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Most balanced edition. I love AD&D2e but 4e gets so much hate for practically no reason. It was a new system with a new cosmology, but new can be fun too. 5e seems to erase everything that came before.

As a note, we did eventually beat that Hag! Just not wit the party that we first fought her with.

Your idea of session 0 sounds like it’s for new players. My session 0 is about where the game is set and what type of game it is. Are we general adventurers or part of a thieves guild or even a group of pirates. We don’t discuss rules unless they are house rules the GM is going to use. We have played, Pathfinder or D&D, long enough to have gotten the hang of the general rules. If there is ever a problem this is the time to bring it up and decide how to handle it. We also use session 0 to decide who is playing what and if it meshes well. We don’t end up with a crazy party unless we are going for that.

When people said that they hated powers because it made the Fighter and Wizard too similar, I think if how 5e 2014 and 2024 editions both have made spells so OP that playing a martial class is basically not viable. I have never played 4e but this video has made me now want to really play it

Time management was not the issue for me. It was probably the only thing which I had no issue with, frankly. It was the at least fifty other things I didn't like of that system that made me hate it since the first time I red and tried it. And since Pathfinder 2 is basically a remake of 4e with a few issues corrected, but a bunch of new ones introduced, I don't like it either. By the way, I am not a power gamer and I mostly play as a DM.

In the name of the the Great Dire Capybara Spirit of the Feywild, we will fight for justice across all the planes. By the power of friendship, teamwork and character optimization we will defeat any foe. For we are HEXCOM, and we fear naught but bad rolls.

So I've been playing D&D since the yearly 90's. I'm also basically a forever DM. I've always had a session 0 when I'm starting a new campaign. I love it and find it very important. The most important part of it is making characters. Rolling characters in front of everyone else is a bonding moment and gets everyone on the same page from day 1. It makes sure the party is diverse and multiple bases are covered. It then also gives me a chance to go over the world and setting, my games often have politics and economy and religion front and center affecting the world. The player characters would know certain things a head of time. Like who's the King of the country they are in, what towns or major cities are near-by, what religious order is currently in charge of the area. The assumption is usually that the characters came from this country and are familiar with day to day life. Another thing a session 0 does is help me direct the campaign in the direction the players want to go from a story perspective. I often run my games very sandbox style and the players might have a certain story they want to explore that I didn't have fully in mind. So session 0 gives me a chance to change the starting location or factions etc. I also usually end my session 0 with about 2 hrs. of gameplay. A simple quest acquiring situation, travel, a combat encounter and a simple 3 room dungeon with a BBG at the end. It shows everyone how I run the game and the basics of the rules. Just my opinion, I love session 0 and definitely prefer it. No one talks about x-rated content, or awkward situations, or triggering content, etc. I also gotta say if there is a situation where there is a whole session with no dice rolling at all..... that's a really really bad dm. If I see there hasn't been a roll in 15 mins, I'm changing things up quick. Honestly, the games you play in sound like a nightmare... I'm not really sure if I've ever seen some of the situations you are describing. So if I may be so bold, I'd like to request a video where you go more in depth with what you mean by the DM not being the "God" of the world. The DM creates the environments, places the treasure, loot, places all the NPCs, all the bad guys, the economics, the religions, religious orders, armies, factions, and on and on and on. Want to talk to that squirrel, guess what, its the DM. Want to climb that cliff face, DM placed it there and set its difficulty. You get the point. How would you propose a different style of play in which its still D&D but the DM isn't "God?"

If you love 4e pf2 takes a lot of inspiration from that design.

I'm 50/50 with your analysis. Like you are correct that if everyone was responsibly fluent as a player and in their character, games would flow great for all players and the DM. But what your describing sounds more like a video game than a DnD game. In a video game it's just accepted that area 1 is area 1, and actions and interactions are precisely what they are programed to do. Which is what DnD fundamentally breaks away from.

Never went for 4e. Still got BECMI, AD&D, 2e and 3e. I think I’m done with 5e too.

I hated two things: MMO-like taunts and movement powers which completely replace just walking somewhere. I mean, why walk six squares if you have an at will power that lets you move and do something else? So I got this silly picture in my head where the PCs would not just walk down the street, they would walk six squares and attack the air, walk and attack ... as if instead of pressing forward on your keyboard or controller, you pressed forward AND attack the whole time. There are some ideas which I thought were great, like ritual spellcasting and powers for melee characters, but I took those and tried to incorporate them into 3.5e. I loved the simulationist "completeness" of 3.5e.

Time management was not an issue. I liked many parts but it was hard to get a feel for the characters when they were all the same except fighter, which was a sad class, and wizard.

Ive always looked at rule 0 less as "Dm is in charge and can ignore the rules for the story" and more "If a rule doesnt make sense in the games current situation, then ignore it."

I like that way of thinking!

As a few others have said in the comments, I'd like to reiterate that "Rule Zero" is a tool. Like any tool, it's best used in the right context. Many here, including myself, are advocating for using your DM fiat to make a ruling in the moment intending to look up the correct rule later. This keeps the game going and also gives the group an opportunity to review after the session. In this sense Rule Zero gives the referee (in your case) the power to keep the game from stalling. The examples you gave about story-driven play seem to stem from something aside from Rule Zero. After watching a few of your videos I understand you have a very clear issue with story-driven play, but using Rule Zero to railroad PCs and take away their agency is a separate issue. It's a misuse of the tool.

Cool, man! Play what works for you. I tried 4E as a player, I never tried to DM it. It was OK for me, but not my favorite. But if you get more out of it than I do, wonderful!

Session 0 will actually save a DM time and prevent campaign dissolution. You probably don't need it for close friends you've been playing with forever, but it's a useful tool for folks you don't know well. Anecdotal examples don't mean that session 0 isn't useful for a DM.

I'm of the same generation of DM, and I was a 4E apologist until I went back to it last year and ran a 9 month campaign for "modern" players. Good Lord. They never got the hang of it. Never figured out how to synergize. Never figured out how powers worked. Never created treasure parcels. Refused to interact with skill challenges. I think I hate the system now. It was such a dreadful experience. I hope you fare better.

I couldn’t disagree more. First, sex crops up quite regularly in fantasy RPGs, not just PC-NPC, but NPC-NPC. Ask anybody who played Pathfinder’s Rise of the Runelords. In my experience, sex at least tangentially comes up in RPGs about as often as PC-on-PC combat: not every day, but you’re not likely to go your whole gaming career without seeing it several times. But even if your experience is different, the idea that DMs are burning out because “OMG, I have to be so careful not to let sex be in my game because I promised in session 0” is ludicrous. Clearly you lean heavily toward hack-and-slash gaming. Nothing wrong with that; I love hack-and-slash too. I just happen to enjoy social encounters also. But some players are so geared toward social encounters that they don’t want their characters to have any chance of dying. Now for me, character death is nonnegotiable. I will not DM a game where I can’t kill the characters, and I will not play in a game where my character isn’t at risk of death. So that’s what Session Zero is for; if I’m DMing, a player who isn’t willing to see their characters die can walk at the outset, and can be replaced, rather than investing weeks of gameplay only to throw a hissy fit when their character dies. Other things might be negotiable. I once GM’d a GURPS game where the party heard a woman being raped by a dictator’s goons in an adjacent room. I think it helped establish what kind of horrible place this dictator’s country was. But if I had a player at the table who just couldn’t stand hearing something like that, I could and probably would have skipped that moment, because the player would be more valuable to the game than that one scene. But without a Session Zero, I couldn’t intelligently make that decision. You object to sessions which are all social encounters, and to DMs who hand out inspiration. I don’t object to any of that. But that again proves the value of Session Zero; it lets you say you don’t like that stuff, and the DM can tell you he doesn’t like it either, so this game will be fun for you, or that he does like it, in which case you can walk away without wasting your time. Ironically, what you describe also shows the importance of Rule Zero. Some people who’ve had a hard day at work actually enjoy playing social encounters as a way of leaving all that behind. But if you don’t, and are just sitting there bored and feeling left out, that’s the moment when a good DM will see that and invoke Rule Zero by having a horde of demons swoop out of nowhere and interrupt the magic item shopping trip. And yes, Session Zero can be used to establish rules of the game. Veteran players presumably don’t have to be taught what AC, HP and spell slots are, but it’s good to lay the ground rules on things like whether there’s going to be a caller (please, no!), or whether “if you say it, your character says it.”

Imagine Monopoly 2.5, Chutes & Ladders 5E, Yahzee 3.0... there's no reason to buy the Star Wars edition just because it came out. Play the version that works

My approach to DMing is to make a mostly linear story with an emphasis on challenging mechanical combat and resource management. If they do something wildly out of left field, I might end a session a bit early to prepare for the next steps. This is a skeletal strucutre that works for me, both in mechanical and story based campaigns. More Dragon Age: Origins and less Skyrim. Here's my secret to story driven campaigns though: Secret player objectives. I make a bunch of secret objectives and make a raffle, so only the player knows what their secret objective is. I can start to guess who got what objectives if they do something obvious, but it creates a tension between players that can be great for roleplaying and making players start taking initiative.

Why didn't 4e thrive? 1) WotC wrecked both the setting and backward compatibility, and crapped on the existing 3.x players. Especially the RPGA and Living Greyhawk folks. Great idea, guys, deliberately anger every single person who gave you a nickel in the past. 2) It wasn't D&D. If they sold it as what it actually was-a D&D-based small unit wargame-we'd still be playing a version of it. It's 40k's Kill Team, advertise that way. 3) Too many powers felt the same except for the power tag. Bleah. I played for one year with a great GM using official D&D adventures, with minis and multi-level maps and 3d terrain-essentially the ideal circumstances-and after a year my enjoyment was finally overwhelmed by my irritation, and I left. I tried, really tried, to like it. And I couldn't.

okay have fun bro!

8:28 _"You are crushing a level on a weekend"_ Yes and you are supposed to, because 4E is designed to have up to 30 Levels of available content. Unlike say 5E which is broken past level 10 and almost nobody plays it after that, heck a gaming club I know of have DnD5E PCs capped at level 8.

🥳🫂👍🏿

Very cool thoughts, I am going to take them onboard for an in person 13th age game I starting this week at a local game store.

@3:30 thirty years ago people were calling this "The Road to El Dorado" because in practice it basically never happens that players who aren't trying to fulfill their own narrative sense produce a story worth repeating accidentally while trying to win an analog videogame. "The DM should run around behind everyone's backs to create the illusion of accidental storytelling" isn't better for me, but it rose to prominence in the first place because players abdicated their responsibilities to actually do something fun.

As an accumulator of copies of "heroes of the fallen lands" and "heroes of the forgotten kingdoms" (ostensibly to use as loaners to newbies) I agree with this video.

I don't necessarily think that I gave it a good shake, but I played a combat session at level one against a hand full of kobolds, and it took forever. That killed it for me.

I can't understand how anything you said relates to time management. Pacing maybe, but not time management. And it's weird because you don't compare Editions fairly. 5e is a beloved Edition, has the same 6 seconds per round and recommends the fewer number of encounters per day. Sorry, I can't understand your point there

“DMs shouldn’t be trying to tell stories; they should be running games.” And I already know you and I have VERY different opinions on D&D. You want DMs to basically be a glorified game engine. And sure, if YOU want to DM that way, have at it. However, prescribing that for *all* DMs is egocentric at _best._

session zero has been around since the 90s, at the very least. maybe even earlier. I remember session 0's as a kid in the 90s. Tables have been discussing expectations and boundaries pre-campaign long before tumblr or social media was even a thing. Aside from that, it sounds like you balk at the idea of setting aside time to have a mature conversation with people you'll be interacting with for long term periods of time. I've been DMing a long time too, as in decades, and I've never been like "oh man if only I didn't set expectations of conduct and communication in session zero, I would've never burned out!" Like, how is it even an argument that being mature and talking leads to burnout? I dont think your problem is with session zero, I think your issue is the same as all the other anti-woke content makers have, that being open about acknowledging other people's boundaries and personal preferences hurts the game... somehow. You're just trying to rebrand the same arguments as it being an issue with session zero's existence, while tip-toeing around the buzzwords themselves. It will not kill you, or even injure you, to be an adult and talk about these things before committing anywhere from one month to a decade with the same group of 4-6 players. And discussing these things beforehand is NOT a DM setting themselves up to be "an omniscient narrator". For all these complaints you have, im guessing it hasnt once occurred to you that an experienced DM needs to establish protocols to settle disputes between players, or even declare what's off the table, before the campaign begins. because adults are REALLY good at thinking theyre all getting along and on the same page, but then blowing up on each other out of nowhere over small misunderstandings because they all mistakenly believed they had the exact same ideas of what is fun at the table. And as a DM I dont think this all falls on the DM alone, it's just that at my table I'm the most experienced and best trained at arbitration, settling disputes, and de-escalation due to my career. In fact several DM's are just naturally suited for these tasks either from their personality or their experience and education, it's often how they end up being DMs in the first place. On another note, I've played for at least 30 years and never once seen anyone at any of my tables (as a DM or as a player) EVER develop a "mother may I" behavior set. A good DM and player group is not penalizing or punishing a tired or exhausted player either. This just sounds like another personal isolated anecdote, when in reality *even if this was a widespread issue* the tired player could communicate this. And if they can't, you have 4-5 other adults at the table who should be emotionally mature enough to detect this and accommodate him or her accordingly. Also where are you getting your "rule 0" from? Wotc's rule zero is that fun takes precedence, and makes no mention of the DM being in control of everything. Overall it sounds like you're inventing the same hypotheticals most of the other anti-woke content creators invent, in the same fashion that the media invented the tide-pod eating craze. Ironically, a lot of your griping about certain DnD play styles could be easily fixed for any table you would join as a player, that you make it known at session zero that you dont like narrative and you only like rolling dice, clearing rooms, and collecting loot.

Having played and DMed in 4e, people saying it was all combat no roleplay i feel had new or poor DMs. The group I DMd for were either all new, or had last played AD&D, and easily jumped into 4e. The only failings we had were probably due to my subpar DMing, but we all still had a blast.

I have given out inspiration for a good joke.

Big advocate for 4e. Been running it for the last 3-4 years, switching from 5e. Love it. Just made a switch to AD&D 2e. Debating on whether I want to stay with that.

This’ll be perfect to use my frostgrave miniatures

Okay you're you're almost there why did you stop it for me there there's like two other stops to go before you get to your destination

Sounds like you really want to play AD&D. I run and play in a shared world with 3 DMs and we endeavor to run as BtB as possible. We have a shared rulings document so we are all playing the same game. If you want to know more let me know.

Honestly play whatever you want. I use 4e aspects in 5th edition games

The reason i didn't like 4e was it was blatantly trying to turn dnd into a video game like WoW. Not why i play dnd, so no thank you. Out of all the versions of dnd, 4e allows the least amount of player creativity, and changed the most lore, just to try to be different, not for any real change or good story reason. In an attempt to streamline things, they only made the game more confusing. What they did to alignment, the planes, elementals, etc, was completely unnecessary and just plain silly as a result.

I was looking into Old School Essentials started in 5e then it got weird in the next edition so back we all go I suppose.

14:45 Players should not be asking to make specific checks, players should describe what they want to do. "I want to search for anything hidden around, particularly any hidden doors." The DM then will decide if a check is required, if a check is required they will generally tell the player to "Sure you can search, give me a Perception check." This not only works better because the DM can best decide what check to use here, or lack of a check if no check is required. Without a check the DM could say: "You look around and notice as you move the rug that there appears to be a hidden hatch."

The whole appeal of TTRPGs for me is the randomness of what might happen in the game, I enjoy that aspect of ot the most and if there were rules as to what is allowed and what us not that would kill that part of experience for me both as a dm and a player. Let people do whatever they can achieve with their skills and their rolls, don't limit them in their actions and you may not only get a great or stupidly funny stories but also learn a few things about them as real people that even they may not know about themselves

I find my two games i like the most is Dungeon Crawl Classics for a more casual type of game and Hyperborea 3rd edition, for a more DnD type feel and for a more defined rule system

You mentioned about too many people thinking 4E being a “video game”. I never felt that way, but those same people should take a long, hard look at the new 5/5.5/6e VTT. That is a total video game. I love 4E combat and the “abilities/techniques” fighter types can use to do combat, instead of just doing a basic attack….3dmg. You turn! That old school combat was so boring. Keep up the 4E content.

I played 4E pickups at a LGS every week in college (was it called the adventure league?) and enjoyed committing to a 60-90 session with as few strings attached as possible. Then my buddy ran a 4E Gamma World campaign for 2 years where we played every week. I will never give up my 4E collection, even if I never get to play it again. People who rag on it can rarely come up with a reason its "not good" that isnt perfectly paralleled in 3E or 5E. Its just a meme to hate 4E. As a huge fan of Final Fantasy Tactics series, 4E is very satisfying combat for me, but I would rather play it as a video game. That being said, after hundreds of sessions of 4E and 5E, I just think the combat takes up too much time and doesn't keep focus for players. This is why I switched to OSR - Cairn and Old School Essentials specifically. I ran the sessions with solid emphasis on resources, exploration, and problem solving. Combat is quick and resolved usually within 3 rounds or less and it is always tight and brutal. Play what you love and best of luck!

4e really sucks. 2e & 3.5 are both better

My entry into dnd was AD&D2E and it and 4e are my 2 favorites. 3.5 got gamed way too hard to the point every single game i played was an arms race to find a way to play the most ridiculously broken stuff you could, at least at my table. 4e came out and the balance side was a huge thing i enjoyed. Sure there were optimal ways to play technically most of them werent significantly better or worse to such a degree you were effectively multiple levels ahead of your fellow players. 4e was a ton of fun and I recommend it to most people

Viciously mocked from every angle. Then I wake up...

Pathfinder 2e shares a lot of design ideas with D&D 4e (due to overlap on the respective design teams) to the extent that it feels kind of like PF2e is a "do-over" of 4e with the benefit of hindsight. And a lot of what they did was to better disguise the design decisions behind game concepts. So things like "encounter powers" have the numbers filed off and become "focus spells". It's not specifically called out that they're intended to be used once per encounter. It's just that you can only recharge them if you rest for ten minutes. Fighters don't get "powers" that give them more complex and powerful actions in combat. They get "feats" that do that. The action economy is simplified, and this has the extra effect of putting a cap on how much power you can unleash at once, quietly, in the background. And I think it's interesting how much better received PF2e is than 4e. I think these more hidden mechanics have something to do with it. Of course, PF2e also has extensive and explicit rules for downtime activities, which closes the hole you point out in 4e.