and Ptolus by Malhavoc Press.) and even allowed the Ravenloft Campaign setting, which wasn't being directly supported by Wizards at the time, to continue on under management by White Wolf's, Sword and Sorcery, imprint. The Rule set also didn't change so drastically, yes there were things like Thac0 disappearing and AC becoming a positive not a negative number. But a lot of those changes were kind of things that people had started doing at their tabletops already. Also the 2e to 3e shift had come after a very very long 2e life cycle. A change was feeling needed if not inevitable. 4e on the other hand was significantly different when it came to the shift between editions. Lets start with time in between editions. If you count 3e and 3.5 as one edition then it lasted eight years to 2e's eleven years. 3.5 was a slight but a very significant change in 3rd editions ruleset. There was a similar revision in 2nd edition in reprinting the 2e rules. BUT the 2e revision was way way smaller and almost imperceptible to only the most versed in 2e rules. However 3.5 was different enough that a lot of people saw it as a different game than 3.0 so if you see that as it's own separate edition then that's a five year time between editions. Either way both gaps were smaller than the 2e to 3e edition changes. This seemed way to fast to 3rd edition fans, and then the other things started piling up. 4e's rule changes were such an overhaul that beyond ability scores the game itself wasn't even recognizable as the same ruleset unlike the shift between 2e to 3e. There was no attempt to bring the 3rd edition players along for the ride either. There was no conversion pamphlet for 3e characters to become 4e characters. It didn't help that the devs at the time seemed to be taking great pleasure in how different 4e was going to be. The old lore was tossed aside in favor of "streamlining the system." Stuff like the cosmology being thrown into a blender(example the Inner Planes being simply thrown together into a singular Elemental Chaos.) Old monsters and lore being tossed aside as "clunky or pointless" Instead of having a campaign setting baked into the core rules they attempted a more open campaign idea for the core rules called "Points of Light" taking the lore of older editions and mashing them together into a Frankenstein's monster of what they thought were the best ideas from older editions and basically telling DM's to build their campaigns around smaller individual places and build the world outwards on their own. (I don't hate the Points of Light idea in the abstract cause it's basically a build your own homebrew world built into the system. But I understand why some people hated it.) And then the MMO inspired rules... I understand why it was done but it was such a departure from what came before it's not really a shock that so many people balked at them. Balance was the name of the game... and I get what they were trying to do, but It also felt super boring as hell as no matter what your class was characters generally felt super samey compared directly to each other. It didn't help that the OGL still existed and that Paizo who printed the Dungeons and Dragon magazines decided to try their hand at doing what Wizards had opted not to do and create basically d&d 3.75 which you may know as Pathfinder which is an excellent system by the way. It was immensely popular among 3rd edition fans and probably contributed to 4th edtions short lifespan. I will say personally I didn't hate everything about 4e character creation was super super easy and fast. I loved the introduction of Warlords, Warlocks, Teiflings, and Dragonborn. But those small things aside the game itself was so different that me and most of my groups eventually moved over to Pathfinder after giving it the good old college try.

My only great disappointment in 4th ed was the overhaul of all the lore and stories of the famous settings. While some where (thankfully) left untouched, this felt forced, brutish and disrespectful in many ways. I do honestly believe some settings belong in different eras, different editions, but that is my point of view. But it is true they learned well from it and I haven't ever been happier than with 5e.

I like 5th Edition enough to where I can't actually see any meaningful updates that warrant an entirely new edition. Spellcasters have their at-wills as cantrips (my primary gripe with 3.5 and why I love 4), non-casters are still very relevant at higher levels, prestige classes/paragon paths are now core parts of their respective classes (no needing to bend over backwards for at least five levels to do what you want), races are more relevant than before. The only thing I have against 5e is the clunky CR system and the fact that I find most monsters in the monster manual to be boring.

There was also a bit of backlash from moving away from the open gaming license to a game system license that while on the surface was just a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo actually alienated a lot of fans and developers. This in turn set them up with a great deal of negative press from the word go. 4e didn't fail because it was a bad game but more due to the fact that some higher ups misjudged the community and our loyalty to certain elements within the society. There were more than a few that even saw it as nothing more than a cash grab and a power play.

I think people should stop being mean to each other over editions. Just go play D&D and have fun, don't wage the pointless "Edition Wars".

It's funny how the history of Faerun now reflects the editions of DnD lol

I'm still playing 3.5

I have played through every single change that D&D has had. (Yes, I'm that old.) I started Arneson and Gygax's first rule set and went to the boxes, AD&D, and so on. The 4e rules were the least D&D rpg like rules yet. They were a great game, but the weren't D&D as it was back when. That is what I feel so many didn't like. I played 4e and 3.5 at the same time with two different groups. The 3.5 group were more 'traditional' roll-players, where the 4e group were 'gamers.' I think many of the points made in this video were spot on. It's not that 4e was bad: it's just not what a lot the D&D players liked or wanted in the game.

Not bad but I think. I Think Cloville got it more on point. The 4th edition was not to pull WoW players in but to work with a virtual table. They even had announced plans that they would be trying just that. The change in language was an issue as well. But You CAN role play quite nicely with the system and that was not stopped but the battles took longer. This limited play time. A battle in 4th could take 2-3 times that of other editions because of the way it worked. Things that did not hurt were 1) number of books you could buy (open license and the game masters guild say not an issue) 2) balancing the fighter and others (GG was trying to fix this even back in AD&D with things like the Strength percentile rules ) That is my POV and loved your take on it even if I disagree with it.

My first dabble in dnd was 4e, but i could not get a grasp on it. 5e is considered very simple, but what i love is its easy for new players to jump in. 4e lost me, 5e brought me back.

I think you've nailed it pretty darn well right here, this is an excellent video. They made 4e into a tabletop tactics style of thing, removing it as far as it's ever been from it's traditional "theatre of the mind" format (nice phrasing too!). That alone alienated many people, and as you say, all the world changes and upheaval in the FR books continuity took care of the rest.

Love 4e. 4e didn't stop roleplaying. The weekly encounters adventures did. The weekly encounters made the game feel like a board game session. We played as a group of friends and loved it. Still do. Not a fan of 5e at all.

The reason they jumped to 4th edition so quickly is because for some reason they made the 3E OGL so open that anyone could make their own game based on D20, which allowed their biggest competitor Pathfinder to make a better game based off Wizards system.

8:08 yep that's me, 4e was my first love, coming from video games into 4e was a fun transition. these days I play the Pathfinder series but i'll always remember the fun I had playing 4e with my friends.

If you ignore Forgotten Realms 4e lore is really interesting. And oh how I wish 5e would ignore Forgotten Realms a little more.

I started on, and still play 4e. I'm a DM and very lax on the rules. I think the rigidness of the rules is what confused a lot of players. A Fighter in my during our first game was surrounded, he had a large sword and wanted to try and spin around to cut as many people down at once as possible. As a new DM and not familiar with the rules i said "You can't do that, you don't have that ability.." The warrior does have access to "Cleave" a similar technique, but the player never picked it. So he ended up choosing a different thing and we went on. Now as an experienced DM more familiar with 4e's ruleset and balances, reading through the pathfinder and 5e rulebooks (and some of my father in law's AD&D books) I'd probably say "Sure, make an attack roll on the first, and if you do well we'll see if it goes through into the second. making him take a strength check or something, but punishing him for a failure, maybe he slips and falls prone. A Lot of what people didn't like about 4e was rules lawyers, its a framework like everything else, the DM's job was to build on it.

4th edition was not at all a bad game. It did add a lot of new interesting things to D&D, but it was less like D&D and more like tabletop XCOM. :D

The biggest problem with 4E for my groups was that combats took forever. It went from the lethality of 3E where a single saving throw missed could spell death and went to an extremely boring slog as you whittled away at oversized monster HP pools while having tons of combat healing options yourself. Results were very boring and predictable and even simple combats lasted an hour or so. The end result is that other than climactic battles, there was hardly any tension. If the monsters were outmatched (and being an RPG, most of the times the PCs held a significant edge), there was really no chance of them winning. Even if they scored several critical in a row, the extra damage wasn't all that much, and a few heal powers would negate any actions the monsters took. Unlike prior games where you'd have an orc with a greataxe scoring an x3 critical that would instantly turn the tides of battle, or ghoul paralysis and a few bad saves leading the group to sweat as members are knocked down, in 4E I found myself almost always confident of victory because combats were so long that luck was largely factored out of it.

There are also a lot of people who absolutely loved 4th Edition. Most of them had been driven from D&D by the power gaming aspects of 3 and 3.5. You have to look past the 3rd Edition to the larger RPG community in general to get an accurate perception on how forth was received.

I remember reading a little preview pamphlet at my local game store right before 4th came out. It talked about how DnD was changing and went into what the devs were thinking. They talked a lot of being influenced by modern MMOs (modern at the time) and wanted to attract young players that only knew RPGs through PC games. They felt it was time for DnD to evolve with the times. BTW, if you drop all the role-playing, 4E makes a really good fantasy skirmish miniature wargame.

Thank you for this informative video. I am running a 5e game set in the Forgotten Realms. Researching different material from different editions can be confusing. One of my biggest challenges is the map changes from on edition to another. Could you do a video on how the Faerun maps change, in detail, between each edition?

I thought you were going to talk about how 3e became Pathfinder and 4e became 13th Age. And 2e became Hackmaster (KOTDT). Nothing ever dies as long as someone loves it. True, they reworked each of them to give them a new paint job, but mechanically they are still D&D. I also played 4e, but it wasn't as fun as 3rd edition so I'm glad they made the switch to 5e.

Great video. I bought one 4e book and our group played one evening of it. Since then we have moved back to 3.5, and mostly Pathfinder. You should do a video comparing Pathfinder to 5e.

I started with 5e then went back to 3.5 because in the opinion of more experienced in the group, 3.5 had a good balance between gameplay and roleplay.

man that was one hell of a transition to an ad at the end, color me impressed

I've always just taken aspects of each edition and shoehorned them in to a hybrid anyway. No edition is perfect but the components for a perfect system do exist, only spread out throughout the line.

*Shortest editon with Ad&d numbering. B/X D&D was only out for 2 years. (Still the best) Still loved the vid keep if up.

Love the Dresden reference. Love the videos my dude, you never disappoint.

0:45 1D&D was just announced and this section feels like dejavu. We're right back in this state with 5e into 1D&D

Wow, I stopped playing when it was still second edition. Wish I still had people that played it. 44 now, I miss playing but I enjoy your videos. They bring back plenty memories.

I am one of those weird few that actually loved 4e. As a defender, meaning a fighter class, I loved the fact that I wasn't constantly performing the exact same thing each turn. With previous editions, as a fighter, all I did during my turn was "full attack". Boring. With 4e, I had so many more options. 4e was more dynamic from my perspective.

Just threw the last little bit of money I had before college to help the kickstarter, great videos watch them all the time

4e was made with the assumption that you need codified rules for resolving the tactical side of D&D, but you don't so much need them for the role play side of D&D. So when people look at rule books heavy on tactical rules and light on role play guidelines, they think it's a heavily tactical game. But, just like all other editions of D&D, it's only as tactical as the players make it. The rule set of 4e means that the burden of tactical play can be distributed across all players at the table, not just playing "DM, may I?" but empowering clear, game-codified answers to that question. And with creating and running combats made simple, the DM can spend less of her energy on futzing with combat and more on beefing up the role play.

I'll be honest, if while playing 4e you have less story for the sake of the combat, then the DM just sucks. 4e leaves story up to the people, instead of holding your hand. Cause that's not the hard part to balance. The hard part of a game is combat. Make combat fair, and the rest will fall into place

I've been playing D&D since AD&D and I liked 4e for what it was. It was a good game, more balanced than previous editions. I don't buy the complaints on it losing on the "role-playing" aspects of the game; that's mainly on the players and the DM, not the ruleset. But I understand why people didn't like it's more "gamey" approach. In the end, I was the sole pro-4e voice in my group and the shift towards Pathfinder was inevitable.

What was that art piece with all the Realms characters? I recognised Elsimer, thst Tiefling Warlock lady, Drizzt, but the others I’d like to learn about. I’d love for a bullet points ‘movers and shakers of the Forgotten Realms’ summery as a jumping off point, the wiki is too easy to fall in to

4E got me into the game and I will always hold a warm spot in my heart for it. We played for a few years before switching to 3.5 and played that a lot as well. I am now throughly burnt out on 3.5 and don’t really feel like playing it again. But I do long to go back to 4E with the balance and the tactical combat. I enjoyed the art more then 3.5 and it felt like it had a unified theme throughout the game.

C'mon, i started with 4E, it was nice.

I'm actually one of the people who got their start in 4th edition, and in some ways I actually still prefer it over 5th edition, mostly down to a few specific combat rules I really think should have carried over, and especially how much I HATE the levels of cross reference you need in 5th edition. In 4th, I can fully run a game just with a monster manual behind the screen with me, all their stats and abilities are right there. 5th? Nope, I have to have a player's handbook at all times to see what the spells actually are, cause the MM only says what spell they have, not even a simplified version of what it actually does. There are just too many things I have to dig up from too many different books, as well as the game being too easy to break outright with one magical item that did more than I expected.

Jorphdan, great video! Enjoy your Sunday! 💯🙏🙌

Do you know any lore on Azlin, stahds apprentice?

D&D 4th was amazing. The largest thing holding it back was it being called D&D. I felt way more awesome as a character in at level 5 in 4E than I do in 5th or did in 3rd.

What saddens me, is that this whole video is 100% Forgotten Realms specific. Forgotten Realms, thanks to writers like RA Salvatore, has become an overdone world, where the lore is so well known that it actually has started more than one mid-session fight at our gaming table between players. As such, it has been banned from my table in favor of a completely uniquely created campaign setting, outside the TSR created or even WoTC created and published worlds. It is really disheartening that so many players these days do not realize that Forgotten Realms was only one of a plethora of campaign settings, and due to intentional removal of emphasis of the other worlds by WoTC, they have made the LEAST interesting world the standard. Before WoTC there were worlds of such vibrancy that the PHB today still has reference to them, for instance, look throughout the spells, find anything with a person's name in the title, and you can guess that arch-mage was either from Dragonlance or Greyhawk. Barovia, home of Castle Ravenloft, of which the campaign setting took its name, resided in THE DEMIPLANE OF DREAD, and had nothing to do with Forgotten Realms. Anyone that would have gone there would not have been able to return, if entered from Faerun, as it existed as a plane of imprisonment, meant to contain and isolate specific elements deemed destabilizing to the rest of the multiverse. The "One Setting" method of marketing is probably really simple for WoTC, but we are not talking about products that even need marketing. Just stop making lore changes to 40+ year old content, and publish rule books that have been adapted to the existing lore. Otherwise you drive away your older, wealthier, and more apt to spend money player base.

Actually, 3rd edition also had a Players Handbook 2, as well as Monster Manuals II through VI (Trust me I bought SO MANY 3E and 3.5 books as a teenager)

My brothers and I love your channel. Always so helpful

I am that person who 4th Edition was their gateway into D&D, and you know how my buddy sold it to me? "Dude, they made it easier, it's like WoW, only in person with your friends and you can do ANYTHING...within reason." I loved 4E, the combat was amazing, monsters were balanced but difficult if deployed well, and characters were balanced. I STILL tell stories to my players about the Pacifist Cleric I made. I also love 5E, and DM two weekly games. But yeah, 4E was my D&D gateway drug. ;) No regrets.

I was one of the people who made their start in 4E. My friends played for about a year and a half, then i asked if we could try 5E or switched because it looked so much more fun. While i did enjoy combat and the tactical parts of 4E, the roleplaying lacked. Eventually we switched our game to 5E and were still going strong (3.5 years)! I'm glad to have experienced it but i enjoy being able to 'just do more'. Now what i REALLY want is a Planescape setting, i LOVE that lore and actually started DMing my own campaign using 2E/Planescape Lore but 5E mechanics. I hope WotC releases more content for that setting! Thanks Jorphdan, always great and always boosts my Wednesdays!

So I have been introduced to dnd by 4e when i was a kid. I played it for years, we did 90% of the time theaters of the mind, because for example squares are simpler using than fricking feet as a measure of distance for anyone who isn’t in the US. And overall made it simpler to visualize. “Dm how far is the door ?, 3 squares ok cool”

It wasn't that players hated change. It was that 4e specifically changed what D&D was. The classes weren't what they'd always been. Suddenly they were MMO archetypes, and very obviously so. WotC could avoid talking about it but that didn't make it any less obvious. The fact that WotC also completely ignored all the howls of outrage during the open playtest from the people saying this wasn't D&D. which far outnumbered any other comment made about the playtest and eventually the WotC mods simply started deleting them so as to be able to pretend they weren't being made at all, proved that the decision was made at the very beginning of the design process. Further when 5e was announced the brand manager gave an interview, or made a blog post, which included a mea culpa about his part in 4e which basically admitted 4e was a mistake without saying what specifically WotC got wrong.

6e wow, let not get ahead of ourselves, after all, their still making a lot of 5e content. Plus I'm just not ready for them to screw it up again.

I got away from RPGs when they started doing the "Now buy the revised version and now buy the new system and now buy the..." BAH That and work

3.5 had multiple PHBs, DMGs, and MMs The entrance of the video gaming aspects was an early attempt at virtual tabletops, the VT was supposed to be available at launch it wasn't Yes 4th edition was heavily miniature dependent and its not the only RPG that is but I had always played with minis, personally I really liked this aspect Yeah they did some weird things with the lore, I liked the spell plague I agree as a player of 2nd, 3.5, 4th, and 5th I can say most of the hate I saw and still see revolves around peoples dislike of change and the most common complaint against 4th that WoC took out the roleplaying aspect of the game, which I never understand since the RP portion comes from the players and the DM, DnD is just a rules system. To your last point yes 4th was many peoples intro to DnD, I introduced many many people to RPGs through 4th and to this day 4th is still my favorite edition. I understand that not everyone has to like it but so many never gave 4th a chance and still have a burning hatred for an edition they never played (edits) Out of all the editions I've played 5th is my disliked it just feels bland and like an attempt to appease a very vocal group and in attempting to appease that group, most of which stayed with Pathfinder from my experience, they lost the bulk of the good from 4th. I remember the play tests for 5th, they were short and not listened too, WoC rushed 5th out of the door and it suffered for it. I truly prefer having to deal with THACO than playing 5th.

I started with 4e, but had the good luck of a having a veteran master that played the game bassically from 1e. While at some points it was clear that he didn't really liked the new system as much as 3.5 (for one he loathed the new multiclass rules), he made a good effort to make a story-driven campaign. And we love it, after 5 years we are still running the campaign. Now Im also a master, and I have a campaign in 5e. As someone who loves both systems and has 0 experience in

3.5 was just as focused on miniatures as 4th if you look at the books. The difference was that in 3.5 movement didn't matter. Once you got into melee (after level 6) all you did was full attack until either you, or your opponent died. I love 4th. I think It's the best edition of D&D because it isn't like D&D. If you really step back and look at D&D through the ages you'll see that its... just not that fun honestly. It's always had a strong focus on combat since its inception was a tactical miniatures game, and it sacrifices so much in the name of "realism" that the fun is often lost in the minutia of these games. 4e was different. It slaughetered the sacred cows of D&D, and for that it was named heretical by the purists. But looking back at it it still has rock solid design and in my estimation the best monster design bar none in a TTRPG. I do think a lot, and I mean a lot of people who say they hate 4e have never played it. Back when 4e was still being supported I would hear all the time "Oh man I hate 4e, it's not even D&D," and I'd always repsond "well have you played it?" 9 times out of 10, no was the answer. And don't get me wrong there are plenty of things wrong with 4e, it is not a perfect system. The skills are boring and uninspired, feats are a fucking quagmire of bloated shit 90% of which are totally useless or borderline useless, some classes can feel samey (looking at you PHB2), you heal back up to full after just 8 hours, monsters at higher levels just had too many HP and fights dragged on. But I think there are some many things 4e did right that WotC just dropped when they made 5e because they were afraid people were going to have the same reaction. The second sundering of faerun is a metaphor for the WotC D&D cycle in a lot of ways. By essentially retconning it they said 4e was a mistake in not so many words, but I think 4e was great! And WotC was too busy trying to improve their PR to take the lessons they should have learned from 4e. Like having varied monsters with interesting abilities, having high starting HP but low HP scaling, making sure everyone always has something interesting to do on their turns, balancing the game so it doesn't turn into wizards and sorcerers once the party hits level 5. 4e might have been gamey, but after all this is a game. The biggest complaint I always heard was that 4e didn't support rules for roleplaying, and that's true, it didn't. But that was a design choice made on purpose, in some article in one of the dragons magazines (I think? I don't remember) one of the lead designer's had mentioned that he didn't think rules for talking were important because you talk in your everyday life. You know how to make an argument, throw in some intimidating glares, and lie. What you don't know how to do is use magic to fight a dragon, or at least that's the assumption. The rules existed to give life to that part of the game because roleplaying can be arbited without dice rolls. I have had so much fun with 4e, and I still continue to run it with some heavy homeruling modifications. Honestly I can say it is my favorite game to run. And I think it was a game ahead of its time. Go back and try it if you haven't, try it again if you have, there are lessons to be learned even if you don't like 4e. It isn't a perfect game by any means, but it actually does what too many games are unwilling to do and sacrifice some of the tried and true TTRPG traditions for the sake of attempting to make the game more fun for everyone around the table at all levels of play. Also it supported Darksun in official books, and Darksun is my jam.

I started with 4e, then played 5e, 3.5, and Pathfinder. Of those I feel 4e is the most balanced and has really interesting combat. I don't get why people are saying 4e doesn't promote role playing. The only edition that has any game mechanic to promote role playing is 5e with inspiration, which is probably the least used mechanic in the game. Other than that no edition of D&D has a mechanic that says, "If you role play you get this mechanical benefit." My point being D&D has never mechanically supported role playing, so why bash 4e for it? The mechanics of D&D have always been about killing monsters and getting loot. 4e provided a balanced class system, hands down the best monster manual (with the most interesting enemies as well as creative suggested encounters), and cool magic items. Concerns that WoTC was trying too hard to sell books and profit are fair, but I think 4e was great. 5e is my favorite, but I think there was a lot done right in 4e, some of which I wish would return.

3:16 I don't understand the sheet being shown - it says it's barbarian but all the names are star wars - is this a parady? I don't get it!

4e blows chunks. for example. where is the table to find the cost to have an npc cast a spell for you? or how about the table for the cost of magic items? in the end, I dropped D&D and went to pathfinder.

Tactical tokens? I've been working on making my own and someone's just going to sell them and save me time and headache? Wish I knew this a few weeks ago!

What's quite strange is that 4th edition went hard core combat, then 5th edition went full on story telling- roleplaying, and that is was 5th edition was way more popular. The Powers system was not actually that bad, but a lot of the people who enjoy the tactical stuff are playing video games of miniature games like 40k. Also for better or for worse there is so a lot of legacy in DnD; people liked having Wizards have to memorise spells etc. 4th edition just flushed a lot of that down the toilet rather than embrace gradual change.

What happened with 4E is that all the min-maxers of the world pitched a fit that someone dared to ruin their video game, I mean, role-playing game: 3.5.

Fantastic points all of them. New to the channel, subbed and liked!

The main problems I had with 4th edition was that every previous edition allowed me to transition my campaign and characters. That did not happen from, 3.5 to 4th. The game wasn't D&D anymore. It wasn't a bad game perse, it just wasn't D&D.

I personally ran 4e for about a year and a half before I gave it up due to combats taking FOREVER. The problem was inherent in the math. Monsters just had WAY too many hit points and as you leveled there were way too many "I interrupt his action to do this" followed quickly by "And I'll give you a reactive action to do something else" followed by the DM saying "As a reaction to your interrupt and reaction..." you see where this is going.

I first started playing DnD as a DM for 4th edition. I remember how fun I found it and how exciting it was but then again Hindsight is 2020 and looking back it was rough especially since I was new and so were my players.

Going to be honest, I preferred 4th to 3/3.5/5. Doubled damage dealt and cut hp in half when using monster manual, and homebrewed, and called it a day. Jesus the game was clean, balanced, and made me want to work with others. DnD and PF are still Plus, these new terms and conventions were so transparent for players to understand function and play. I also ADORED the powers frequency with encounters, etc. Anyone who says they didn't "emphasize story" is full of shit. PF is the clearest example of not being about RP. RP is what you make of it. I also never cared for DnD's lore, as I homebrewed most of my stuff. Now I'll say that I actually like story systems. I play Dread, PbtA, WoD, and oodles of indies. We all have different tastes, and maybe it's because in the end I just don't like DnD (especially 3/3.5/PF) as an rpg system.

4E was the first and only time combat in D&D was actually interesting from a tactical standpoint. It was also the only edition ever published in which the non-spellcasters were more than just water carriers for the spellcasters. It also had the most interesting cosmology of any edition of the game, making extraplanar travel both more accessible than ever before (the Feywild and the Shadowfell) and more dangerous (the Elemental chaos). And classes like the warlord couldn't even exist in any other edition. And warlords were f'ing awesome. The criticism that there is "no roleplaying" in 4E has always baffled me. My 4E campaign was far and away the most RP heavy fantasy game I've ever played in. And no other edition of D&D would have allowed those characters to shine the way they did in that story.

I think something more akin to D&D 5.5 would be the next iteration. They could easily fix the problems with 5th edition and tweak the action economy. Mike Mearls has stated multiple times that he does not like bonus actions and would tweak the system so as to remove them. Edit: To further clarify, you would be removing the bonus action and moving the things that used them to become a part of an action. It is not the things that use bonus actions that seems unnecessary but rather the bonus action itself. This would not screw over any classes because they're not losing anything. It's just getting condensed instead of having a bonus action that some classes may or may not use.

Dnd 4th ed was my first introduction to any RPG. Although I look back at the system realising it wasn't that great, it got me into a hobby I love. I now DM more games than I play but 4th ed will always hold a special place for me, especially my dumb Dragonborn fighter.

I can tell you some forum posters also criticized 3e (when it was new) as "too video gamey". Maybe it was because in 3e you could roll dice or take feats to do things that older players were instead used to roleplaying, or that there were combat ability trees, or even the paradigm that the DM must follow certain mathematical formulae when creating new content to ensure “game balance” (see 3:45). Anyway, I can agree with some of these critiques while also resenting "video game" being be used as an insult; I got into D&D because of Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda.

Wow I’ve never been so early

4e is the only set I have and don't see anything horrible in it. It's got interesting combat mechanics that can basically turn every fight into an Avengers' brawl. So perhaps the combat was focused on too much. A good DM can work around this stuff. 4e is fine. Just use your imagination more.

There is a theory that the obelisks that keep showing up randomly will lead to players being sent back in time a thousand years or more. Either starting in that time or rewriting history altogether, which is theorized to lead to 6th edition being rewritten history of some sort, with time shenanigans.

A lot of comments on here already, but I don't care. I'll tell my story anyway. Read it or skip it. I played Basic D&D back in the 80s when I was in high school. I played with a pair of brothers, so it was 1 DM and 2 players. We started with 2 characters each and eventually added a couple more. We didn't use minis or a battle map. We used graph paper to map what we encountered as we went along. "Theatre of the mind" (as you called it) was how we handled combat. The focus was on storytelling, exploration, discovery, and interaction. We had combat of course, with some campaigns being heavier than others, but we didn't count every 5-foot square on the graph paper. We had a blast until it was time to graduate high school and go our separate ways. Fast forward 20 years and I'm itching to play again. It didn't take long to find a group to play with, thanks to something we didn't have in the 80s...."teh interwebz." I was warned ahead of time that the Basic of my teenage years bore little resemblance to this new 4th Edition I would be joining. The description I was given was "It's like comparing a duck with a dinosaur." They were right. Everything was very specific, very cut and dry, and very carefully measured out. The biggest difference I saw was the combat. It was much more cinematic, and the more powerful we became, the longer combats lasted. I mean like, really longer. I genuinely enjoyed the combats, I loved the strategy involved and the way I could build my different characters. Using my Dragonborn Warlord with his reach weapon to pluck a melee enemy off one of my ranged squishy allies and forcefully move him away, without having to disengage from the foe who was right next to me, made me feel tactically brilliant for choosing a "Power" that could do that! But at the same time, it just didn't feel like D&D to me. All those ridiculously high Defenses as you got to higher levels (AC of 35?), with the equally ridiculous high bonuses to hit (+20 to attack?). I thoroughly enjoyed 4E, but with the combats gradually taking over the bulk of the gaming....if they were going to keep the D&D name, I think it should've been a stand-alone game separate from "regular" D&D, and call it "D&D: Tactics." I thought sure it was going to be turned into an online video game. And now I'm into 5E. Everything feels much more like traditional D&D, only streamlined & simplified. I like that. My only complaint is that while combat is fun, I'd like a little more of the tactics from 4E....not an overwhelming amount, just some.

This is how I consider each version. B.C.I.M=beta (I forgot the c and I positions) Dungeon and Dragon= Original Advance Dungeon and Dragon= Balancing and inducing more stuff and allowing you to play powerful heroes 3ed edition= wanted to extend the edition to make god like characters (not heroes) 3.5= the hot fix needed for 3.5 4th edition= board game 5th = revamp of second edition (the major reason I say this is mechanical s more similar to 2 e then 3 or 3.5 and you don't play God's you play heroes) My personal rating goes like 2nd 5th 3.5 B.I.C.M First edition 3rd 4th

I’ve been playing D&D for years and 4E is a great game!

I haven't played in 12-13 years and I remember looking in on dnd a few years ago to see if a new edition was out and how it was.. I had been introduced to the game with 3,5, so I was thoroughly confused and didn't like 4e and didn't get back into playing.. Now though, having seen a little of 5e I could seriously see my self playing again :) I like your video, it was kind ofba hammer on the nail on what went wrong. Have you thought about making a video with more focus on what happened from 3,5 to 5e? Maybe sort of a "welcome back to dnd" for old school players? :)

Those saying 4e killed roleplaying have not yet tried dnd 5e. 4e was great in that you had a huge amount of character customization and actually made it feel like you had a real role in a group. Sure all classes had the same basic structure (at-will, encounter, daily) was that much of a jump from all classes having the same saves or the same actions each round (standard, move, swift)? Never understood the hate of 4e outside of just people not able to grasp it.

I really prefer the 4e cosmology to the great wheel - and I say that as someone who's played since 1980. Never cared for FR, so that whole thing was no skin off my back. I also enjoyed the balance of the system. There were still some issues with the math: the skill system in particular, and the encounter building math. But that could have been tweaked. No, the only real deal breaker for me was how long it took to play out a fight.

I really don't think it was "holding on to nostalgia" and "people do not like change". I think that a lot of people would be willing to accept 4e as a system, it is just that to *a lot* of players, 4e simply wasn't D&D. It didn't play like D&D, it didn't feel like D&D, the focus was different from D&D, etc., etc., etc. Of course, a lot of this can be attributed to people thinking about what D&D is in a certain way, but I don't think that can be called "nostalgia" per se, but rather the issue is that something that was established and had an established appeal was dismissed in favor of something fundamentally *different*. It is much like you liking croissants, and then someone is trying to sell you a donut, but they're still calling it a croissant. And sure, donuts can be good too, but *they're not croissants*, and you happen to really like a good croissant. Similarly, I'm not a huge fan of 5e, but at least it is, in a manner of speaking, a croissant. 4e simply wasn't. And this is the first time I use an analogy in which I hate donuts, which just feels wrong, but I think it gets the point across.

If the 'ph' is silent, why add it?

One of the great things about 3 to 3.5 is it was a free upgrade. They published a giant list of errata that let you use your 3.0 books to play 3.5. Honestly most people bought new books, but the fact that you didn't really need to was nice. Also 3.0 was when they came up with the open gaming license. There were a lot of people who had D&D as their main game but had some random d20 wrestling game, or reality show dungeon crawl game for random one offs. The open gaming license made RPGs feel open. I don't have a source for this, but early in the development of 4th Wizards held a panel at San Diego comic con, one of the things they were really enthusiastic about is how 4th would come with it's own virtual table top. If you wanted to play D&D with your friends, it would be ready out of the box, they could sit down at their computer just like they sat down at your table. It's my understanding that that never happened, but if it was a design decision from the very beginning it does explain it's "video game feel" I've played a number of the D&D board games that have come out lately that are based on 4th, those work fairly well. As for the massive changes when 4th happened. It's a long standing tradition, especially in the Realms, that an edition change is celebrated by smashing the world. 1st to 2nd edition had all the gods get kicked out of the heavens, Mystra was killed by Tyr I thing, Cyric killed Myrkhyl, and picked up the portfolios of him, bane and Bhaal. Midnight also got Mystra's job. This is what explained all of 2nd editions changes and wild magic. One thing 5th did to sooth the hurt feeling of us old timers, a really subtle thing. 5th edition looks a lot like 2nd edition. Not in the rules, but in the fluff. Particularly the magic item lists. They are actually pretty close to what you got in 2nd, where as 3rd was incredibly different and I assume 4th was as well. And this is only tangentially related but I don't have any place to put it. There was a lot of great material in early Forgotten Realms. The Azure Bonds books, Pools of Radiance series. The old gold box games. When everybody wintered in the Dale lands and most of the characters from the books had much smaller stories that left a lot more room for the players to run around.

The criticism that 4e focused more on combat and less on story is simply invalid. It focused more on combat, sure; it had a great combat engine with balanced abilities scaling up with power level. But there was nothing _missing_ from the RP bit of RPG. You could still do anything character-wise that you could do in other editions (in some ways more). Moreover, skill challenges - while they had their flaws - were a major step in moving the G bit of RPG away from just combat. I remember having conversations with people that would run something like this: Friend: It's too restrictive! I can't play a DEX-base Fighter inspired by Westley from the Princess Bride anymore! Me: Sure you can. Just play a Rogue with a rapier. Friend: But I want to play a Fighter! They've forced me to play an armored guy based on STR! Me: No. You can play a character _exactly_ like Westley. It's just that character in 4e is a Rogue. Don't get hung up on the name of the class, look at what you want the character to do. Friend: Stop trying to tell me who my character is! Me: I'm not, I'm going off the things _you've_ told me. Quick, deadly, rapier, black clothes. Rogue. Friend: But it doesn't _feel_ like D&D! It always seemed that the criticisms would start with some broad, sweeping claim that something the claimant loved had been rendered impossible. You'd point out that they could still do that thing and the complaint (eventually) reduced to something quite trivial. Like the decision to replace active Saving Throws with passive Defenses. From a basic concept point of view, this was just an extension of the 3e concept of a single mechanic. You want to do something, roll a d20, add modifiers and compare the result to a target number. In 3e though, Saving Throws were the exception. For some things, the _defender_ had to roll instead of the _attacker._ Swing a sword at them and you're rolling to hit; cast a spell (though not all spells) and your target rolls to avoid. Why? Because that's what was always done. The really huge decision was already made when 3e replaced the grab-bag of random mechanics with one mechanic: the d20 roll. Weird categories of Saving Throw were replaced with REF, FOR and WIL. Compared to that, the decision to alter those same three categories to passive Defenses is minor. Mathematically, it's identical and it means the rule that the party trying to do something is the one who rolls becomes consistent across the board. Which basically meant these people were pissing and moaning because the _term_ "Saving Throw" had been altered. Or Roles. In 4e each class had a clearly defined Role. These were basically a summation of how any competent player played the class, developed from years of playtesting in 3.5 (and yes, observation of the millions of players on MMOs). Defenders (Tanks) got into the thick of the fight, took a licking and kept on ticking. Strikers (DPS) either operated at range or had awesome mobility; they did incredible amounts of damage but couldn't handle what they dished out. And so on. Yet some people seemed personally aggrieved by being told that a Wizard was probably not a good choice if they wanted to play a front-line combatant. But who ever thought they were? You'd have that one noob who'd try to go toe-to-toe with an orc, then he was rolling up a new Wizard while promising himself not to fuck up like that again. Roles just made explicit what every experienced player was doing anyway. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- TL;DR people complaining about 4e tried to pretend that their concerns were tied deeply into things like player freedom and roleplaying. It is my experience that their _actual_ problem was with extremely superficial legacy features. Features so superficial that the complainers were too embarrassed to be honest about why they were _really_ pissed.

Objectively, 4E as a game isn't that bad. My biggest problem were the core books were terribly written and leading to some ambiguity with the rules. I eventually picked up the Rules Compendium which basically combined the rules sections from the PHB and the DMG into one $20 paper back. The writing was much better and the rules were clear. If Wizards had written the other books the same way I wouldn't have hated 4E as much.

I have never played 4e and haven’t looked into the system, but I really like the idea of putting all the classes on the same level balance-wise. I’d love to play it some day.

But what about all those 4e classes that were removed in 5e?

4e did help the DM do a lot more with creating a personalized world, though. 5e murdered some of the most interesting aspects of the 4e world and somewhat forces Forgotten Realms lore into everyone's universe. You have to do a lot more "work" explaining that the books aren't the same as the world you want to build, basically.

4e was less accessible than previous editions and having started at 5 editions release, I find that I don't want to go through the 8 books and play with the mildly wonky combat system. That said, I picked up the MMs from a garage sale and the monsters are 10 times cooler in 4e than they are in 5e. I find myself using the 4th edition MM to build more challenging and dynamic enemies and surprising players. 4e might not have been poorly designed for existing D&D players, but the huge number and detail of the books, as well as the changes in lore and abilities, made it less accessible to new players and less appealing to old players overall. I don't think it was so much a bad idea as a poor implementation.

I loved 4e. With a fistful of house rules (mostly from 5e) still do. What grated on me was the high-handed, "This is what you're getting and you WILL like it," approach Wizards seemed to have.

An issue with 4E that I heard a lot about back in the day that doesn't get talked about much anymore is the initial advertising campaign. The earliest ads for 4E were aimed at people who had never played TTRPGs and WotC, for whatever reason, thought the best way to do that was to directly insult the people who had been playing it for years. It didn't take very long for them to realize their mistake and purge the ads.

As a friend of mine said "4th ed was great game but it wasn't Dungeons and Dragons".

What happened to 4e D&D? Short answer Pathfinder.

I do intend to borrow some of the 4e lore into my 5e games. They did get some things right. I do like the Feywild and the idea of the primordials. The primordials I think would make excellent patrons for Warlocks.

i loved the Dead Beat meme. nicely done